A Modest Bouquet: Ten Mother’s Day Posts

Here is an image of a flower’s flower, replete with “sinuous rills” to borrow from Coleridge (Kubla Khan). We all get to be Georgia in front of a flower, inhabiting her eye for a fractionally inspired several seconds, to the tune of Stein’s refrain “a rose is a rose is a rose” circling, just as the words circled the ceiling over Stein’s bed (Alice’s idea, according to Rebecca Mark in the introduction to Lifting Belly).

Last week I wrote about the almost-flowers of Harry Cooke’s illustrations for Poe’s tales. There’s no question about the authenticity of this flower blossoming in my tiny garden by the sea. I’m stunned by it’s veined folds, inner reds, heartlit golds. Its dream chamber unfolding itself, enfolding anyone pausing long enough to see, and take, the invitation. Remember having time to ask before sleep, a question, a dream to incubate?

I want there to be that kind of time again. But I’m allowing my already three-real-time-children divided soul to be further divided by three websites I love and can’t stop nurturing (the new one at Transformative Blogging, last year’s addition, Mother, Writer, Mentor, and my first web baby here, Feral Mom). This Mother’s Day I decided to celebrate--hope you'll indulge me--by posting early, and then taking it easy…not rushing to create a new post, but stopping instead to walk back into some of the rooms of the past. Here are ten excerpts with links to the rest of the posts that circle either Mother’s Day or aspects of motherhood from solo parenting to a letter written by my own mother to mom vs. dad styles of parenting. Blessings and love to my own mother. And to mothers everywhere.

Mother’s Day

The man next to us caring for three kids by himself gave my husband a smug look when I got up to go the bathroom and someone at a neighboring table told my husband, “Hey, you’re supposed to take the kids out and let the wife go do her own thing, like this guy here.”…Read Mother's Day here.

Mothers and Daughters: A Bird’s Eye View

… Now, forty years later, I stand in the electrified field of my own kitchen: raising a daughter. She stomps before me, enraged with me for saying no to an overnight with a family I have only just recently come to know. I could easily spend her childhood lamenting how odd to find her so deeply wrapped around my heart, embedded in my subconscious, how uncomfortable to feel her groping around in there for the edges of her own self, unable to accept the simple yes or no answers my sons tend to accept…Read Mothers and Daughters here.

On Sons and Guns

… I still ask how we walked into that farmhouse without picking up on the boy’s charged, residual field of absolute panic. Back then, I had no reference for the burden of sons—what they might or might not do by accident…Read more of Sons and Guns here.

Some Mother: Abalone vs. Coffee

…Saturday morning…and I’ve believed my husband’s line that some other diver plans to meet him to brave the 19-plus swell he’s bent on surviving in order to nab three abalone. Despite a raging desire to meet a friend alone for coffee during this rare window when my husband’s home and thus can cover our brood for me, my mother’s intuition perks up when he says casually, “Of course I’m still diving and I’m sure some mother will watch the kids on shore.”…Read  more of Some Mother: Abalone vs. Coffee here.

In my writing cabin

...a photo of our daughter sits next to the printer. She wears a red velvet dress, holds a peach rose, each petal fringed crimson. She’s leaned against the white marble statue of a hand, so large that the palm’s lifeline curves past her shoulders and she is cupped, the hand extending still three feet above her head…Read more of In My Writing Cabin here.

Alice in Flames: Going Back to Work after Ten Years at Home:

…Against the pitch black sky stands a young terrified girl, shaking as I hand her a glass of water and my telephone. I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I was in the ditch. I make her a cup of tea, wrap a scarf around my neck, follow her out into the cold and dense tree-canopy dark, my Boy Scout son bursting out in front of us, his swiss-army knife flashlight illuminating the gravel, and 100 yards further, her car, one wheel lodged into the right bank…Read more of Alice in Flames here.

Lessons from the Body: Paper Boats, Poison Oak and Kites

… I floated in liquid state, trying to let go and hold fast, to descend but not disappear, to allow but not relent, to release but not evaporate, to ground but not split, to center but not centrifugally, to calm, to cry, on the far side of my husband’s business trip. When he’s gone, we fill the hours, as all solo mothers do, with joy, with sparring, in equal measure…Read more of  Lessons From the Body here.

