Meditation at Lagunitas

Ok, let’s talk about sex.

People having been writing about sex, love, and loss for centuries. Recently, I assigned myself the mission of rifling through our stock of erotic poetry here at Lemuria to see what it is that makes poems about sex so damn interesting. Is it the snickering, childish curiosity that moves us, or is it a yearning for the familiarity of human touch, even if it’s from a page?

In haiku, desire is portrayed almost entirely in natural images; flowers opening, the cool rain on hot, dry earth. It is subtle and easy to misunderstand. The words are gentle and soothing. A favorite of mine:

By Yoshiko Yoshino

nights of spring–

tides swelling within me

as I’m embraced

shunya miuchi ni ushio unerite dakare ori

Similarly, the erotic verse of the sixth Dalai Lama relies heavily on natural imagery, but brings an achingly human element to the stories being told. So often the poetry recalls unrequited love or the yearning of . . . being . . . horny.

So out of my mind with love,

I lose my sleep at night.

Can’t touch her while it’s day–

Frustration’s my sole friend.

When I picked up E. E. Cummings book Erotic Poems I had NO idea what to expect.  Turns out it is as confusing and tender as his other collections; a combination of jagged, unfinished thoughts, and jarringly familiar moments (i.e., the phrase “don’t laugh at my thighs”). Several times I was caught between “aawwwwww” and  “what the hell?” moments. Here’s a favorite that savors strongly of The Song of Solomon:

[my lady is an ivory garden]

my lady is an ivory garden,

who is filled with flowers.

under the silent and great blossom

of subtle colour which is her hair

her ear is a frail and mysterious flower

her nostrils

are timid and exquisite

flowers skilfully moving

with the least caress of breathing,her

eyes and her mouth are three flowers.       My lady

And then there’s Jill Alexander Essbaum; poet extraordinaire and April’s First Editions Club author here at Lemuria for her debut novel, Hausfrau. Before Essbaum wrote Hausfrau, she dabbled in erotic poetry and came up with some blush-worthy stuff. Where the Japanese are subtle and coy, she is brazen and honest. Instead of constant natural metaphors, she gets straight to the point, and there is something refreshing and scary about that, if I’m being completely honest. Essbaum pulls a lot of spiritual references into her poetry, pushing the imagery as far as she can possibly go. It is insulting, impossible to put down, and strikingly beautiful. Here is a tamer poem from her collection, Harlot:

Psalm of Shattering by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Oh Lord of Hosts and Nazarenes,

Hear my Psalm of Shattering.

How do I come to feel these griefs?

A little lust is a dangerous thing.

Beneath the orchard canopy

As balm of pear swelled in the breeze

I squeezed his pulse between my knees,

And behaved my hands so shamelessly.

Our eyes belied a hot-blood need.

He stroked my body, crease to pleat.

A passerine purled from the fork of a tree

As he passed his mouth all over me.

But the torture of Christ was shared with thieves.

His was the right cross. The left was for me.

I lumbered up to Calvary

As cloud moved into mystery.

I’m fifty kinds of agony.

And so damn drunk I cannot see.

And so damn sad I cannot breathe.

I meant well, if half-heartedly.

So I laze in a bed of catastrophe,

And sleep these dreams that are not dreams.

I’m guilty of nothing but defeat.

His ardor caroused the unrest in me.

But nothing will rouse the rest of me.

This blog was about two weeks in the making and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I was looking for or even found what I was looking for at all. I guess I’ve always known that not all erotic poetry is the same, and that I’m enormously uneducated when it comes to poetry in general. What I have figured out is that there is so much beauty in erotic poetry. Maybe it was my upbringing in the the church, hiding under pews and trying to figure out the infinite mystery of sex that was handed to me in The Song of Songs, but I know in my heart that poetry about the intimacy between two people can be a very spiritual thing. To connect with another human, even on the page; that is a kind of fulfillment that everyone deserves.

1978, the poet Frank Stanford shot himself three times in the heart. His second wife and his lover were in the next room.

During his lifetime, Stanford’s poetry never found a broad audience. The rare and worn copies of his published works were passed poet to poet. His short, autobiographical film, It Wasn’t a Dream, It Was A Flood has never been digitized.

