It was a fine Sunday to make my writing leaner, more visionary.
And then they showed up at the door.
Tag: Musings
Tribal beadwork applications
I have no idea anymore which tribe or tribes these notes reflected, but the list still stirs something in my imagination.
- Large pottery bowl
- Moccasins
- Painted stone fetish
- Bear mask
- Home partition screen
- Pipe bag
- Painted robe
- Painted shield
- Drum holders
- False-face mask
Step by step somewhere into the wild
Walking unrushed, meaning outdoors, in fresh air, releases something within me: I feel freer. When I begin, I’m like a slightly out-of-tune violin. I enter the woods full of thoughts, problems. The office is still with me, along with many worries. The wind may scurry up leaves, and I jump and then freeze, startled that I may have scared up a large animal of some sort. Or perhaps it’s be a twisting item that resembles a snake. Sometimes the sun stings my eyes. I adjust, from one system of time and timing to another.
As I fall into a rhythm, my mind clears. Poems begin.
In the hills or mountains or along the water, the world is always fresh: sunlight on branches or water.
On hits and misses as a writer
Here are ten more confessions on being a published author.
- “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
- “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” ― Stephen King
- “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” – Jules Renard
- “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” – Ken Follett
- “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” – Harper Lee
- “One of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less … My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there … One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
- “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” – Isaac Asimov
- “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” – Jennifer Salaiz
- “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath
- “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” – James Lee Burke
Consider your audience
Most poets write of themselves or lovers or at least things around them: poetry as a conversation with yourself. Or maybe God, on a good day.
What do you know about jellyfish?
With their many different species, jellyfish are found in every ocean in the world, including very cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. Some are even found in freshwater. Some species live in shallow, sunlit waters near the surface, while others live in the deep, dark, cold or somewhere in-between. Here are a few other points.
- They predate dinosaurs, bobbing along in the currents for at least 500 million years and possibly 700 million years, roughly three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
- They aren’t fish. They don’t have a backbone or spine, nor do they have brains, hearts, eyes, scales, gills, or fins. Instead, they swim by opening and closing their “bells.” Many scientists simply group them as “gelatinous zooplankton.”
- A few species have surprisingly complex vision. For instance, the box jellyfish has 24 “eyes,” two of which can see in color. It’s also believed this animal’s complicated array of visual sensors makes it one of the few creatures to have a full 360-degree view of its environment.
- Its lifespan depends on the species in question. Some live for just a few days or weeks, while others can live for several decades or more. One species, called the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii), is capable of reversing its life cycle and returning to a younger stage of development after it reaches sexual maturity. This means that it can essentially live forever as long as it is not killed by predators or other external factors.
- This ability is a major subject of research, as it could help the medical field understand how to turn cancerous cells into noncancerous cells like muscles, nerves, or skin.
- Jellyfish use tentacles to catch their food. These long, thin appendages on the sides and bottom of the jellyfish’s body are covered in tiny stinging cells that contain a venom to stun and capture prey. When they encounter something edible, they use their tentacles to bring it closer to their mouth, located in the center of their body.
- They are carnivores, meaning they eat other animals. Since they’re unable to chew their food, they usually eat small marine animals they can swallow whole, such as
- plankton, small fish, and crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters. They’ll also eat smaller jellyfish.
- The power of their stings can vary widely depending on the species. The most venomous is probably the box jellyfish, capable of killing an adult human in just a few minutes with a single sting. Each box jellyfish reportedly carries enough venom to kill more than 60 humans. To make matters worse, their stings are excruciatingly painful — it’s said the pain could kill you before the venom does.
- Jellyfish are eaten by larger predators, such as tuna, sea turtles, and whales. They’re even a delicacy in some places, such as in Japan and Korea. The Japanese have transformed jellyfish into candy. More often, they find their way into salads, fried into crunchy noodles, or are eaten with soy sauce like sushi.
So clear it could shatter a heart
The first three cuts on my first Joan Baez album (acquired in ’62 or ’63) were classic folksongs – “Silver Daggers,” “East Virginia,” and “Fare Thee Well.” Along with a few others, like “Wildwood Flower,” they exhibit a very moving quality that comes not so much from directed words (as in “calf with a mournful eye”) but from a sum that arises outside of the text.
The lyrics themselves are dry, compressed. The songs are best sung emotionally flat, with a childlike beauty and comprehension (or lack of it). Above all, there is a kind of detachment that makes the whole thing even more touching or eternal.
From Maynard Solomon’s album liner notes: “A remarkably compressed love story. … In its four short verses loom enough tragic characters to populate an 18th century novel … the haunting and mysterious opening verse, with its claim of historical authenticity and its foreboding of personal bereavement. … Perhaps its beauty comes from its biblical connotations, for the imagery of the closing verses is related to New Testament descriptions of the Last Judgment, and the song ends with a quotation from Mark (XII,20) – ‘Till all these things be done.’ … The seemingly obscure and disconnected text is emotionally fused. … Like many another favorite from North Carolina and its neighboring states, [it] has the strange quality of rejoicing as it laments, exulting as it weeps …”
I did not yet know my family roots in North Carolina, but I have taken this, internalized, as an ideal in my own writing that has followed, not that what’s followed has manifested that way over the years. Think, too, of how her material changed.
A fresh perspective on the craft of poetry
Lew Welch (1926-1971) was a Beat-era poet I’ve enjoyed very much. He was influenced by Gertrude Stein early on. At Reed College, he was a roommate of Gary Snyder and a friend of Philip Whalen – what a Trinity of fine poets! William Carlos Williams certainly thought so after meeting them in Oregon.
Here are ten insights gleaned from Welch’s take, “How I work as a poet.”
- All poems are translations.
- Language is speech. The din of a tribe, doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is.
- Speech is the most powerful single thing we human beings have.
- Whose kid is that? (With force!)
- All poetry should be that intense.
- It very seldom is. The few poems we praise over the centuries and across all cultures and times are more intense than this.
- (Discussing a copywriter, Do Not Disturb): He is in a trance. All he is trying to do is make his living writing baby-talk ads for a mail-order house. But Li Po, while extemporizing intricate lines on whatever subject the Emperor happened to throw at him, dropped, I am sure, into the same glaze-eyed state. His eyes would widen then clear, and he’d wittily speck his lines. I saw William Carlos Williams do this on a challenge from Snyder and Whalen and me back in the 1950s.
- Usually, of course, we don’t speak with any exactness at all. It is mostly ceremony and blather. … Exactness to what?
- All that trochee, iamb crap, it’s British. Forget it. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.
- The poet doesn’t want to be understood. He wants to be believed!
Welch left a suicide note, but his body has never been found.
A reflection of what happened to local communities
Newspapers are mostly ads. But rarely taken out by the big-box stores.
~*~
For more, see my novel Hometown News.
‘Nature lover’ doesn’t begin to cover it
Do you require getting out in nature when it comes to maintaining your sanity and soul? I certainly do. In fact, one of my struggles living in Fostoria was the relative lack of that exposure, even though the small city was surrounded by some very productive farmland. I wanted something a little wilder and freer.
Here are ten perspectives:
- “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker
- “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” — John Burroughs
- “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu
- “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle
- “Nature is the art of God.” — Dante Alighieri
- “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” — Rachel Carson
- “If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.” — Alex Trebek
- “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” — Gary Snyder
- “You are a guest of nature — behave.” — Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Jnana's Red Barn 