Tag: Poetry

BLURRING INTO SMOKE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title, drawn from a line in Galway Kinnell’s “Tillamook Journal,” brings to my mind the corkscrew motion of seasons, memories, and time itself across the sequence of landscapes where I’ve dwelled.

My poems arising in this vein rarely stray far from northern woods. Or from the woodpile or fire, even in summer, no matter how unacknowledged their presence.

Nor do the poems in this range stray far from crickets, whose fiddling is akin to rubbing sticks together to create a fire. Where I live, their night rasping intensifies in early autumn, as though defying the growing chill and approaching, decisive frost. In a sense, there’s an inverse relationship between the mating songs of birds, so rampant around dawn in mid- to late spring, and the cricket activity. In the end, their music goes where the smoke goes. For now. Before starting over.

AT THE FEEDER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve already mentioned my astonishment at the range of wildlife we’ve had at our property inside the city limits. We’ve enhanced that, of course, by keeping our bird feeders up through the year. In fact, they devour much more in warm weather than in the depths of winter.

Watching them along with the garden can provide a marvelous awareness of the changing seasons. Here are some notes I made in the passing:

EVEN IN WINTER GARB NOW EMERGING

 

LATE SUMMER

already the goldfinches are losing their bright yellow,
shifting over to their “traveling clothes”
cardinal flower still scarlet
the sunflowers nearly past
will we have any pumpkins in this crazy year?

a stream of crows, maybe a hundred, all headed south
(the ten thousand roosting together in a cemetery, how spooky)

admiring the white gull against blue sky
and the black band on its wing
four white droplets fall away and vanish
never seen that before!

today, two large hawks, soaring

*   *   *

and the goldfinches lost their yellow …
how sudden and uniform this molting!
now-dun at the feeder

 

MIDWINTER

cardinals singing boisterously, 5 a.m.

a raven or two in our yard
regular visitors
under our bird feeder

corn / cracked corn in the mix

poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson

HISTORIC UPDATES, CONTINUED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

As I said at the time, so long ago now …

No changes on the love-life front. Maybe I really don’t have the time or energy these days to invest there. Just too much going on with the writing and publishing – plus the Quaker responsibilities as clerk of Quarterly Meeting (which is something like being bishop of New Hampshire congregations would be in some other denominations).

Besides, am trying to be careful this time not to connect with my previous patterns – a radar that seems to pick up on emotionally troubled romantic partners or seems to draw them to me. Important thing is to keep myself nourished and centered. There are, however some encouraging new friendships, including those arising from a local poetry group (the “Prozac Poets” meeting at Barnes and Noble) and a weekly open reading in Concord. Will be the “featured poet” at another, which raises its own set of concerns: do I basically read from one extended series or period, or do I instead select a sampler from the past thirty years? Any suggestions?

Am leaning, at this point, toward opening with a Hindu chant that’s supposed to be efficacious at warding off tigers and poisonous snakes and closing with a wonderful quote by William Penn, a piece that wasn’t written as a poem but certainly works as one and points toward both Walt Whitman and Greenleaf Whittier. After the opening chant, I would say a few words about poetry arising in the sacred, which includes sexuality and even the more successful sacrilegious efforts, then go into a long piece, “Flight With Sun and Moon,” from the early 1970s. After that, I anticipate a grouping of five micropoems to change the pace, then maybe three sections from a longpoem, Recovering Olympus, followed by five more micropoems, leading into three to five pieces from one of my more recent “Police Blotter Love Poems” series. I would then end my own work with a five-page piece from Maine, addressed to my favorite poet and the influence he’s exerted throughout my own moves during the past three decades. Guess I’m just thinking aloud here. Sound reasonable? Like all good plans, it’s subject to a slew of revisions!

Yipes, it’s time to run already. Another Tuesday, the last day of my “weekend,” and the sun’s just set (well, it is late afternoon) – need to get something to eat before running off to a poetry reading. Some good stuff being done around here, as well as the usual dross.

Am looking forward to all of those pictures you’re promising in your always scintillating ‘zine. And no, no way are you what they accuse. You’re a poet, remember? But you already know that.

Oh boy indeed!

