It is the middle of the night after the second day of the Pacific University MFA program residency. So far: five crafts talks and two faculty readings, but I skipped the second student reading last night in hopes of getting a better night’s sleep. [That last is not going well. I should not be awake.] Yesterday, I ran in the morning, napped twice, and so much has come on so quickly, I feel simultaneously sated and drained, inspired and exhausted.
RATTLE is a poetry journal that emails poetry each morning, including a weekly response to a current event. Today, I received a form poem that made me sit up and feel. What follows is the mother’s explanation of where her words were birthed and a link to the poem.
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The Academy of American Poets offered an event of poets reading their favorite poems by other poets. Joy Harjo hosted the hour and over four thousand people logged on the hear them live. You can listen my clicking the link in the caption. The meme above is merely a screenshot.
Without Poetry, we lose our way.
—Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate & Academy of American Poets Chancellor (2019– )
Spring Morning When it is cold enough at night, spring's strawberries are sweeter in the morning. In the morning I woke before the sun blushed all across east and west, a gathering warmth slid around the Cape and over Tillamook Head. Before hard day pushed past, pink dawn had trailed her fingers all round the sky. In the morning I bent to berries' green tipping over into red. In that morning, red juice ran down his chin.
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Even though I’ve already made the herbed dressing, wild rice and mushroom casserole, twice baked potatoes, cranberry bread, pumpkin pie, I still have to make the Waldorf salad and roast the Brussels sprouts. I bought a wild fillet of sockeye salmon. We will eat flesh this day, our only seafood or meat of the year. I will pan-poach with lemon, garlic, butter, and wine. Or maybe with soy sauce, ginger, toasted sesame oil, and garlic . . . Gary seems to find it funny.
Anyway, I prepared most of this post a couple of days in advance because I didn’t want to be too busy. The holiday cards are all addressed to go out on Monday. I mean to slip handwritten notes into a couple of them. (I always mean to do that and never do.) A few gifts going to people far away are waiting to be wrapped and boxed for mailing. On Sunday I deliver a dozen shawls to the gallery in Manzanita. We have not driven there even once this year!
This morning I found an email from a small yarn company that has gone completely, and successfully, online this year. They offered a long list of of thank-yous to many specific people. The list ended with thanking their customers, like me. But it was the first block of thank-yous that led me to save the email in my covid folder: “Thank you to our fellow taxpayers, Congress, the SBA, and Columbia Bank for loans and grants. Thanks to Washington State for health safety cautions and unemployment benefits, and to the Kitsap Economic Development Council for weekly seminars on how to cope with COVID.” They are optimistic about their future. “Because of you, we are back on our feet, getting stronger, and feeling more determined than ever to make this a 100-year company. Only 80 more years to go.”
Well, I feel gratitude too. Thank you here to a great many people who read my blog, who respond to particular posts, ideas, and questions.
Most of the people I have known in my life have given me something good to keep. Just among my teachers I treasure studio skills and experiences from Del Hansen and Bob Gee when I was still a girl, and thoughtful perspective from Darlene Sherrick and James May, and serious artistic growth with Patti Warashina and “Jack” Marshall and Howard Kottler. They changed my life. Sherrick chose me for Honors History. Harriet Koenig stepped in three times to turn my life: a Design class, a conference, my first teaching job. Thank you.
You are probably avoiding the news, but an architect designed a prank Trump website, and this page is my favorite: https://djtrumplibrary.com/portfolio-item/tax
Happy Thanksgiving! Humor is back!
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FOR AHMAUD ARBERY, AN UNARMED BLACK JOGGER KILLED FOR ALLEGEDLY LOOKING IN THE WINDOW OF A HOUSE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
that day I wasn’t shot for trespassing.
It happened nearly two decades ago.
Three of the local whimbrels. Eight have been out in front of the house for the past few days. A loose dog chased them off but the returned soon enough. They are after sand crabs, I think.
“Time and Tide wait for no man” is how the saying goes. It is a recommendation against procrastination and as I am reading Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels (for the third time) I understand the reference. However . . .
We waited for the tide to turn so that we might have our walk. It was past dawn, though if the sky were clear we would not see the sun for at least two hours. Out we went a half hour past full but the stretch of rocks were were most interested in searching were awash and we often had to run up shore to avoid getting wet.
There were fourteen whimbrels further note on the shore, and when we returned home there were four plucking sand crabs from the wet sand.
We saw no one, only the tracks of one earlier walker, and perhaps that person went out last night. Their prints vanished in the waves.
We found the ocean and we gathered and we were fortunate to be together.
This evening we watched “Shelter in Poems” from the Academy of American Poets. You might find it here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/shelterinpoems
After a false start with no sound, the poems start at about ten minutes and forty seconds in. I would like to say that if you can listen to Merwin’s “Thank You” without tears you are not quite human, but that sounds like a dare to some people. I will say that I taught many of these poems, I was grateful to hear them and to discover others that will carry me on.
This morning I compared the message of an essayist to “The Gift.” That poem by Li-Young Lee describes how self-discipline was taught to a young boy by his father, who calmly tells him a story while removing a splinter. Search for that story and you will find it.
“to get the news from poems . . .”
I also received an email with links to
One of them is by Alberto Rios. I have had a soft spot for Rios since reading his poems about death by avocado and because he was born the same year I was.
Alberto Ríos – 1952-
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
I have not donated to the nonprofit Academy of American Poets this year. Perhaps you will find enough comfort in this website to help them continue their offerings of hope.
It can be helpful to spend a few moments each day with language to maintain our well-being and fortitude. As we find ways to come together while apart, please find a selection of poems our team has curated especially for you, from Poets.org:
“Darling Coffee” by Meena Alexander
“For Keeps” by Joy Harjo
“Song Out Here” by Juan Felipe Herrera
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson
“These Poems” by June Jordan
“Leisure” by Amy Lowell
“The Last Thing” by Ada Limón
“So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Cento Between the Ending and the End” by Cameron Awkward-Rich
“When Giving Is All We Have” by Alberto Ríos
“Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon
“The Flower at My Window” by Lucian B. Watkins
“The Things That Count” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“[I wandered lonely as a Cloud]” by William Wordsworth
“To All My Friends” by May Yang
Ada Limón – 1976-
Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
[and every woman too . . . originally published in the July 1936 issue of Esquire]
Academy of American Poets
75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901
New York, NY 10038
info@poets.org
Dear Friend,
Please join us in congratulating our Chancellor Joy Harjo on being named our nation’s newest Poet Laureate! Harjo was elected an Academy Chancellor earlier this year and received the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry in 2015.
As a poet, a teacher, and a literary leader Joy Harjo has touched many lives and many communities. She now has what is one of the largest platforms a poet can aspire to and it is a well-deserved honor. We’re thrilled for Joy and for the nation on this historic appointment.
We’ve enjoyed wonderful partnerships with our Poets Laureate. Since the position was created in 1937—a year after our organization was incorporated—more than half of the poets in this esteemed role have been Academy Chancellors. We look forward to continuing our tradition of celebrating our nation’s Poet Laureate and supporting Joy however we might.
Read this special Q&A with Joy about her new role.
Sincerely,
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 