A Summer Solstice Promise

…I bark the admonition about non-retrievable body parts to my son for the third time as we course in a four-door car over the blue bridge into Coronado, his elbow and hand buffeted by the air current inches from the concrete dividers. I’m thinking about an article I read on the airplane the day before about some kind soul in China employed solely to out-sprint prospective suicides as they scale a bridge probably about this height…Read more of A Summer Solstice Promise here.

I feel mediocre trying to do it all

“Rather than fighting the situation,” (of trying to find uninterrupted writing time), “Ehret says she ‘embraced the aesthetic of interruption,’ as a way of mirroring her reality and honoring the fragmentation common to women’s lives” (Bart Schneider’s 10/22/08 Lit Life column). I embraced her philosophy all of Halloween, putting my thoughts about which poems to send Margie’s Strong Medicine Awards on hold until after the kindergarten celebration—when Grandpa and Grandma would take the three children home for the afternoon…Read more of I feel mediocre here.

Rejection, Rhino Ends, and Rapunzels

There were lots of children in the neighborhood because it was an Irish Catholic town, so just on our small block there were 10 children in our family, six in the Kelly's across the street, five in the Clark's eight in the Jenny's and three in the Keating's. Everyone watched out for everyone else, and everyone knew each other. We lived on the edge of town, with a dairy farm just across the street. The traffic on the street was so slight. I remember falling asleep at night and hearing the whistle of the train in the distance...Read more of Rejection, Rhino Ends, and Rapunzels here. (Excerpt from a letter written by my mother, Mary Doherty).

Happy Mother's Day...and I'd love you to add a link in my comments to your favorite mother's day post that you've either written or come across--share the wealth.

Further Reading:

Notecard to a Nursing Mother: It's Never Too Late to Have a Happy Motherhood
I wrote this post last week for Mother, Writer, Mentor. It mentions a timeline of motherhood exercise I hope you'll take me up trying-- take a moment in your journal (ask for a new one!) to celebrate all you've given to your children. Breakfast in bed, flowers, and those precious drawings from the little people are always wonderful... But a little bit of self love goes a long way. Toot your horn in that journal! No one else has to know!

Photograph credits: Photos 1 and 2 (Rose, Butterfly and Collage) are mine, but the boots and Alice are from Robyn Beattie.

Almost-Flowers, Celestial Aspirations and This Morning’s Descent into Poe: The Color of Lightning

The art that excites me the most has always had both a railing and wild river in it... Timothy Donnelly, March/April APR, 2012

Back in January when Elizabeth sent me her half of The Color of Lightning (see our latest recording here—the first we had to do remotely, not side by side in her yard or my woods) the prospector in her poem crying “Eureka,” inspired some general rummaging before I wrote my half. I discovered Asteroid 5621 (co-orbital with Mars) bears the name. And came across something of Edgar Allan Poe’s I’d never read titled, Eureka, A Prose Poem, which it turns out, is anything but a poem. But how clever of Poe to dodge scientific critique by calling his treatise on gravity a poem. I also like his dedication, which reads in part, “…to those who feel rather than to those who think -- to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities…”

Out of the blue (without knowing I was writing about Poe), my brother visited several weeks later with a copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination under his arm, which he left as a gift for me. The illustrations are Harry Clarke’s (scroll down to the eleventh image here on 50 Watts to view the image I'll be discussing below; thanks to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings for the reference).

I love Clarke’s illustration for Descent into the Maelstrom which confronts us with a funnel of delicately layered Morse Code reminiscent lines mixed with repeating blurred comet tails and long dashes and dots of white in tightening rings. But even as the rings choke inward, the amount of black space the artist employs between rings grows. You immediately assign the location to the sea because of the vessel circling midway down the vortex, deck nearly parallel to the opposite side of the funnel. You (viewer) find no rim of sky; you are placed at the outer rings of the gyre looking at a slight angle down at the funnel whose tip you are not allowed to see (thus the secret fathoming of its genesis or end made worse, left to root in the imagination’s darker surmisings).

