You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
When we sit silently in worship, clouds that separate us may evaporate, allowing us closer to oneness, our own fullness, which is the essence of God.
The closer we get to Truth, the more tolerant and understanding we become of others. There can be no lasting revolution in the world until we’ve changed ourselves, as in reborn or liberated or enlightened, even self-realized.
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I have never meditated that it wasn’t productive, even when there were no thoughts.
At times I see yoga [or real religion] as a way of preparing for death; at others, I see it as a way of intensifying life. It is one thing to acknowledge something exists or occurs but quite another to embrace it. For the unenlightened, their glance is fleeting: as soon as they’ve identified the object or movement by name, they bounce on to something else. The yogi or artist or philosopher, for that matter, looks beyond the surface and into the structure and ways it fits into the whole of the scene. It’s looking with in a sense of oneness, blending the unity and changing faces of nature. This occurs very deep in the heart, or what the Psalms call soul.
Leaving the ashram can bring a period of “awari” and “subari,” as the Japanese put it – poverty and solitude – to test and strengthen the previous lessons with the master.
Inner strength is more than an idea or a philosophy: it is an exercise, an ongoing practice. When the routine falls away, how does one keep the core strong?
Sometime in March, Kat and I visited the Poconos ashram. We helped prepare for a Seder. Here, a room half-full of young adults raised Christian in a center ostensibly teaching a strand of Hindu faith, inviting a broader Jewish community to the celebration. One Spirit! A concept of communion taking a fresh depth and joy. This was also Holy Week, and the Seder was on Maundy Thursday.
When I returned to the ashram on another visit, I heard, “The realizations have been very heavy” or “We’ve been learning a great deal.” Same thing, over and over. My insight? What is learned is not as important as the experience of learning, or perhaps relearning. Human life is nothing more than consciousness.
In contrast, so much of life in the secular world reduces and dulls one’s existence. Routine, noise, responsibilities, focus on products deflect us.
The new meditation room is gorgeous and airy, like a cloud, rich big windows, spacious exercise mats, cherry wood paneling left unoiled … Swami’s baby grand piano amid plants in the alcove … a seemingly “homemade” Dharma Hall.
Kat fasted three days
What I also realized was that moving back to the ashram with Kat in tow was not a possibility.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
I’m excited to announce that five of my books are being offered for FREE at Smashwords during the site’s 18th annual Summer/Winter Sale. Add to that another 13 volumes by me that can be purchased at a 25% discount. The sale, which begins today and lasts the entire month of July, is a great time to obtain my works as well as many others by talented indie authors at bargain prices.
You can find all my free and on-sale books at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jnanahodson.
I must confess that back in a period when I was a newspaper syndicate field rep, I was baffled by retail sales (we didn’t offer them, by the way). A product should be worth the given price, right? But I’ve come to appreciate that many of us often need a prod to get us to pick up a product we want. Beyond that, nothing beats word of mouth for spurring purchases, so you can’t beat the opportunity to discover some fine original work and then giving it a boost.
Thank you for your help and support!
Happy reading!
You could add listeners who try to categorize each reader. or overly critical folks like me.
D.W., envious of my electric typewriter.
Me, envious of the garage he converted into a large writing studio.
Poetry workshop, as we called it.
I was asked to read at the end of the evening – just as I was about to leave, actually. So I shared three pieces.
“Your poetry is very rich. It’s almost so rich you don’t know what to do with your wealth,” one person said to me afterward.
Pflum was very pleased. “You’ve improved a lot in the past year.” He enjoyed the suggestion, the room for the reader’s imagination. I told him I had a lot of help.
Earlier, I had sensed in his reading a real or whole person, despite his disclaimers.
A poetry journal I noted had a “Zen mood.”
Rejection 21:I:76: “… your poems lack vitality, are surface, not involved.”
Was surprised by our featured reader, who had contributed so little to the group and usually left immediately after reading. … She invited her ex-husband to come and hear her read of lovers and her abortion.