What About This is the first collection of Stanford’s published and unpublished work in one volume. It is important not just for readers already familiar with Stanford’s poetry, but for the rest of us who have never seen our South with such a sharp eye nor heard it recorded by a pitch-perfect ear. His poems are pinched from the world around him, changed just enough that the lines are both familiar and strange.

Born in Richton, Mississippi, Stanford lived in an orphanage until Dorothy Gilbert Alter, a single mother, adopted him. In 1952 she married Albert Franklin Stanford, a levee engineer from Memphis and shortly afterward, the family moved to Arkansas. Showing poetic promise, Stanford was asked to enroll in graduate level courses in creative writing as an undergraduate student. But he never finished college.

It is easy for the exploits of a poet’s life and death to overshadow their work. The life and death of Frank Stanford is no exception. His self-destruction hums on every page. Death stalks his lines:

I am not asleep, but I see

a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost

of an anonymous painter

leaving the prints of death

on the wall… –from the “Transcendence of Janus”

Frank Stanford is a disguised intellectual. He is among us when we are knee-deep in mud and grass, he sits beside us on the front porch and cracks one open, he’s in the hot summer nights and the still air, and he watches as nothing much happens except the slow close of day. He sifts the banality of the every-day for poems that are more then they are.

His poems wade through dreams and reality. They are a surrealist vision of the muck and grime of life. Of the workingman. Of juke joints and women and rivers that govern the pace of living.

Throughout the collection, Stanford appropriates from Southern heritage. Jimmie Rodger’s Blue Yodel’s are reimagined into ballads of the hard life. In “Blue Yodel a Prairie,” Stanford captures the spirit of Jimmie Roger’s down-and-out songs, but with a poet’s sensibility toward images heavy with meaning:

Whenever I think of the shadows

Two oranges cast on the piano

When the sun drives a horse mad in a dry spell

I think of Virginia Day

Hanging up sheets in her backyard

She has a pair of blue jeans and a brassiere on

Holding the prairie

With a clothespin in her lips

A 20^th century Walt Whitman, Frank Stanford sings of the South. In a place overflowing with literary voices, Stanford holds his own alongside James Dickey and Faulkner. He is a troubadour of the Mississippi Delta.

Nearly forty-years after his death, Stanford’s poetry is still a poignant and accurate depiction of the South. Our traditions hold us close to the ground. Our rivers roar and crawl, they overrun their banks and seep into the earth, but we keep a record; we remember our past.

So have respect for the dead my dear

And watch your heart like a jukebox. –from “The Visitors of Night”

Hurray for April.  Yes, April is the ideal month to celebrate poetry, especially that poetry that raises the roof beams, making room for all the fresh, blooming air, pressing the bleak winter away while standing ankle high in mud puddles.  Puddles are the playground for spring madness and feet soaked in gooey earth just like e. e. cummings said in his poem In Just:

n Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

Then came my senior year at Murrah High School, in 1965, with my great, good, four-leaf-cloverful luck having Bee Donley as my English teacher. She taught us that poetry mingled all the great issues of life in such a profound poem as Dylan Thomas’ The force that though the green fuse drives the flower (1934):

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

[Stanza One]

So as a young child I adored the pure innocence of e. e. cummings (not to mention the cool way he spelled his name in lower case). As a teenager, I was mesmerized by Ms. Donley’s eloquent teaching of Dylan Thomas and the depth and width and height of “real” life as captured in the great green force. Then as a mature adult (in years but not in heart), I was introduced to Mary Oliver at Lemuria mainly through our children’s manager at the time, Yvonne Rogers. Ms. Oliver became my official priestess of the higher arts, a word magician, and a most spiritual priestess who kindled the scared beauty of the earth and animals and filled my imagination with wonder as in this poem from her collection Dog Songs:

Every Dog’s Story by Mary Oliver

I have a bed, my very own.
It’s just my size.
And sometimes I like to sleep alone
with dreams inside my eyes.

But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy
and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why.
But I’m no longer sleepy
and too slowly the hours go by.

So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon
is shining on your face
and I know it will be morning soon.