Once you stop thinking about that boat on its side spinning towards oblivion, you notice odd fragments of flotsam, wood, torn trees, or are they limbs of trees? Or worse? Then you realize one of those random bits forms a barrel, and to that barrel clings a survivor. Which ends up feeling more ominous than the image of the boat (though…check out the boat again…as you peer more closely it seems to house a human foot...and the back part of the deck appears fringed with human teeth, lower portion of a jaw, the boat the shape of a mouth opening in protest).

Flipping through the rest of the illustrations, I find the combination of ornate almost-flowers and detailed pattern that really otherwise should add up to ornament coupled with the sometimes gruesomely extending limbs and body proportions effectively betray the warp of psychological states Poe puts his readers through time after time. Clarke’s drawings match Poe’s methodical haunting, the way Poe rings you with words and portions of argument that should add up to reason but tilt towards madness.  The words chosen to describe Descent into the Maelstrom’s illustration reads: “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic…upon the interior surface of a funnel…”

Initially the image felt familiar—I first identified as the boat trying to maintain position…boat of motherhood, boat of personhood, boat of poet trying to stay afloat. But once I saw the person clinging to the barrel, the lonely boat felt far less romantic in the light of this second image with its graver degree of depravity and desperation.

Weighing the emotion rings of each image (empty boat vs. barrel clinging survivor), I turned to a back issue of APR I found unpacking this weekend (in a stack of other reading material I was supposed to return to Elizabeth before we moved). In a conversation in APR’s March April 2012 Issue, Why Write If Not to Align Yourself with Time and Space with Mathew Zapruder, Ange Mlinko, Timothy Donnelly, Steve Almond, and Hannah Gamble, a couple of paragraphs by Timothy Donnelly moved me. In speaking of the sublime, the experience of it, how the relative safety of the observer (reader) figures, he left me with another useful visual:   “…The difference is that between terror and horror. It’s leaning over the railing at Niagara Falls versus actually falling in… The art that excites me the most has always had both a railing and wild river in it…” You need to read the whole conversation to appreciate all the nuances (I hope you will). Donnelly follows this by rooting for taking risks in writing, going the distance.

Been a long time since I felt that excited about writing poetry again, about reaching for the curve past the curve. I am thinking of the opposite vortex of terror Descent into the Maelstrom implies—is it possible for our generation of poets to write poems that spiral with equal height celestially, hope-driven, not sappy, not trite, not “angel-fied”, but where body meets potential of spirit.

Likely these poems already exist, so tell me your favorite. I’m feeling restless with my own tired orbit, spiraling on the updraft of others with brighter vision, thrilled for example with the birdsong and the rainbow hammock behind Elizabeth, the cheerful lilt of her voice in this week's recording. I’ll be recording my next half of poem outside near the birds of paradise, hoping too to catch the trills of the yellow warblers I hear right now and every morning when I wake.

End Notes:

Email Elizabeth if you want to join in her collaborative prose poetry blog, Perhaps, Maybe. You can send her a Perhaps or write a Maybe to one of her Perhaps stanzas. It will grow on you…I promise…

For images reminiscent of Clarke’s, but definitely aligned with a sweeter strain of music (enchanting, an antidote for me to the darker Clarke depictions) check out Kay Nielsen’s work. See Maria Popova’s Kay Nielsen’s Stunning 1914 Scandinavian Fairytale Illustrations.

 Photograph is cover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with Illustrations by Harry Clarke; published by Calla Editions in 2008 (unabridged republication of an edition originally published by Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1933). Twenty-nine tales, with illustrations (Eureka, A Prose Poem does not appear in the collection).

 

Marriage’s Lineage of Imagery and The Poetry of Motherhood

I wrote this post last year, but due to the surreal anguish and ongoing questions (would we be ok? would we be reunited?) I waited. In synchronous harmony, I am preparing to teach Poetry of Motherhood again, but this time, selecting poems from the sun-filled home I inhabit with my husband.

