Category: Poets

Liz Nakazawa’s Painting the Heart Open

Except for some exciting Hummingbird fights over the newly flowering Crocosmia, things have been rather dull around here. I wanted to visit Malheur and Bear River, but a nagging upper respiratory illness has kept me relatively homebound. It has pretty much limited me to watching television (yes, I probably am addicted to Son of a Critch), practicing Tai Chi and Qi Gong at the Y and Titlow, and meditating in my den. 

These activities don’t lend themselves well to blogging, so I’m beginning to feel guilty about the blank screen. So, I thought I would pick up one of the numerous poetry books littering my den and try to write a poetry entry. 

Naturally, I picked the shortest one: Painting the Heart Open by Liz Nakazawa; I originally bought it because I liked a collection of Oregon poems she edited that I had read previously. I didn’t realize just how short the book was when I bought it from Amazon — just twenty pages of poetry and fewer poems than that. I might not have purchased that short of book if I’d seen it in a bookstore. 

That would have been too bad, though, because I would have missed several poems that I identified with. Nakazawa has an interesting style, combining concrete imagery with abstract concepts to create enigmatic poems.  Despite relying on concrete images that any reader would recognize, she combines them with lines like “ variations haggling, properly enigmatic/right into bones of an emulsified conclusion.” I’ve never had to look up so many words I didn’t know in so few pages

Even a short poem as simply written as

Pray. As Earth Does 

hold others steady 

be a cradle for seed 

absorb water slowly 

help feed the hungry 

manifest layer of rock 

so young children 

delight in its pebbles 

hold others steady

crumble when needed 

sharing their sorrows 

hold others steady 

be a friend to moles and badgers 

hold others steady 

offer a lap for horse chestnut, catalpa and fir 

hold others steady 

warm with the sun 

pray:  to hold others steady 

moves from concrete imagery to a much broader concept of Nature as a unifying and healing force.  

It’s clear how the Earth cradles seed and helps feed the hungry, but exactly how does the Earth “hold others steady?”  Most of us can identify with young children throwing pebbles, but how many of us can identify with “being a friend to moles and badgers”? Despite my wife’s grumbling, I do think moles help improve the soil, and I laughed when a local pest controller knocked on the door and wanted me to pay him to help get rid of them.  On the other hand, I have only confronted a single badger once in my life, and I definitely don’t want one in my yard.  

It’s never quite clear whether we are supposed to “hold others steady” or whether the Earth is supposed to “hold others steady,” or whether we are both supposed to hold the world together. 

Ai Qing: Selected Poems

It’s been raining a lot during our visit to Santa Rosa and we don’t have the same programs to watch on TV that we watch in Tacoma, so I’ve turned to reading and polishing up photographs I’ve recently taken.  Strangely enough, I just finished a book I bought at Copperfield the last time we were here.  I was browsing the store looking for something different and found Ai Qing: Selected Poems.  In retrospect, I probably picked it up because the cover jacket claimed that Ai Qing is “one of the finest modern Chinese poets,” and I could only remember reading classical Chinese poets.

In the Foreword his son Ai Weiwei says, 

As a kind of faith, Ai Qing’s writing brought both joy and sorrow to his life. He sacrificed for his beliefs in order to survive under the harsh political environment. His use of vernacular Chinese and his love for simple truths make his expression a powerful reality; his inner truth makes his poetic thinking flow like a stream of spring water, even in the driest Season. In the most suffocating years, Ai Qing never betrayed his beliefs; it was he who showed me the courage needed when aesthetics and morals are marginalized. Against the aesthetic mediocrity of despotism, poetry is the key to wisdom, and the mortal enemy of banal politics. 

That might have grabbed my attention, too. 

The book is only 102 pages long (another reason I bought it ?) but I tabbed eleven poems that I wanted to re-read.  One of my favorite poems was “Daynhe, My Wet Nurse,” but it is too long to cite here. These two shorter poems do a good job of demonstrating some of the power of his poetry and make it clear why it appeals to me.

“Trees” reminds me of William Carlos Williams’s Imagist poetry, which I’ve always loved.

TREES 

One tree. Another tree 

Stand distant, alone. 

Wind, air,

Inform their isolation. 

But under cover of mud and dirt 

their roots reach 

into depths unrevealed. 

entwine unseen. 

SPRING 1940

The opening line emphasizes the trees’ isolation from each other.  They would seem less isolated if the poem had begun “two trees” instead of “One tree.  Another tree.” Despite this apparent separation, the earth itself unites these trees, perhaps in the same way that their homeland united the Chinese in their war against the invading Japanese in the year the poem was written. This is a simple but powerful way of arguing that no matter how isolated we appear on the surface we are linked to each other through our roots.  

“Autumn Morning” develops the same themes, with a little more emphasis on the sorrow of poverty-stricken villages.

