What right do I have
to this morning's brilliance
its pellucid peace?
In the ancestral cities
distant cousins wake weeping.
--
The million green leaves
above me cannot shelter
one child of Taksim.
--
My arch on your thigh
slow movements in the pale light
rain again today.
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"Once in a while it vanishes - in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three. This coming and going of the inner life - because this is what it is - is a curse and a blessing. I don't need to explain why it's a curse. A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness."
- Adam Zagajewski (via Whiskey River)
The underground food court is filled with the sounds of voices and cutlery and plates and plastic trays reverberating against the low ceiling, but this is where there's WIFI so after finishing my lunch of Indian fast food I call my father, who's been trying to call me, and after we talk I go up the escalator and decide to visit the English-language bookstore a few blocks away. When I walk in I'm greeted by a cheerful woman who asks me if I know about today's special. No, I don't. Buy any three items and get the fourth free, she tells me, gesturing at a display of colorful pillows and decorative throws behind her. It can be anything, she says. Books, gifts...Thank you, I say, moving away and looking around with dismay; every time I come here it seems like there are fewer books and more housewares, soaps, candles, and expensively-packaged cookies and chocolates. Worse, there's hardly a book I want to read. I do one circuit of the second floor, and stand for a few minutes in front of Poetry, a small display of two book cases at shoulder height. On the endcaps are a recent collection of essays by James Wood, an edition of the Odyssey, and a volume of poems by local hero Leonard Cohen. I'm looking for the latest Adam Zagajewski, but it's not here; none of his books are. Instead I pull out the new Anne Carson, Red doc>, and recoil at the price. She's Canadian so most of her books are on the shelf: Plainwater, The Beauty of the Husband, Autobiography of Red, NOX,translations of Euripides and Sappho. The price for the new hardcover is just too high, I'll probably buy it in paperback later online or used -- the irony of which is not lost on me -- and then I think about having a coffee and sitting down in the cafe for the forty-five minutes before rehearsal, but decide against it and walk out, rather sad and annoyed, but tell myself to let it go, and I do.
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Several years ago, a group of friends put together this poetry anthology, Brilliant Coroners, published through my nascent publishing house, Phoenicia. We've never done a really effective job of promoting it, but I was looking through it again recently, and remarking to myself that it contains some truly wonderful work by many bloggers and poets you may have heard of in these pages...several of whom who've since published books of their own and are even gaining an international literary reputation.
Thanks to the excellent work of editors Rachel Rawlins and Rachel Barenblat, I think you'll find that the work inside is of consistently high quality. The cover was a collaboration between Dave Bonta, who took the original photograph, and Marja-Leena Rathje and Natalie d'Arbeloff.
The poets are:
Elizabeth Adams, Ivy Alvarez, Rachel Barenblat, Maria Benet, Dave Bonta, Teju Cole, Natalie d'Arbeloff, Dale Favier, Dick Jones, Alison Kent, Leslee Masten, Tom Montag, Jean Morris, Rachel Rawlins, Peter Stephens, Anne-Mieke Swart, and B.E. Wing
It's on sale through tomorrow, and is inexpensive anyway. To take a look inside, here's a link. It seems like a great way to celebrate National Poetry Month, and the joy of collaborating with others to keep poetry -- and our own enthusiasm for it -- alive.
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I haven't written much about my publishing projects lately, but today is a launch day, so it's a perfect time to do that!
Rachel Barenblat, also known as The Velveteen Rabbi, has been a friend of mine for almost as long as I've both been blogging. After becoming friends through our blogs, we worked together on an anthology of poems, Brilliant Coroners, and on the online literary journal qarrtsiluni. We met several times in person, in Boston, Montreal, and New York. During the past decade, she studied to become a rabbi, was ordained, and started serving a congregation. As religious people coming from different places we both engaged with and talked about the difficult issues of the Middle East. We did a presentation together about Jewish and Christian approaches to Scripture, and contemporary life and politics. Recently she entered into the world of parenthood. All the while, she blogged, and wrote poems. Very good poems.
When I started Phoenicia Publishing, it was because I wanted to publish the work of writers like Rachel, who had the courage to look beyond borders and convention and to illuminate the liminal spaces of ethnicity, spirituality, politics, and personal identity. Works that created bridges for readers, rather than walls behind which we could fortify ourselves, or hide within our prejudices. The first book of Rachel's that I published, 70 Faces: Torah Poems, looks at the first five books of the Hebrew Bible through a feminist perspective. Other people shared my own enthusiasm: for an independently-published book of poetry, it's done amazingly well.