When my husband-to-be flew out to Iowa City to woo me thirteen years ago with all the muscled vigor of a grown man—certainly no longer looking anything like the freckled kid I remembered from sixth grade—and asked me to marry him, his eye was caught by an image on my shelf of Guinevere knighting Lancelot (artwork by Edmund Blair Leighton). That, he proclaimed, should be our theme. 

So we hired a dress-maker; she skillfully replicated the long draping sleeves of Guinevere’s gown, sketched out and sewed to red pigskin the black griffin-like bird of Lancelot’s heraldry to my husband’s tunic. I remember sort of glossing over the metaphor of the entangled love triangle between Guinevere and Lancelot and Arthur, choosing to focus on the parallel spiritual solace Guin and Lance may have found in the later years of their acquaintance.

Our wedding guests arrived adorned in period costume. We hired a harpist who by chance could also fulfill my husband’s request for closing processional by bagpipe; under the canopy of redwoods, we married in a stone amphitheater to the low sweet trill of a hermit thrush. We filled our years with children and jobs and the stresses of our economic times, which lead to my husband taking a second job in a city a flight’s distance from us.

 After two years of the inevitable strain our situation placed on our marriage we found ourselves facing a crisis of trust. I feared irreparable damage. Wriggling under the clarifying purification pain provides, I farmed out my three children and stayed with my aunt in an attempt to gain perspective. Simultaneously, I happened to be on the hunt for poems to use in my Poetry of Motherhood class, grateful for the distraction work lent from the psychic sorting obsessing both heart and head. Tea in hand, from across the room, I spotted the pale green spine of a book titled, “Ireland in Poetry.”

When I slid the book free, I found two familiar figures gracing the cover. In slightly different costume (her dress, blue--not white, his head, covered in chain mail--not bared), but so close to the image we’d used on our wedding invitation, I felt as if the figures were speaking directly to me: All is not lost. But you are, for now, turned away from one another. What relief—I could acceptance our distance. And take comfort in the image of gripped dress sleeve linking the forlorn lovers. Later that night, a poet friend of mine said: Why don’t you advise your husband to forgive himself, and you, do the same: forgive yourself. She was hinting at two equally important halves of forgiveness: forgiving the other person matters little if self-blame runs riot in the background of one's inner monologue.

While my husband and I still had hours of emotional thicket to clear, both the image and the suggestions from my friend (which I voiced to my husband) seemed solid reminders of possible redemption. Another friend chimed in with: The only way through perceived betrayal is through…through the physical grip on the body, through the triggered childhood griefs that attach likes boxcars to the engine of one’s particular train. At least the caboose, vibrant red, has room for two to stand viewing side by side the ground crossed to get here, retreating, retreating.

Notes and further reading:

Book cover: Ireland in Poetry, Edited by Charles Sullivan. Cover image, "The Meeting on the Turret Stairs," by Sir Frederick Burton, 1864. Watercolor on paper. The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

A beautiful collection of poems; for Poetry of Motherhood, I chose for my students, the poem Cliona, by Catherine Twomey, a mother daughter poem graced by the opening lines , "You are letting her go / from you slowly / so gently she hardly / knows."

A plea for compassion for new fathers: Notecard to a Nursing Mother: Let The Husband Be Where He Is (a follow-up to Postcard to a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are) at Mother Writer Mentor, where I'll be teaching Poetry of Motherhood.

Hope you'll join me for Poetry of Motherhood (April 22). Check out this video I made last year with my daughter's help out on our back deck in the redwoods, "Introduction to Poetry of Motherhood" for a better idea of our class. Also know we aren't strictly in the business of writing poetry. We write to prompts and while poetry is welcome, it isn't required. We had a great time last year.

For a look at the quandaries and intricacies of blogging about the personal and traversing the public/private line, see an interview Edith O'Nuallain (yes, of Ireland) conducted with me earlier this month (posted in two installments): On the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging and Part 2.


