the cassandra pages

memorial day memories

This past weekend a friend and I were talking about shoes. I said I had bought two new pairs, one brown and one off-white. She said, "but it's not Memorial Day yet, so you can't wear the white ones," and we both laughed. Later I wrote her a note:

In my home town we always had a parade, the first of the long summer season of parades and fireman's conventions and county fairs, and the band would always participate. Along with the American Legion members and auxiliary (in their white gloves) and the firemen and the boy- and girl-scouts, we marched over to the Episcopal cemetery where there were old graves of soldiers (and where I caught snakes and my mother taught me to read and later I walked with boys, longing for kisses), and the best trumpeter in the band played taps and there were brief prayers and speeches and the laying of wreaths. The parade always ended up at the American Legion, where someone recited the Gettysburg Address and "In Flanders Field." I had to do it one year, when I was a junior, I think.

Our peonies usually weren't blooming quite yet, but Grandma usually gave several baskets-full a few weeks later for the graduation ceremonies. I think the white with red-flecks variety was "Festiva Maxima." I planted three bushes in my garden last year, and they're all full of buds. Because of the noxious goutweed I didn't want to bring to Canada, I left the one bush from her garden - early dark red ones - in Vermont. When the petals finally fell, I had a private ritual of picking them up - each fallen head as substantial as a handkerchief of heavy silk - and scattering them on my vegetable garden, where they lay like feathers from an exotic bird, which is not far from what she was.

Détour

A Deficit of Consonants

Poems - a lot of poems - come across this virtual desk. Some I need to read with extreme attention, because my advice or input or decision is needed; some, often written by friends, feel like gifts during my day. Others - the majority - are part of the large volume of words that pass in front of my eyes, sifting and tossing but eventually falling like bits of colored paper drifting from skyscraper windows during a parade. My words, too, are part of that constant fluttering: some catching the light for a brief moment before coming to their own rest, lost among so many others.

Today, unaware, I read a poem that utterly devastated me. It wasn't a good poem. It simply sliced me, the way a sheet of paper turns into a thin, efficient blade and cuts the side of a finger.

A friend quotes W.S. Merwin, in conversation with Bill Moyers:

"I think poetry's about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe something else. You know, you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. And you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. Just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that's the beginning of language right there.

Inexpressible sound. And it's antisocial. It's destructive. It's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that's how language emerged."

Poetry is about what's can't be said: yes, often true. And we need poetry, art, music to try to express the rawness of our pain more often, I think, than our joy. We enter the realm of art full of emotion, need, and desire, wanting to say something about ourselves, about existence, about what has happened to us or what we've seen happening to others.

But if poetry is the language that emerges from inexpressible sound, we must learn that handling words is like handling knives. Becoming masterful often means saying less, or coming at the subject obliquely: the slant light of late afternoon picking out one falling shred of paper and setting it aflame during its flight to earth. Becoming a master of oneself as well as the words.

The amateur and the egotist, however, say everything. Their work has the capacity - perhaps even the intent - to violate rather than move us, like the graphic news photograph on the front page that can now never be erased from our mind.

It was safer, perhaps, before the internet gave everyone a platform from which to dump their buckets of vowels.

 

"and it was Spring for a while, remember?"

Spring has finally, finally come to the north. It's late - I've sometimes planted the whole garden by May 15, but no one could have done that here this year. Last week was cold and rainy, but the past few days have warmed up steadily. I'll be heading over to the garden later today, with a box of roots and tubers it finally feels safe enough to plant.

Euphorbia and a favorite fossil rock from central New York state, in my garden.

Spring, for all its beauty and newness, always makes me a little bit melancholy. I've never understood why, except that it reminds of the truth of impermanence about everything we cherish. Spring reminds me of the need to open my eyes fully to the beauty around me, to love it completely and yet let it go, knowing it can't stay and that I can't hold onto it. "Do not cling to me!" Exactly.

Sometimes spring knocks you right off your feet, particularly so for those of us who have lived for six months in a monochromatic world. It's too much. I stumble home, dazed.

Better for me to get down on my knees and engage the small things. I moved two clumps of woodland violets into my little plot this year. Many gardeners don't like them because they tend to pop up in unwanted places. I don't mind.

