let’s get social

Who doesn’t like a good story and when I mean a story, I mean a person. You’ve heard “don’t judge a book by its cover” and while the genesis of this phrase may have started with a book, let’s just say more often than not it’s intended for people.

Journalism, waitressing, coffee barista, even librarian- the only similarity shared in these hats of the past was people. My blood starts flowing faster it seems, heart speeds up when I think about an opportunity to connect. I’ve been thinking a lot about words like “connection” and “community” lately. Where I think they may boil down for me is delight and opportunity of the online meeting the necessity of the offline. Perhaps the point is that one begets the other or at the very least informs the other.

Poetry can be like that too. A person writes a poem. The poem meanders into the hands of another person, who then ascribes their own ideas and value onto the poem. And the poem outlasts both of them, possibly touching countless other hands or nudging into other ears and eyes.

Narrative poetry // photographic poetry- it all belongs to the people.

On feathered things

Some big changes are afoot. One such change is no longer being employed at the company that almost captured a decade of my life. It’s good to calibrate and sometimes re-calibrate along the journey. I remember graduating from school and thinking I would be overseas in six months. Eight years later, this is not where I would have expected myself, let alone, expected myself to be happy.

Have you ever been prone to give up? Equal parts dreamer and realist, depending on the moment and the day, I walk that tightrope of belief and disbelief. Lately, or more specifically 2008 on, I have encountered many people around me giving up. Hands in the air. Stamped resumes filling in-boxes. The recession has definitely played a part in that buzz kill. Complacency founded in fear cripples more than it builds up. And so, hope can either be the bird that chirps the unknown mystery inside of you aloud or the feathered thing flying into the room that must be shot.

Enter Emily Dickinson’s poem “254″. In it, she introduces “hope” as the “thing with feathers”. I can almost hear each of the stanzas as music: 1: major keys, bright, sunny // 2: minor keys introduced, an extended sweep across a soprano violin contrasts the crash and boom of deep piano keys // 3: violin pizzicato to the finality of chords held on a half note.

I wonder that hope is not something easily held onto. It’s much easier to let go of it because sometimes its surface is chilled and other times hot sand. How does hope play out in today’s world as a gritty counterpart to its childish reputation? Hope costs and the cost of hope deferred, as a proverb has said, “makes the heart sick.” This begs the question, “is hope worth it?” As life is meant to be lived in full hue, hope is the necessary void sometimes lacking from our lives. It gives the outline to the right now by separating it from what could be. Hope requires tenacity and a firmness of spirit which belies the lightness of the word itself.

Moving into a new position and a new year of life, I’m choosing a new lease on life: one imbued with hope.

254
Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops- at all-

And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard-
And sore must be the storm-
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm-

I’ve heard it in the chillest land-
And on the strangest Sea-
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb- of Me.

SOUND: Larissa Szporluk’s “Deliverer”

“Dark Sky Question” as a title of a collection of poems sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? I found the poems inside equally compelling by what they tell and what they leave out. What would be the single question you might ask to a dark sky? What would its’ response be? Szporluks’ poems have an air of mystery in them. The one that caught and held my attention in my reading is “Deliverer” which I am happy to re-post below. If you like what you read, check out DSQ. Enjoy.

Deliverer by Larissa Szporluk

No one can spin forever.
It will all slow down.
The poles will grow sore on the world,
the valve in the heart
will retard, slow down, slow down,
to a speed we can’t see,
can’t feel, slow as a cloud
carting snow through atomic darkness,
to her son, when the magnet
is low, when the blood,
can’t see, can’t feel, how slow…
as the whale pulling out of the sea
can’t see the no-sea,
can’t feel the tide bring it back,
breaking her agony over the beach,
who she was, who she loved,
who God opened up, how still and how slow,
belly no longer with Jonah.

Consider This: Poetics

Continuous Cities 4
By Italo Calvino

You reproach me because each of my stories takes you right into
the heart of a city without telling you of the space that stretches
between one city and the other, whether it is covered by seas, or
fields of rye, larch forests, swamps. I will answer you with a story.
In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd,
driving a tinkling flock along the walls.
“Man blessed by heaven,” he asked me, stopping, “can you tell
me the name of the city in which we are?”
“May the gods accompany you!” I cried. “How can you fail to
recognize the illustrious city of Cecilia?”
“Bear with me,” that man answered. “I am a wandering herds-
man. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we
are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing
lands, I know them all: the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green
Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are
places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and
where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog
and I run to keep the flock together.”
“I am the opposite of you,” I said. “I recognize only cities and
cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each
stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every other
stone and clump.”
Many years have gone by since then; I have known many more
cities and I have crossed continents. One day I was walking among
rows of identical houses; I was lost. I asked a passerby: “May the
immortals protect you, can you tell me where we are?
“In Cecilia, worse luck!” he answered. “We have been wandering
through its streets, my goats and I, for an age, and we cannot find
our way out…”
I recognized him, despite his long white beard; it was the same
herdsman of long before. He was followed by a few, mangy goats,
which did not even stink, they were so reduced to skin-and-bones.
They cropped wastepaper in the rubbish bins.
“That cannot be!” I shouted. “I, too, entered a city, I cannot re-
member when, and since then I have gone on, deeper and deeper
into its streets. But how have I managed to arrive where you say,
when I was in another city, far far away from Cecilia, and I have
not yet left it?”
“The places have mingled,” the goatherd said. “Cecilia is every-
where. Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow
of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island.”