Am thinking about a style that requires a new turn in each line, so that the poem move forward by mosaic rather than each line alone
Pflum and Wade arguing over whether to discuss a work-in-progress or wait till it’s done.
In Pfingston’s poems, every word is right, exactly on target. His deceptive clarity is so much harder to achieve than is apparent, so that some might dismiss these as “so what.” Not me.
David Halpern on poets under 40: “There is no poet-public. Name a well-known living poet. Few people could.”
~*~
You never know where you’ll find inspiration:
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
As my journals record, my return to southern Indiana took me well beyond the college campus. I’ve already mentioned my explorations of the wooded Leonard Springs and its cave system just beyond our house at what was then the fringe of the college town. Let me remind you that my Thistle Finch editions blog has free PDF downloads of the related chapbook of my resulting poems as well as a photo album I put together from online gleanings to refresh my memory.
Related photo lookbooks slash storyboards are Ghost Towns, Iconic Farmers, Mills by the Springs, and Wonders Under the Ground, assembled to assist in my revisions for what is now “Miller at the Springs” in my novel Secret Side of Jaya.
Poetry chapbooks originating in this period include Cornflower Eye, Blurring Into Smoke, and Green Wonder, all available as free PDF downloads,
I did encounter a lot in a short year-and-a-half, even beyond my paying employment. I do would how my writing would have evolved if I had been able to remain in place.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
As I journaled: All of my writing moves toward silence. The practice is a cleaning out of past accumulations. Let me burn like a candle until I reach a supreme transparency. [Not transcendence!]
My head throbs at the thought as I receive yet another rejection slip: there are 1,500 published poets in the USA [this was back in ’75!] … this, according to a new directory.
My first poetry reading at University Lutheran’s Spring Arts Festival: I had won $15 for second-place in their competition with the poem “Binghamton,” not “In Ashram” as my memory would have it. Nor first-place.
One of the jurors’ daughters liked mine best.
Pavarotti was singing down the street.
At another reading, Victor Contoski: “I decided there were thousands of love poems, but none about an air conditioner,” or, “This is my shoe poem.”
My take? Having decided the subject, he forced himself upon it like a flat-topped economist.
The next volume, had a red cover and, yes, pink pages.
“Read my ‘crazy’ poems at poetry workshop tonight. Went well, very well.”
Read four poems at Hummingbird in Naptown. Good crowd, half-Black, responsive to the word, willing to laugh, to hell with the erudition …
Destruction, when a poem takes form.
My writing strives to erase my past, wring it dry, work down to bone for the present, take flame from there.
“What do you write about?”
Let’s start with places and seasons and hope to find love.
Notice that I wasn’t having so many diatribes by this point.
Found poet who seems to have what O’Hara strove for, and in plainer, stronger English: JACK SPICER!
Dick Pflum called late night (10:30). Me, groggy. Wanted some poems for WFIU to consider. Earlier that week I had wondered why the station didn’t intersperse local poets in addition to the national network offerings. I had even thought of writing the manager and suggesting it.
“You walk a lot. I feel it in your poems. I walk, too.” Another woman at Mtg.
Go-Between (III) accepted by Cottonwood Review today. Quite surprised, didn’t expect an acceptance. The piece, the fourth variation on a source, has no adjectives – or verbs. The nouns all have associations and emotional weight. … They also liked section 5 of Survival Kit, the part I thought was weakest. So it goes.
Anthologies seem to choose the poet’s least visionary work – or a least safest work.
Use of chorus in Native chants:
“I was there, I was there, I was there”
“We will kill, we will kill, we will kill”
Writers “living by our wits,” working hard but unable to capitalize/obtain equity from our labor – the fear of growing old.
Thinking about so many good writers who work only two hours a day – or 40 lines or some such – constant limit.
Inscription in A Book of Music: “No Spicer book was ever © copyright.”