Violets were my mother's favorite flower. She'll be gone five years on the 23rd, a fact I find astounding. I think of her, very young, wearing a corsage of deep purple violets with a pink rose at the center; and I think of her, very old, sitting in her favorite chair near the piano and asking me to play "I Bought You Violets for Your Furs:"

It was winter in manhattan, falling snow flakes filled the air
The streets were covered with a film of ice
But a little simple magic that I learned about somewhere
Changed the weather all around, just within a thrice.

I bought you violets for your furs and it was spring for a while, remember?
I bought you violets for your furs and there was april in that december.
The snow drifted down and the flowers, and that is where it lay.
The snow looked like dew and the blossoms as on a summer day.
I bought you violets for your furs and there was blue in the wintry sky,
You pinned my violets to your furs and gave a lift to the crowds passing by,
You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs,
That we fell in love completely, the day I bought you violets for your furs.

A Choir in Pictures (and Sound)

I've written a lot about the choir I sing in at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, but I don't think I've ever posted any pictures. On Easter I took my camera along with that (and you) in mind.

Here are some of the irrepressible Trebles, in the choir room in the cathedral undercroft before the 10:00 am service. They sing with us on most of the major feast days, and a few other Sundays during the year. The Treble Choir practices weekly and each child gets a remarkable music education in the process.

The music for each service is written on the whiteboard, at the far right. Beyond it, out of the picture, is a whole wall of filing cabinets: the music library, which also extends outside this room.

Before each service we have a lot of music to organize into our folders. On the left is Carole, our fabulous first soprano soloist (she's also a jazz recording artist and, with her partner Alain runs a well-known jazz label.) On her right is Mary, another first soprano, who's been in the choir for two decades and takes care of all our robes and surplices. You can see the wall of music cubbies, one for each singer, in the background. Another choir member,  Shayna, is the music librarian. Both of those volunteer jobs are significant contributions of time and skill.

 

Here's Hilary, the assistant organist, up in the loft at the organ, with Rachel, the organ scholar, looking on. Both are candidates for masters degrees in performance at McGill. The video monitor shows the altar area so the organist/director can coordinate their timing to what is going on downstairs; the loft is at the back of the cathedral. Hilary will be getting married this summer and leaving for a job in England; her fiance, our former assistant organist, has been at St, Paul's Cathedral in London this year. Watching the development of talented young organists is one of the great pleasures of being in the choir. Another is being in the loft and able to watch brilliant organ-playing first-hand. We sing up here about 1/3 of the time, I think, whenever we're doing music that is accompanied.

On Easter, though, there are brass players in the loft and we sing from the back pews. On the left is Choir One: Trebles, and first (high) sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. On the right is Choir Two: second sopranos (that's me), second altos, second tenors, and the lowest-voiced basses. That's Ashley, our first tonor soloist, giving me the nice smile. In front of him is Dr. Elizabeth Rowlinson, faculty member at McGill and honorary assistant priest at the cathedral; she often presides at Evensong; beside her is Simon, our counter-tenor/first alto soloist.

And that's Patrick Wedd, our extraordinary organist and director of music. He's also a gifted composer, and gives concerts throughout Canada.

Here's Choir Two, seen from above. My section, the second sopranos, are in the top row; I went up into the loft during the sermon to take photos.

And here's the whole view. The majority of the time, we sing a capella (unaccompanied) from the front, either in the middle area behind the altar or in the baptistry, a chapel-like area you can't see here, to the right of the altar. This view makes the cathedral look a bit bigger than it really is, but I hope its beauty and airiness comes across. Come and visit, and hear the music too! (Click the image below to hear a sample.)

 

Open publication -

I Went to MOMA and...

Regular readers might remember a post from early March, when J. and I were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with our friends Jenny and Bill and Teju. In the cafe I picked up some of the cards labelled "I Went to MOMA and..." and did some portrait sketches on them. None of mine got left at the museum - I gave them to the subjects, but am still using the nice little stubby black pencils for my sketchbook.  Now MOMA has recently posted a wall of some seven hundred of the cards, and you can view them on their website.

My favorite? "I went to MOMA and...became a human being again."

Which reminds me that I haven't been sketching or drawing much at all lately. Time to do something about that. I did take my sketchbook to the garden today but never took it out of my pack! Photographs, however, were taken.