 

An Easter Note: Spirituality, Blogging and Dorothy Parker

 

I confess, here on a sun filled Easter morning, I miss our Northern California redwoods and the hill of trees above our house. Where my husband would rise while it was still dark to hide the goods: jellybeans, chocolate eggs, malt-balls tucked inside the neon pinks and yellows of plastic eggs. From the upstairs bathroom window I’d see the flash of his legs as he powered along the acre trail ringing our property. We’ve new rituals to make at our sunny San Diego home where we’ve as many hummingbirds flitting amidst the birds of paradise as we used to have juncos in their black hoods bobbing along the deck of the old house.

Easter holds for me the memory of my father waking our family of five in the dark so we could drive to the top of the nearest hill to wait for sunrise. Remember? The chill of night air, the smell of damp grass and dew wet sneakers. Then, jostling shoulder to shoulder beneath sleeping bags with my brother and sister in the backseat, the last handful of stars starting to wane in the predawn grey as we stepped out and spread out our blankets on the hill. How still and quiet. Nothing to do but wait. Gradually the layers of grey, muting brighter. Til more silver than gold, the morning light surrounded us and the sun’s rim crowned.

I love that Easter has been an experience my body remembers, that my father gave us a way to know it. Watching the sun come up, connecting to something so far from us in the sky that radiates with the same heat as the core of the earth. Or, now that I’m older, a mother myself, reading Dorothy Parker’s, “Prayer for a New Mother,” written for Mary, which opens with the lines, The things she knew, let her forget again-- / The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold…praying that Mary have all the peace and time with her son that other mothers have in their earthly incarnations. By stanza three, she begs on Mary’s behalf, Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd, / The smell of rough cut wood, the trail of red… For now, there is enough time. To bask in the sun. To imagine one’s children grown, thriving.

I’ve also fallen down the rabbit hole into my new Transformative Blogging site, but an equal portion of my heart lives here still at Feral Mom, Feral Writer. My hope in launching The Year of Inquiry for Women Bloggers was to learn as much as I taught and the trail of synchronicity has already begun. I’ve met new writers, creatives, and bloggers to engage and play with along the way. Edith O’Nuallain, who blogs at In a Room of My Own is one such new writing companion (she also happens to be a mother) who took the time to interview me about the work I’m developing in my classes for women bloggers. Edith’s questions, such as her lead, “Why transformative blogging? What is the connection between the spiritual and the personal?” took me on a reflective journey you can read here: Tania Pryputniewicz on the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging.  And Edith just posted part two of the interview here.

I’m throwing a good deal of my blogging energy into giving examples of each of the posts from my Twenty Inspiring Blog Posts You Can Write to Kickstart and Transform Your Blog worksheet (offered for free to email subscribers on my main site). Here are links to those latest posts:

Inquiry Posts, Chaucer and Blogger as Pilgrim (about question posts and considering blogging as pilgrimage)

Trickster Angels: Collaborative Posts and SynthesisBlogs (about hybrid blogs and teams and pairs of bloggers)

An Interview with the Collaborative Team Behind TheScience of Parenthood (about a humorous postcard blog put together by a writer-designer duo)

And the latest post I wrote for Mother, Writer, Mentor, is part of a “Postcard for Nursing Mothers” series I started, though my postcards are metaphorical:

Postcard for a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are

And if you wish to read Prayer for a new mother, I found an online version of it here at Poem Hunter:

Prayer for a New Mother

photos by Robyn Beattie.

What the Heck is Transformative Blogging Anyway or How I Used to Not Sell Vacuum Cleaners

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

Over an omelet at Clayton’s on Coronado Island (and generous portions of coffee), tired of listening to my manic lamentations about the deluge of slicker, smarter blogging classes and a profusion of free e-books online on the same subject, my husband blurts out, “What the heck do you mean by Transformative Blogging anyway? Why don’t you just teach Blogging 101?”

As usual, my man’s not even intentionally after my goat. He’s just earnestly confused.