Everybody needs a safe place.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver is by far my favorite poem.

I love this poem because it makes me confront my own humanity. Why do I do what I do? And what am I going to do with the rest of my life, my wild and precious life? I’ve had many chapters in my life and I am sure that there are many more to come. Every time that I start the newest chapter, I say a little prayer and remember the iconic line at the end of the poem:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Reasons this poem resonates with me:

1. Its quiet beauty: no wasted words, nothing overblown.
2. Its devotion to honesty: at the end, Roethke freely admits he doesn’t know how to feel.
3. Its content: as a teacher who’s lost students, I’m comforted knowing I’m not alone. Neither father nor lover, but still affected deeply.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse) by Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

[from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke]

Charles Simic always turns the familiar upside down; the poem is a coin flipped in mid-air, spinning over and over itself until you are no longer sure what is heads or tails. I return again and again to this poem when poetry becomes too serious; magic can live in the lines. So much of a story can be held in a handful of images.

Untitled by Charles Simic

The first time I heard Little Gidding was in a secret literary society, a group who met under the cover of night back in college. Just like it sounds, the group was very Dead Poet’s Society, and this particular night was my first time to timidly grace the doors of the unknown literary fervor. As a Robin Williams figure enthusiastically recited and explicated the poem, I was spellbound, letting the words wash over me for the rest of the night.  A few years later I actually visited Little Gidding, an old religious community in England that inspired Eliot’s poem. For years, I’ve found great comfort in Eliot’s questions, his complex desire for simplicity, and his hope that all shall be well. Plus, the poem is breathtakingly beautiful. In the text, Eliot shows the goodness of sacrifice and necessity of suffering to unifying a fractured self and broken society.  What he says about love, time, memory, and suffering resonates with me and at the same time is beyond me. I can read and study it for days and still not completely grasp all the allusions and plumb the depths of its significance. And so it continually draws me back to ruminate on its queries and feed on its hope.

Little Gidding  by T.S. Eliot, section V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

You can read the full poem here.

Bonus: You should check out Makoto Fujimura’s artistic representation of the Four Quartets found here– http://www.makotofujimura.com/works/four-quartets/

I am going to confess something to y’all. I do not read poetry. I just don’t get it. When a customer comes in looking for poetry, I am crossing my fingers that they ask for a poet that I know about, especially if Adie is not working. I am always passing a poetry customer over to Adie (our resident poet) because she will be able to help them so much more than I could ever think about.

Hannah sent an email out asking us to write a poetry blog to celebrate April being National Poetry Month. I immediately broke out in a sweat. I was discussing my dilemma with Jamie saying that really the only poetry I have ever loved was some I had read as a child. He urged me to write about it.

I loved Shel Silverstein when I was young. I had poems memorized and would recite them when I thought the time was right. So today I went in OZ and picked up a copies of Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic and found some poems to share with you.

HUG O’ WAR

I will not play at tug o’ war.
I’d rather play at hug o’ war,
Were everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

 

LISTEN TO THE MUSTN’TS

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me —
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

 

NO DIFFERENCE

Small as a peanut,
Big as a giant,
We’re all the same size
When we turn off the light.

Rich as a sultan,
Poor as a mite,
We’re all worth the same
When we turn off the light.

Red, black or orange,
Yellow or white,
We all look the same
When we turn off the light.

So maybe the way
To make everything right
Is for God to just reach out
And turn off the light!

 

CHANNELS

Channel 1’s no fun.
Channel 2’s just news.
Channel 3’s hard to see.
Channel 4 is just a bore.
Channel 5 is all jive.
Channel 6 needs to be fixed.
Channel 7 and Channel 8–
Just old movies, not so great.
Channel 9’s a waste of time.
Channel 10 is off, my child.
Wouldn’t you like to talk awhile?

 

SENSES

A Mouth was talking to a Nose and an Eye.
A passing listening Ear
Said “Pardon me, but you spoke so loud,
I couldn’t help but overhear.”
But the Mouth just closed and the Nose turned up
And the Eye just looked away,
And the Ear with nothing more to hear
Went sadly on its way.

 

I just felt the time was right.