 

 

Back to the Garden

Finally! A string of warmer, sunnier days have made it possible for me to get myself back to the garden (thank you Joni), where I've been reconnecting with my gardener-friends and meeting new ones. As much as I loved my former, quite private backyard garden, the experience of community gardening adds a social and cooperative element that I've come to cherish.

Last spring I began with some trepidation, especially because nearly all the other gardeners were French speakers, some exclusively so. I was starting out with a bare plot and a limited budget for perennials, as well as limited knowledge of the soil and growing conditions. It was hard, sometimes, to make myself go there, because I was shy about my lack of communication skills and about being a newcomer among some extremely experienced and creative gardeners -- I hadn't anticipated that part of it at all.

By the end of the season, though, I was feeling comfortable and excited. The other gardeners were so friendly, generous, encouraging and helpful that I quickly began to feel part of the group. This spring I realized I had missed them a lot, and the greetings and conversations have made me understand that was mutual. I've met some new people already: Alexandra and her daughter, in the far left of this photo, and Mimi, on the right. In between is Eric, who is almost always present in the afternoons and has become one of my best friends there. Wandering around the plots and talking to one another isn't something everyone does, but I love it -- and it's part of the French warmth and joie de vivre that make this city special.

Claude, Christiane, Michel, Eric, Patrick and Natalie gave me not only friendship, but plants. And I was surprised to discover, when I got my hair cut recently, that my coiffeur is a close friend of Claude, who was president of the association last season, because his partner runs a wholesale plant nursery! The small world of gardening, indeed!

This year I've noticed that my French is actually quite a bit better. I can understand most of what people say to me, and can carry on a conversation with more confidence, laughing about English and French names for plants and sharing the happiness of beginning again in a new spring.

And my plants are coming up and doing well! The peonies are getting taller, the delphinium look strong, the bee-balm has spread, the foxgloves are getting ready to send up their biennial flowering stalks; the miniature roses look vigorous and healthy. In another day or two I'll have violets and pansies to cut, and before long, some lilies-of-the-valley. I hope I'll soon be able to return the favors I've been given, and share some plants with other gardeners. For one thing, there's a bucket of canna tubers sitting here after the winter in the cellar, and I can't possibly plant them all...

Sweetness

My friend Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, was here this weekend to do two book tour events for 70 Faces: Torah Poems, one of which was a talk we did together at the cathedral yesterday after the service. It was a glorious day, and Mother's Day besides, so I was convinced few people would come - but I was wrong, and we had a good turnout of enthusiastic and interested participants. It had been a lot of work to put it all together (including planning and making one of those loaves-and fishes lunches for a group of undetermined size) but all went well. Afterward we went back to our apartment and out for a walk with coffee and pastries as our goal. It's Montreal, after all!

We ended up in front of the enticing display at Première Moisson on Blvd. Mont-Royal. Since there were three of us, we chose three different desserts: the whipped cream/cream puff/strawberry tower shown here; a small tart made like the famous Quebec sugar pie, but with maple sugar; and a slice of chocolate mousse cake with dark chocolate crust and a raspberry layer. And, of course, some strong coffee.

Several hundred calories later, we buzzingly stepped back outside.

It was wonderful to see Rachel in person. We've known each other for eight years online, and I've recently published her book, so there have been Skype video calls and lots and lots of emails, but we've only gotten together in person three times. We went back to the apartment, talked a lot, drank some red wine and ate some gravlax, and late in the evening went out to a neighborhood bistro for a very simple meal of burgers and salad, mussels and frites, and talked some more, all the way home.

This morning Rachel headed back to her home and family in southern New England, and we went back to our studio and a cat who needed some quality attention after being somewhat low on the totem pole this weekend.

I was hyper-aware, yesterday morning, of all the things we do and say during our formal Christian liturgy that must be strange or even offensive to Jews. Because I was hearing and seeing everything through a different lens than usual, it made me realize how much I'm usually on auto-pilot, NOT paying attention to such things, and also how -- it being right after Easter -- all the people in the lessons and in the sermon - including Jesus, of course - were Jews still practicing their faith in the same basic way as Rachel. Everything that is typically "Christian", from the stained glass and vaulted arches to the liturgies and creeds, has been added on over the centuries as the two commmunities diverged further and further. As I've often thought before, it's hardly a question of "what would Jesus do," but rather "what would he THINK?" And there was my friend, sitting next to me, singing the hymns, reciting the psalms, watching baptisms, and praying the prayers, but carefully leaving out any lines that she couldn't say with integrity and being enormously appreciative and respectful. Yet her religion is there, where we left Jesus and the disciples before Easter, and I'd never quite realized it so strongly before