Aquarius Tracker

FROM THE CROSS TO CHINESE CHARACTERS, WITH LADY CHATTERLY ALONG THE WAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Richard John Neuhus: Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus From the Cross. A beautifully designed volume laced with some tender pastoral memories, the line of argument ultimately collapses for me under the weight of the Augustinian tradition and its emphasis on Paul (or more likely pseudo-Paul) rather than Jesus himself. Despite all of the subtle contortions, I don’t see God getting off the hook here.
  • D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover: What a marvelous bit of storytelling! I love the way he’s free to tell, with just enough show to make it compelling. Some marvelous dialect here, too. As for the scandal, he was pushing the envelope of conventionality. All of the anti-social diatribe, however, reminds me too much of Micki. How curious!
  • D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Short Stories. A tedium sets in quickly with these, especially as one sees them as studies for the later Chatterley. So much of the dialogue awaits action, which proves tepid when it arrives.
  • Friends General Conference, Religious Education Committee: Opening Doors to Quaker Worship. Some interesting exercises for deepening an understanding of Friends Meeting, some for adults. One to pass along.
  • Walden Bello: Visions of a Warless World. A survey of world religions regarding war, including the dual strands in the Judeo-Christian stream in which God originates as a war deity and is transformed along the way. But I find the broader vision missing – just how, for instance, do we channel the innate aggression in human nature?
  • Ernest Fenolosa, edited by Ezra Pound: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. What fun to revisit this piece from much earlier in my career!

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FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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FROM SHAMANS AND NICE GUYS TO THE LEFT HAND OF GOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

With the annual Christmas shutdown, I thought my reading drive had also collapsed; seemed during the first two months of 2007 I wasn’t getting any traction, either. Only when I sat down to update the list did I realize I’d got up through quite a number here, and there may have been more. So to continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Jeremy Narby and Franics Huxley, eds: Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge. Anthology of selected excerpts of field observations of “magic men and women … with the power to summon spirits.” Ranges from hostile writings by missionaries to anthropologists who submit to healing sessions, and from Siberia to South America and Africa variations. Includes mention of the dark side of the practice, too.
  • Paul Coughlin: No More Christian Nice Guy. Argument for a masculinity that has boldness in the face of fear – one that confronts prevalent assumptions in society at large, protects the weak, and upholds Christian values in the home and the workplace.
  • Stephen L. Carter: Integrity. This legal scholar of ethics presses the case that integrity is more than simple honesty. Rather, it is a matter of actions based on deep reflection, which also demands listening to perspectives other than one’s own. The crux of integrity, he says, is the willing of good rather than the willing of evil.
  • Geri Doran: Resin (poems). “We rowed all night in the river of God, / singing kyrie, kyrie.”
  • Sascha Feinstein: Misterioso (poems). Pieces rooted in and flowing through jazz.
  • Toni Tost: Invisible Bride (prose poems). “My friends are wheels turning away from themselves.”
  • David R. Montgomery: King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. A geologist examines the pressures on salmon, both in historic preservation efforts in Scotland, England, and continental Europe as well as those in New England, and in the Pacific Northwest today. Includes consideration of the dynamics of rivers and they ways various varieties of salmon have adapted to the specifics.
  • Michael Lerner: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right. A social activist rabbi argues that in removing religious values from public discourse, the left has left a vacuum for the political right to exploit. Rather than being value-free, the result has been value-less positions by the left – and the left is perceived as spineless and without beliefs. Lerner has some good insights on the American workplace and the tension people feel, blaming themselves for unhappiness in their employment while applying value systems that are diametrically opposed to their religious faith. Much of this volume is quite painful to read, addressing public issues in full candor and complicity.