He perpetually forgets he married a poet. At least he likes to pretend that’s the case. Just like he likes to pretend he’s not spiritually connected. He’s the one our daughter visited before she was born. Here’s yours truly, the reiki-loving, tarot-throwing dreamer, who can’t stop free associating long enough to tie her shoes, famous for leaving apple cores all over the house as a child (ok, and as a grown woman) reading everything from Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe to Terry Tempest Williams's When Women Were Birds). And our firstborn appears in a dream to tell him, the husband--the former ten-year Ironman triathlete, women’s cross country coach, Navy SEAL instructor and mentor extraordinaire, etc., etc., more grounded in his body than a sumo wrestler—that she’s a reincarnation of a blue-eyed woman who formerly died in her 40s. Nope, he’s not spiritually connected.

There’s nothing wrong with my course title, I tell my husband (secretly hoping there isn't and trying not to sound too defensive). But maybe there is room to grow in other arenas. Which brings us to to the M word: Marketing. Which still calls up “used car salesman”, or worse, college memories of two miserable weeks pushing Kirby vacuum cleaners. Memories of singing How Much is That Kirby in the Window to the tune of  How Much is that Doggy in the Window at the sales meetings while standing up in front of cold metal folding chairs with half eaten powdered donuts still clutched in the palm.

And memories of pulling dirt pads out of the tiny, wet, dome window besmeared with dog hair and family filth meant to shame people into buying something they couldn’t afford. And that was back in the days of the land-line, when you were required to phone in to the top sales guy who barked out an excruciating set of questions you were required to parrot at the tired housewife as you dragged the tightening ringlets of the phone cord all through the dining room on the way back to the newly cleaned back bedroom. At which point you were invited to leave.

Except, Kirby didn’t realize they were sending us untrained artist types into the homes of un-shame-able people who really just wanted the back bedroom carpet cleaned for free. Nor did they realize how much we empathized with our desperate potential customers, that we might be too appalled to foist a vacuum cleaner on a family with seven children, so that the only way most of us made news at the sales meeting was by selling product to an unsuspecting uncle or aunt who took pity on us over the weekend.

I’m far better at the art part of life, making poetry movies and hooking up tangential lines of reverie, pushing the borders of association for what might reveal itself towards a world of beauty, wonder, and cross-pollination. That skill transfers joyfully and easily over to the work of supporting women reach their blogging goals and mine their dreams for how they’d like to use a blog as a tool towards exploration.

Any act one returns to repeatedly, with intention and care, has transformative value. Transformation simply refers to a process by which you just might be changed, or the act or instance of transformation. Or, in relation to math, it refers to “mapping of one space onto another or oneself." At the end of the class and our mutual exchange of ideas and exposure to new tools, if I’ve done my job well, participants emerge with a new blogging map.

Transformative Blogging II is a course for students who have worked with me in the past or for those somewhat acquainted with blogging. We delve more intensely into mask-making, tapping into the power of art to give ourselves three-dimensional room to play with the concept of on-line persona. Why would you need or want a mask or on-line persona? Why do we wear clothes? If you are curious, image-driven, hands-on hungry to work with a group of eclectic and motivated women readying themselves to blog, join us (sign up here). Or stop by my main website for the latest articles written in support of blogging women looking for post variation ideas:

On Blog Titles: The Ex-Boyfriend, The Blogosphere, and Why Your Blog Title Matters

On Blog Subtitles: The Oracle at Delphi, Your Blog Subtitle and Three Examples

On How to Posts: The How to Post or How Your Meander Creates an Aerial Snake to Remember

On Holiday Posts: By the Spell of the Spin, The Human Calendar, or How to Write a Worthy Holiday Post

On Interview Post Variations: Interview Post Variations and The Role of Travel Bloggers on Dwellable

And if  you have an opinion either way, cast me a vote: What does Transformative Blogging sound like it would offer?  Is my husband right (bless him for his opinions), should I change my title to Blogging 101? I welcome your thoughts.

Feral Valentines: Thomas, Nijinsky, Plath

The lines of the boys of poetry filled my head this Valentine’s Day (Thomas, Arnold, Pablo). By dusk, in the glow of night approaching and a lifetime’s habit of threshing the day for its beauty with attendant promise of rising at 3 am to write, I forced a reading of In My Craft or Sullen Art upon my unsuspecting husband just to get to those last lines describing how the poet “labours by singing light / Not for ambition or bread…But for the lovers….Who pay no praise or wages / Nor heed my craft or art.” A sumptuous capturing of longing by Thomas: nocturnal poet, moon-driven, hunter of the oblivious hunted lovers so sated by the warmth of one another’s arms they have no interest in poetry. Though the poem, and the force behind it, often outlives the particular lover, as Thomas no doubt knew, such wooing a waiting game.