As I think back over a very busy weekend, I'm appreciating many moments and many conversations. One of the best was essentially wordless, though: standing next to Rachel in the vast space of the cathedral, sharing a hymnbook and singing together for the first time. She has a lovely voice, which I knew, but I didn't know she used to sing in a Renaissance group. On the third hymns she dropped down to the alto part while I sang soprano. I relaxed then, and realized there was no need to be uncomfortable. We're real friends, and friends manage to find the common ground.

La Tendresse

 

 

 

 

 

My walk home yesterday afternoon.

From Eelskins to Glaciers: a Month of Poetry

Here we are, well into the first week of May, and I'm admitting to myself that I barely wrote anything in April - National Poetry Month - about poetry.

First of all, I have to tell you I kind of object to these arbitrary observances, which strike me as only one step away from Hallmark holidays but guiltily induce us all to somehow "get on board." I think it's sad that we have to have a time set aside for remembering a major art form that ought to be part of everyday life. Be that as it may, what I found myself doing this April  -- and I'm a poetry publisher and editor, after all -- was not reading a book of poetry every day, or every week; not writing a poem a day; not writing a series of blog posts about poetry. What I did was to try to notice the poetry around me. Where did I find it in my life, besides the obvious and usual places? What poems seemed to penetrate through the incessant blur of words and stay with me?

I read Seamus Heaney's latest book, "Human Chain," and was blown away by a longish poem in it called "The Eelworks," about Heaney's courtship of his wife: visceral imagery and emotion as strongly remembered as the smell of the eelworks itself:

That skin Alfie Kirkwood wore
at school, sweaty-lustrous, supple

and bisected into tails
for the tying of itself around itself –

for strength, according to Alfie.
Who would ease his lapped wrist

from the flap-mouthed cuff
of a jerkin rank with eel oil,

the abounding reek of it
among our summer desks

my first encounter with the up close
that had to be put up with.

 

At qarrtsiluni, where the "translation" issue has been unfolding, I discovered for the first time - among many other wonderful works -  the poetry of Blaise Cendrars, through Dick Jones' translations of two poems.

The lines we sang in church last month that stayed with me the most, among all the psalms and hymns and motets and scripture passages, were Christopher Smart's, used by Benjamin Britten in his cantata "Rejoice in the Lamb." Smart was a 16th century poet of "brilliant but unbalanced mind" who was eventually confined to an asylum. Smart believed that all creation is continually praising God, and in Britten's piece, there are three long solos about the cat, the mouse, and the flowers -- and how they praise God in their movement and their beauty. The rest of the text, too, has everything from tigers to musical instruments to letters of the alphabet exulting God: marvelous, crazy words and ideas, refusing to confrom to societal expectations. I loved it. An excerpt:

For I will consider my cat Jeoffry
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness....

In April we heard or read a number of poems by John Donne, and I remain stunned by them.

I also read or re-read a number of poems by friends. In the collection Brilliant Coroners, I was again struck by Dale Favier's wonderful "Santiago," and Teju Cole's "Crazy Kev." I re-read Kristen McHenry's remarkable chapbook, "The Goatfish Alphabet," and once again marvelled at my favorite poem in it, "Touring the Glaciers." I read a new manuscript by Nic Sebastian, and one by Khadija Anderson, both of which I hope will be available soon for everyone to read. And I thought about Clive Hicks-Jenkins'  upcoming retrospective in Wales, where my colleague and friend Dave Bonta will be one of six poets reading from a collection of poems written in respnse to Clive's paintings.

And I planned for this weekend's event with The Velveteen Rabbi, Rachel Barenblat (70 Faces: Torah Poems) here in Montreal: called "Modern Women, Old Testament: A Jewish-Christian Conversation," where I'll be talking to Rachel about her book and how poetry and the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash can combine with feminism and contemporary thought to help modern readers respond to these old but often-problematic texts -- many of which are poetic themselves. (Please come if you're in town! Everyone's welcome.)

So: a month of less-is-more, but full of poetric riches that are already spilling over into May.