AUTUMN MORNING 

Cool, refreshing, this morning, 

The sun’s just risen, this coming, 

The village, sorrowful this morning. 

A little bird, white feathers circling its eyes,

Perches on the black roof tiles 

Of a low, squat hut; 

As if lost in thought, it gazes at 

The many-hued clouds bannering the sky. 

It’s autumn; 

I’ve been in the South a Year; 

This place hasn’t got the tropics’ vitality; 

No coconut palms surge to the skies; 

Already my pent-up heart is sad

 but today, as I’m about to go,

 I feel uneasy 

China Villages 

Everywhere the same filth, gloom, poverty, 

But not one I’d want to leave.

SEPTEMBER 1939

The ambivalent opening stanza sets the tone for the entire poem.  The first two lines seem almost downright optimistic, “cool and refreshing,” but this feeling is quickly countered when he says the village is “sorrowful.”

The second stanza’s description of the little bird lost in thought almost sounds like a description of the poet himself, lost in thought. 

The third stanza explains why the poet may feel sorrowful when he compares this village in the north with his previous stay in the South for a year.  Yes, there are reasons why my brother spends winters in Arizona rather than Alaska.  Stuck inside in the far North with cold and little sunshine it’s easy to feel depressed and long for sunnier climes.

The power of the poem, though, lies in that last stanza where he enumerates all the reasons why people want to leave (i.e. filth, gloom, poverty) but his heart longs to stay. This is home, his homeland and it’s never easy to leave home. We belong to the land as much as it belongs to us.

Only Now, by Stuart Kestenbaum

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahnema’s 555-page-long Thinking Fast and Slow for several weeks now, hoping to comment on some of his ideas. I’m determined to eventually finish it because it gives important insight into why we as humans make so many bad decisions.  It’s clear why it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in 2002, but, as I struggle to read and understand it, it also became clear why my granddaughter is learning ideas derived from it in her freshman college class. This old brain takes much longer to comprehend complex ideas than it used to, which, unfortunately, does not come as much of a surprise. 

So, I decided I would turn to some short poetry books I have acquired in the last couple of years.  Luckily, Only Now, by Stuart Kestenbaum resonated with me, so I finished its 74 pages relatively quickly.  

Although I couldn’t find a biography online, one article states that Kestenbaum is 70 (a mere youngster, as it were) and several of his poems deal with subjects we all face as we age. For instance, in “Passage” he describes a ninety-three-year-old friend lying in a nursing home bed. In “Scattered” he describes spreading the ashes of someone who has passed on. 

Kestenbaum manages to make even poems that focus on death inspirational, but the poems I liked best are the thoughts of someone who is looking back but still trying to stay in the moment, to savor what little time is left, as it were. Not surprisingly, the title poem conveys the main themes of the volume.

Only Now

Only now 
do you realize 
how quickly 
everything passes 
how we 
are
here's for 
a blink of God's eye 
how the light passes 
by us and through us 
how the world 
began with a breath 
and a cry 
earth and sky.

I don’t think I would want to teach this to a class of high school students because they probably haven’t lived enough to understand it, but it sounds exactly like the kind of poem I would write at this point in my life if I could still write poetry.  It sounds like the kind of insight you would read in Taoist or Zen literature if it weren’t for the phrase “a blink of God’s eye.” The photographer in me particularly likes “how the light passes/by us and through us.”

“Only Now” was an easy choice, but I had a hard time choosing a longer poem to represent his work because I liked so many of them.  Most of those included “prayers” in the title, though they seldom seemed like the kind of prayer you would hear in church. I don’t know much about Judaism, but most of these prayers seem to suggest the sacredness of everyday life rather than a specific religion.

Ultimately, I chose “Prayer for Beginning” because it confronts the uncertainty that all of us, no matter our age, face every day.  

Prayer for Beginning 

You'll never know how it will end
most days you don't even know 
how it will begin. Will it be 
a clean slate day, a morning 
when you carry nothing 
from the past into now, 
or will your mind be loaded up 
like a small U-Haul, filled 
with the imagined words 
of your father, last night's dream
something you shouldn't 
have said the night before 
and a truck down-shifting 
outside your window, so you put the key 
into the soul's ignition and start driving 
down the road where the sleeping houses 
reveal themselves slowly in the dawn 
and the birds are calling to the light. 
Another day alive and singing.

I’ve never been fond of mornings, being more of a night owl than an early bird, but even I love a”clean slate” days. Mornings can be tough, more often than not preceded by a bad night, one where it seems I spent more time worrying than I did sleeping or one where loud, or even not-so-loud, noises wake me up and make it hard to get back to sleep. 

No matter what kind of night I’ve had, hearing the birds singing in the morning always lifts my spirits, particularly if I’m heading out for a day of birding.  Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.