Other equally adept interpreters of longing (besides poets): dancers. Isadora Duncan (married for two years to poet Sergei Yesenin) seized my imagination early on as a child. I no longer have the book (no doubt lost in one of the moves of childhood) but the image lingers of the scarf trawling behind Isadora, the axels around which it wrapped, the irony that the very fabric she so loved to swath and swirl about her played a hand in her death directly. But here in our home, it is Romola Nijinsky’s book Nijinsky on my shelf luring me with tiny dancer on its spine as image of mysterious lover.

Every portion of the miniature figure’s skin is covered in blue, black, grey, and plum geometrics. At the dinner table, after I’ve tried to capture Nijinksy’s ethereal strength and prettiness with words alone (“He was Russia’s “God of The Dance,” etc), I show my family the five or so grainy black and white photos portioned through the yellowing pages. Because he’s generous, knows to humor my occasional dark girl poet obsessions, my husband patiently retells the story of Narcissus to my boys as they stare intently at Nijinsky. In the pose (labelled Narcisse), his arms are raised but gaze averted in a gesture of abandon, vulnerability. But his pose also conveys refusal: the downcast eyes portend the tight internal focus which leaves no room for an earthly lover.

But such focused refusal has the power to draw feral valentines, as here, where Paul Claudel so succumbs to the intensity of Nijinsky’s presence that everything takes on a certain radiance: “There was a green half-light in the dining room, and the sun of midday with the intermittent cry of cicadas reached us dulled by the mango trees, there was a green shade on the cloth between the fruit dishes and the silver service, a gleam of emerald play in the glass salad bowl among the fragments of ice” (Claudel, preface to Nijinsky, 1934, Simon and Schuster).  Claudel admitted he had no reason initially to enjoy the ballet or expect to be affected by the dancer, but we know he’s smitten by the passage above.

 

I close today by acknowledging one of my favorites of the girls of poetry, Sylvia Plath. On this anniversary of her passing, Brain Pickings posted, The Quicksand of Existence: Sylvia Plath on Life, Death, Hope, and Happiness, pouring us once more through highlights of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (published back in September 2000), celebrating the whole, feral poet, with light of previously edited passages bringing Sylvia's passion and skill for hunting the moment down into focus. All is fair, as they say, in love and war: if you are going to love any girl, love all of her. Happy Belated Valentine’s Day.

Further reading:

Additional blogpost on the movie Sylvia: Phantom Narratives and the Reel Picture

 

Book: 100 Love Sonnets, by Pablo Neruda

 

Poem: Complaint of Isadora Duncan's Scarf, by Charles Jensen

 

Poem: Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold
 

Book: Nijinsky, by Romola Nijinsky

 

 

 

Sculpture Poetry with Sandy Frank

In spring of 2009, sculptor Sandy Frank and I started playing with the notion of putting poems on sculptures. I gave her a handful of poems and here's what she sculpted. Visit my website, specifically, Collaborations for Bread, to see her artwork side by side with corresponding poems: Someone (about an ethereal dream lover you might encounter between waking and sleeping), The Painter's Wife (about the opposite: a physical plane lover, in this case, a painter, a husband). We wrap for now with the sculptures for a trio of poems out in circulation: Querent, Seer, Selke...so we only showcase the sculptures for two of the poems....but...more to come.

 

And I want to extend the collaboration...by reversing the process, so here's my promise to Sandy...to write new poems based on her existing sculptures. We will post as we go. Further, I'd love to discover other work by poets and sculptors along similar lines; so please, in comments, add your links to work you are doing yourself or that of other artists you enjoy.

 

Someone originally published by Coe Review Press, 1996.

The Painter's Wife originally published by Line Break, 2009.