Today we're launching Rachel's second full-length collection, Waiting to Unfold. These are poems about pregnancy, birth and early parenthood, but again, she doesn't take the expected route. The poems, written as letters to her unborn son and then as a sort of poetic journal of the first year of his life, take an unflinching look at the difficulties as well as the joys of motherhood. I'm not a parent myself, but I've often observed that parents, and mothers especially, are under tremendous pressure to feel and to say that everything is rosy, even perfect, when in fact the experience is often quite mixed. A lot of women who give birth find themselves finally admitted to the secret club of motherhood, where it's almost as if they have to sign a pledge not to reveal the darker side.
Rachel had a miscarriage before she gave birth to her son; that experience and that unborn child are not forgotten, but woven into her poems about this subsequent pregnancy as he writes of her worries as well as her anticipation. And after the birth, she experiences and is treated for post-partum depression, eventually emerging from that cloud. The majority of the poems are celebratory, joyful, funny, and above all, honest. Like all of Rachel's work, I found them very accessible, and -- like the author herself -- imbued with a deep spirituality that's always present but never overbearing.
It was a real pleasure as well to work with the exuberant cover artist, Mary Bullington, a Roanoke, Virginia artist who I met through Marly Youmans. The cover art is a detail of one of Mary's collages, titled "Creation."
The whole process of publishing a book -- like becoming a parent, I imagine -- is exciting, demanding, and challenging; the best part of it is working with the author and artist as a team trying to do our creative best, and trying to do justice to the words themselves.
I hope some of you might decide to buy a book for yourself or to give to a mother you love; while you're over at Phoenicia please take note that all of the other full-length poetry books are on sale through the end of April, in honor of National Poetry Month. The books are all available through Amazon UK and Europe, but if you're on this side of the pond and able to order through the e-store, both the author and publisher will receive considerably more of your support. Thanks!
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Children on bright sleds
pulled by panting parents
princes, princesses
of this frozen kingdom
erect, imperious
in their stiff snowsuits.
We came out of our garage this morning into the snow-filled alley, and waited for such a parent and child to pass: the father, bare-headed, all in black, trudging through the deep snow pulling his son on a turquoise sled; the child swaddled in puffy layers of colorful down and wool, staring straight ahead like a little prince. I'm so used to seeing scenes like this -- the mothers and fathers pulling different types of sleds on their way to the early-morning garderies and elementary schools -- that it seldom occurs to me that this common method of conveyance is probably rather unique to far-northern cities like ours. Sometimes the kids, especially very little ones, lie flat on the sleds, staring up at the sky and the buildings going by, but the older ones tend to sit up like little kings in carriages pulled by horses.
Their impassive expressions remind me of photos of child-lamas in Tibet, considered to be the reincarnations of great lamas, who are dressed in layers of bright quilted silks and wools, and treated like royalty from early childhood. In our neighborhood, which is mostly French, parents are very attentive to their children, and it's common to see a sled or a stroller stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, the parent bent over, patiently listening to a child who's talking, animated, waving her arms. The children behave well, or so it seems to me, but I rarely see or hear a parent yelling, and have never seen a child being hit since I moved here. Family life is still a priority; it often feels, to me, like the 1950s.
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Sassetta, Journey of the Magi, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1435
This Sunday we'll be singing our third and final Lessons&Carols service of the season, in celebration of Epiphany.
Sunday's Evensong will also include familiar hymns and readings, both of the relevant scriptural passages and some innovative poetry selections. I will, in fact, be reading Gerard Manley Hopkins' "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" -- a rather daunting prospect for which I am practicing! Here's a link to an audio recording I made of the poem:
Jan Brueghel, Adoration of the Magi, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
A man in our parish keeps a music calendar for the cathedral's services, and publishes it on the web; it includes beautiful art appropriate to the time of the liturgical year, and a full list of the music to be performed with links to online audio, and information about composers and writers of texts. I know it is his labor of love, but I appreciate it so much, and doubt think he gets the recognition his effort deserves! Anyway, here is his listing for Sunday's music, which will be streamed live on Radio Ville-Marie at 4:00 pm Eastern Time (for listeners in the UK, we are five hours different, so that's 9 pm your time.) I hope the whole service will fit within the one hour limit of the broadcast, but if not, you will still hear most of it. (Click the arrow in the blue band at the bottom right of the screen banner, where it says "Nous écouter en direct.")