His Book of Magazine Verse, with a cover designed like Poetry (Chicago): “None of the poems in this book have been published in magazines. The author wishes to acknowledge the rejection of poems herein by Denise Levertov of The Nation and Henry Rago of Poetry Chicago.”
Regarding Jack Spicer, per acolyte Robin Blaser: “The final aspect of Jack’s work is in this – that the reader participates in the meaning of the poem – that the poet is only one voice alongside another – that the poetic reopens words into an action.”
So here is a statement of the tantric aspect of objective, selfless writing that I’ve been pursuing. How ‘bout that!
Manny G found my poems “too delicate” or “too fragile,” yet wants to see more …
Also, regarding “opening the field” or “projective verse,” the necessity for keeping the meaning open …
“The batch of submissions that is mailed must be consistent: i.e., if one poem is down on love, the next shouldn’t be about your wife, otherwise you will seem shallow.”
~*~
Through the university libraries, I had access to some wonderful small-press works. I analyzed them closely, hoping to apply their lessons somewhere in my own future.
~*~
On 9:IV:76, was featured poet with Paul Solyn … audience of 20+ included Nancy Neubert, Francie Bish, Charlotte Pennel, Robin and Andy … Bonnie, walking in late from a yoga class, said the “feeling was exactly the same” …
Pfingston later wondered if it was actually one long piece. I had conceived of it as a yoga class. Need more humor, though. He perceived autobiographical development.
Pflum found new depth in my work, finding an intellect at work in the longer presentation that didn’t appear in the shorter readings.
Betty Q. found the reading full of incredible visual minutia. She also felt I had done everything I could in Bloomington and was now moving in different directions – in my experience, expression, and geography.
Several people said they most enjoyed the poems they had previously seen or heard. Perhaps I should repeat the micro-poems three times each, like a chant or circular work.
Kat suggested more patter, thought I read too long (35 minutes), didn’t like me sitting in half-lotus(!) (too hard to see), though I found it more concentrated and closer to my work – no mic in the way.
In assembling an extended reading, an unanticipated voice emerged. Not the Snyder or Brautigan or Bly, but wholly my own, somehow not the silver I had feared but a sense of craft and, more important, emotion or life or of watching a nearly indefinite sense of my existence emerge in dimensions … not my mind but my heart and feelings emerging truer, in the whole, in ways I couldn’t have known if asked … expression
Betty is right, it is time to move on, though I don’t know where or how.
Pound: “Only emotion endures.” And, “Nothing counts but the quality of the emotion.”
Carlos Williams: “When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you,” it has “an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”
Creeley: Writing is an act [or a way] of discovering … Poems have been about the same matters for 20,000 or 30,000 years.
Curiously, I began delving into poetry and journaling when Nikki and I were breaking up, a time of intense emotions, when my writing needed to spit out in more powerful or sappy, less thought-out or rounded out expressions that I had previously worked.
[In retrospect, I see how much of looking for my problem instead looked at the problemed society in the larger society around me …]
During that period I discovered shorter forms: Brautigan and Borges, then Creeley’s Pieces, often untitled, Tom Clark’s Stones, Snyder, Saroyan. Here I was writing headlines for a living – short, tense, accurate use of words. Only later did I turn to longer forms [often cobbling together shorter bits!]
I admire Creeley’s one-sitting draft, but find after keeping most of the original I hone it later into something much more compact. And to think he dropped out of Harvard.
Reading at the Hummingbird, Jerod Carter’s comment, “I enjoyed your poems. They have a marvelous [wonderful?] delicacy, almost Oriental.” … Somehow, I wished they were stronger.
Two of my poems were accepted by the Bloomington Poetry in Public Places project.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
The varying teachings “were provided to suit the different needs and temperaments of various people … If there were no human beings, there would be no Dharmas; hence we know that all Dharmas are made for men …” The Sixth Patriarch again, I presume.
Jnana's Red Barn 