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FROM THE WEATHER TO SUICIDE OR EVOLUTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Dave Thurlow and C. Ralph Adler, eds: Soul of the Sky – Exploring the Human Side of the Weather. A Mount Washington Observatory publication presenting literary writing about weather.
  • Milan Kundera: The Art of the Novel. Seven essays in “a practitioner’s confession.” From a peculiar Central European perspective, he admittedly stands at odds, as he points out, with contemporary French fiction. After a first read, I find it difficult to place my work in relation to what he argues, except to acknowledge the ways my work does what only a novel can do. On the other hand, I like work that conveys solid reporting as well – history, geography, geology, theology, and the like – something Kundera clearly disdains, except in a most generalized or abstracted manner.
  • Albert Huffstickler: Poetry Motel memorial edition (No. 32). Work that stays too close to daily journaling for my taste. I’ve seen other pieces by him that seemed to take flight.
  • Maxine Kumin: Jack and Other New Poems. This volume doesn’t go far beyond observations of a New England horse farmer, of the genteel sort.
  • Jeff Clark: Music and Suicide (poems). A controversial and often sophomoric collection (from the Academy of American Poets), yet parts of it catch fire – get the juices going. Coming after Kumin, this is poetry.
  • Patricia Fargnoli: Duties of the Spirit (poems). Centering on a quotation from Thornton Wilder, Fargnoli argues for the duties of joy and serenity – all too easy, methinks, for an old lady living in rustic retirement. These are all pale garden pieces, of the white linen sort – dirty fingernails being for the hired help. Righteous anger, like the social justice verses of Isaiah, are also duties of the spirit – where the red blood flows through muscle.
  • Ntozake Shange: The Sweet Breath of Life. A marvelous collection of poems written in reflection to inner-city photographs by the Kamoinge Inc. collective (and edited by Frank Stewart). An incredible match-up.
  • Jon Tolaas: Evolution and Suicide. A thin freebie, this work turns into a fascinating consideration of the meaning of consciousness itself, using Darwin and Freud as its starting points, pro and con. At the core, perhaps, is the insight that the central question is not, What is the meaning of life, but rather: What have you done (are you doing) with your life.

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FROM MATING AND DATING TO THE GREAT NORTH WOODS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries from my scroll as I kept it:

  • Andrea Orr: Meeting, Mating (and Cheating) – Sex, Love, and the New World of Online Dating. One journalist’s argument that matchmaking is what kept Internet companies afloat during the dot-com bust. Also interesting vignettes of the changing nature of courtship in America.
  • Nathan Graziano: Frostbite. Fine short stories in a Bukowski vein, set mostly north of Concord. Pessimistic, young adult outlook. Is title a pun on Robert Frost, for a Granite State writer?
  • Ray Blackston: A Delirious Summer. Frothy romantic comedy set in South Carolina. But ultimately sexless enough for Southern Baptist readership.
  • W.D. Wetherell, ed: This American River – Five Centuries of Writing About the Connecticut. Good way to begin thinking more pointedly about living in northern New England, where I’ve now been nearly two decades. (Compare what I’ve done here so far to my reading about the Pacific Northwest back in the 70s and my Olympic Peninsula longpoem.) From where I live and work, the Connecticut seems to be the backdoor of the house, with my orientation toward Boston and Maine. Yet it also leads up to the crown of New Hampshire, which I need to explore sometime.
  • W.D. Wetherell: North of Now. Some personal thoughts about living in Lyme and the changing character of rural New Hampshire.
  • Simon Ortiz: Out There Somewhere. Poems and journal entries by a major Native American writer. Found the paperback in Kettering, Ohio, and shared portions on the Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Manchester with a lovely Sioux across the aisle. Still, the collection comes as something of a disappointment: I expect work of the level of the piece Rachel had for class discussion.
  • Iris Moulton: A Thin Time. First volume by a young Utah poet who seems to be instrumental in a revival in Salt Lake City.
  • Stephen Gorman: Northeastern Wilds. Full-color photos with essays exploring the Great North Woods sweeping from the Adirondacks eastward across Maine. Suspect I’ve seen many of these in Sierra Club calendars, and the writing often seems pitched to glossy magazines, with three or four not quite continuous sections pieced together to create a single chapter. Annoying, saved mostly by some decent reference material. An Appalachian Mountain Club volume.

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THE NAYLER PRAYER FLAGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve mentioned my love of Tibetan prayer flags, from long before they became so popular and easily purchased. One Christmas, though, I was given a kit for making my own, which left me wondering what to design. Early Quakers would have scoffed at the practice, mostly as vanity and superstition, but I do like the reminder to be more prayerful and attentive. So I turned to one of the early major voices of the movement, James Nayler, and began extracting a few words for each square.

Here’s what emerged:

To
ALL
HONEST
HEARTS

Stand still
in the Light
of Jesus.

Come to
SEE
the Life.

If the EYE
be single
NO
darkness.

One power
WORKS
in the
LIGHT.

Believe
and
WAIT.

HAVE
the
LIGHT
of
LIFE.

To
MAKE
MANIFEST

THIS
COVENANT
OF
LIGHT.

TRUTH
PEACE
RIGHTEOUSNESS

THE
FRUIT
YOU
BRING
FORTH

ONE
is the
POWER

Receive
the
LIGHT.

SHINE.

FOLLOW
the
LIGHT.