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"Rémy Gélinas,
Agneau" -- small truck parked
behind the bistro.
Their bleating's morphed to morsels --
here's the chef in his white coat.
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Blue door, blue balloons
tied to a wrought iron fence --
yesterday's party.
------
Well, here we are in December, which seems completely impossible. Where has the fall gone? And now the holidays will be upon us before we know it. Advent Sunday was yesterday, celebrated with a marathon but really beautiful service of Advent Lessons & Carols at the cathedral in the afternoon. We sang a big program of fifteen choral works, and to our surprise -- since we were particularly under-rehearsed -- it all went very well, including a rhythmically-tricky "Wachet auf" by Praetorius, and an 8 1/2-minute Victorian oratorio-style piece by Edward Naylor -- a period that's not usually my cup of tea, but I loved singing this one.
I enjoyed the practice of writing micropoems every day in November, and wonder if I'll keep it up now, a bit less regularly - maybe so. Every day as I came up to the studio, I found myself looking for an image that grabbed my attention, and it was good to have the focus on color as a way of sharpening my eyes to see something specific. All the poems didn't come from those trips, but a lot did; I feel like I bonded even more with my neighborhood by looking at it that much more closely, and noticing specific people, shops, corners, events, habits. There were always more than I coud write about, and it was interesting to observe the sifting process - what image stayed in my head and seemed to lend itself to a poetic interpretation. Most often, I think, they were images that were arresting, somehow, but led me to another thought. I think the best micropoems are like that, not just a description or word-painting, but a bridge to another idea. I also aim for short poems that have a good internal rhythm and music, through consonance or other forms of repetition or structure, but in a poem as short as a haiku, this can easily be taken too far. My attempts usually fall short of the goal, but that's why it's fun (and necessary) to practice training your eye, your mind, your ear to work together-- and once in a while, you write a good one.
The more I write them, the more I appreciate the diligent practice of the haiku-writing Zen monks and itinerant poets of Japan, which led to what we now appreciate as their "genius." I'm not saying the best of them weren't geniuses, but while good results in any art form do require some talent, they're mainly the product of passion combined with practice over a long period of time.
I take Malcolm Gladwell's blanket "10,000 hour" estimate with a certain grain of salt, but I agree with him that it really does take years and years of practice to gain mastery in any skill or art. For most of us who pursue certain arts as amateurs, how much time does that represent? Let's say we can devote one hour per day, including weekends, to writing or artwork or music or dance: at that rate, 10,000 hours divided by 365 hours per year equals 27.4 years. No wonder it's so difficult! But if we can focus on our chosen art for one solid year, say, even six hours a day, we can make a big dent in that accumulated total: that's 2190 hours in one year. The professional musicians I know have all studied their art seriously, taken lessons, received criticism from teachers, and kept at it for years; it's not simply a matter of talent. And the ones who are really good still take their music home and show up prepared; they don't assume they can coast along on their sheer talent alone.
A little more math: to continue with the music example, I was wondering how many hours I might have put in over the 55 years since I started studying music as an amateur. Let's say I've averaged a conservative 4 hours of rehearsal or individual practice per week. That's 208 hours per year. Not much, by itself, but taken over a lifetime, adds up to something like 11,400 hours. Those hours have been spread over piano and flute lessons, band practices, church choirs, school and university choruses, performing in various ensembles, shows, and projects, and individual private lessons and practice in piano and voice. Which probably explains why I am a good overall amateur musican, and not anywhere close to a master of any one of those instruments! But in the last four years, I've been spending at least 6 hours singing and another one or two on my own; that's more like 300 hours a year, and explains why I've felt my musicianship has been improving, even at this late date.
Another figure to keep in mind is how much time is actually available in our lives. 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, times 55 years = 114,400 hours - ten times what I just estimated, more than ten times the estimate for "mastery." A top-level professional musician, my age, who began as a child would certainly have accumulated that many hours by now.
It's interesting to think about what we have spent the most time doing, practicing, and where in our lives we can see the most accumulation of effort -- it's often not just in our professions. Cooking, for instance - think of the number of hours we spend in our kitchens! Parenting. Care-giving. What about you? What have you devoted your time and attention to mastering, and what would you LIKE to pursue, if you could find the time, space, and diligence to do it? Because, all quantitative measures aside, the truth is that the more we practice -- with a reasonable combination of study, instruction, self-criticism and input -- the better we get, and the more satisfying the art becomes.
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