Floyd Skloot’s Approaching Winter

I recently started reading Life Purpose Boot Camp a book that describes a process for creating a meaningful life, which, I’ll admit, seems a little foolish at this stage of life, but, anyhow, it begins by having you list â€?”meaning opportunities.”  One of mine was reading poetry and responding to it, although it’s clear from recent blog entries that I have not been doing much of that. Coincidently, Leslie and I are spending some time at her daughter’s house and it is raining, so I have some extra time to read and reflect.

Despite the lack of blog entries, I have been reading poetry steadily throughout the years; I just haven’t been motivated enough or have been too busy to respond to what I’ve read. Of course,I also have several books that I started reading and haven’t finished for different reasons, and I’m not going to discuss  a book I haven’t finished.  That would be hypocritical since in the past I would penalize students heavily for taking credit for a book they hadn’t finished. I’ve resolved to finish up books I’ve started — at least those that seem worth finishing — and write something about them.

A book that I finished awhile ago was Floyd Skloot’s Approaching Winter. I doubt I would have appreciated this book when I was a college undergrad, but I can certainly relate to many of the poems now that I am well into my own Winter. The older  I get the more I feel compelled to work out, even though I seldom worked out in the past beyond playing basketball two or three times a week and hiking whenever I got a chance.  Since we moved to Tacoma some fifteen years ago, I have been a member of the local YMCA (at least until the Covid 19 epidemic, and have faithfully used a rowing machine for most of that time. Few things will make you a better observer than repeating the same stroke for fifteen minutes, unless, of course, it’s going nowhere on a treadmill, which I steadily refuse to do.

At the Fitness Center 
 

 Framed by a picture window,
 two old men climbing stairs to nowhere
 watch the river flow.
       As though gliding on air
              beside
 them, a woman with violet hair,
            wires dangling from her ears,
                      keeps her eyes shut tight
 and sings out of tune while she strides
            on the elliptical machine
                                 next to mine.
 A husband and wife jog in place
            on treadmills side-by-side,
                                 keeping pace
 with each other and trying to plan
 the next two
            nights' dinners though they can
                      barely speak. A teen
 with his cap on backwards cycles through
                      a mountain pass
            as his girlfriend screams
 and kickboxes behind shaded glass.

One of the ways I used to get ready to hike in the mountains during the summer was using the stair-stepper referred to in the opening lines. It’s hard work, much harder than climbing in the mountains, precisely because you aren’t going anywhere. If you’re an old man, and I am, it’s hard not be distracted by younger people working out; it’s impossible not to notice violet hair or strange tattoos in odd places.  

I, like most people, used to think gyms were full of jocks or fitness fanatics, not your average citizen. That view has definitely changed over the last fifteen years.  When I go to the weight room, which is, admittedly, in the middle of the work-day, there are lots of women, and lots of older people simply trying to retain some of the strength that aging robs them of.  There’s even husbands and wives, though more often than not it’s actually just Leslie and I.  Of course, there is always the young hotshot who shows up in the middle of the day to to reveal just how out of shape you really are, and, less occasionally, he’ll show up with his hot girlfriend to show you something else you have lost through old age.  

Many of the poems in this collection are early memories, but, in retrospect, the author realizes that the world he saw as a child wasn’t the â€?”real” world.  Despite the fact that my daughter accuses me of being “the least nostalgic person in the universe,” I’ve been going over old photos and old records trying to get rid of everything that no one else could possibly want. In doing so, I have discovered, like Skloot does, that what I thought was the truth for most of my life has actually been mis-remembered.

Near the end of the collection, he turns to even more unpleasant realities, like those in â€?”Today.”

Today 
 

 Johnny is John now, and Billy is Bill.
 Though I haven't seen them in fifty years
 it feels like we're boys together still.
 When his voice breaks, John's boyhood face appears
 across the miles, and when Bill speaks of storms
 we survived on our barrier island home
 I forget and call him Billy, which makes
 John gasp because it hurts so much to laugh.
 The cancer has come back. He says it takes
 all his strength some mornings just to take half
 a breath, but then there might be a whole day
 when he can almost forget, like today.

Because my father’s job required us to move regularly, I really don’t have any childhood friends. Jim Wiese, who now lives in Vermont, is my longest friend; I don’t think he would’ve become a life-long friend if I had called him â€?”Jimmy” in Junior High where I first met him. Still, the poem rings true even for me.  Jim and I can almost pick up a conversation we’ve had a year ago and go from there.  We may not be boys, but we’re still kids not seniors.  Thankfully, Jim and I haven’t had to talk about cancer lately, but that’s not true when I meet with a group of teachers that I started teaching with.  When I get together with that group, all too often someone brings a newspaper clipping with the funeral notice of a friend.  You don’t reach 79 without becoming aware of death as a constant possibility unless you have Alzheimer’s, a fate worse than death from my perspective.  Still, any day when you can still laugh is a good day.

Though I wouldn’t suggest this book to a high school student, I suspect that most of my regular readers are a little older than that and might find Skloot’s work as interesting as I did.