Musings

Poetry Prompt: Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I used to write Morning Pages.  Religiously.  I think I wrote for an hour every morning, fast and without pondering.  Julia Cameron said it would help me learn to know my inner artist, and so I did it.  That was about fifteen years ago, and I was writing many poems during that year and finding richness in the writing.  Ask me why I stopped and I can fire off a dozen excuses, some of them actually sort of reasonable.

Just a few weeks ago, at a writers’ retreat in York, John Terlazzo asked us do a similar process in response to several writing prompts, and then encouraged us to pick it up as a daily practice.  And so I have taken up the practice again.

Yesterday, this came out on the page as I was writing: “The idea is that I am trying to break up the sentence, to pull back that veil of sense that covers my brain.  To let myself go.”  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to string apparently unrelated images together, collage-style, until a unified and profound whole emerges.  I have been wanting to take this process a step further and string words and sounds together in a similar way.  I’m not quite ready for my shoo-be-do-be-doo poem.  And I found that even breaking the sentence was challenging for me.  I’m still stringing images together.  But I’m getting there.  And I want to take it further.

Then this lovely quotation visited my Facebook Feed yesterday.  I agree with many of the people who responded when I posted it (find that conversation here) that many scientists and mathematicians value poetic language to describe the world they explore.  But the basic idea, of the poet approaching truth through paradox–that grabs me:

“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.

“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.

“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.”

—Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”

This will be my homework for myself in the next few days, for Monday’s poem:

Poetry Prompt:
To write without stopping for half an hour each day for the next three days, ignoring sentence sense, trying to bring myself into a patter-spatter of images and words.  To break the sentence, to step behind the veil of sense.  Then, sometime on Monday, to glean a poem from among those writings.  Will you join me?

 

Groundhog skull an Goddess Potato:2013 March 098

Noticing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I just noticed that there is a face in the shadow of the tree on the barn at the top of my blog page.  Just a little to the left of center.  Hmm.  Don’t forget–tomorrow’s poem is a list poem–perhaps a gratitude?

Gratitude List:
1.  Opportunities to practice the work I have committed to, even when it’s hard.
2.  Good music.
3.  Abundance.   Lavish love, overflowing hope.  Yes, even when I sit near or in the shadows.
4.  Children’s literature
5.  Process.  Step by Step.  Just because I/we want to be There at sometime in the future doesn’t mean we have to jump there today.
May we walk in beauty.

Putting the Practice to the Test

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments

I am thinking about the practice of gratitude, and why I do it.  Perhaps at first glance, it could appear to be naive and Pollyannish– if I just smell the roses, maybe I won’t notice the pig shit.

Perhaps the truth is not so far away from that, just deeper.  I am realizing that building my capacity for wonder and delight, that opening the space for gratitude in my soul–all this increases the breathing spaces for compassion to be present.   And compassion is about loving the tender blue of the speedwell looking up from a tangle of grasses, but it’s also about recognizing the role of the pig shit in the cycle of life.  Compassion takes a long hard look at the sunset, and then gazes upon the skull of the groundhog in the mud.

I think (hope?) that practicing compassion develops soul muscles that enable us to look unflinchingly at and listen to the ugliness.  It doesn’t make it easier to hear, to see, perhaps, but what I want it to do is to make it more possible for my soul, my heart, to remain present within those stories.  To witness and listen.

Yesterday, I affirmed again–to myself and publicly–that I want this journey to be about holding it all, about experiencing compassion that can witness whatever gets tossed into the bowl.  By evening, I was handed a story that I don’t want to look at.  I don’t want to smell it.  I want to drop it and wash my hands and walk away from it.  I really don’t know the people at the heart of the story, but we share some loved ones in common, and that is where I need to find a way to be watchful and tender and unflinching in the coming weeks, as the story emerges and is reconstructed and re-created, as people I love and respect move through denial and anger and anguish.

So the practice continues.  I am wincing and flinching, but keeping it open, ready to listen, to step further on this path, to practice non-judgementalism.

May we walk in beauty.  Even in this.  May we walk in beauty.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Birth of Phoenix

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today I have been sorting through some old poems, to see which ones I still want to consider viable and alive, and which ones just deserve to fade away in my computer files.  Here is one from the late ’90s, when we lived in Slippery Rock.  I still remember the cafe where I wrote it the morning after I dreamed it.

 
The Birth of Phoenix
 
This is the story of the woman
Who believed that happiness
lay in the sound of Any-Man-At-All
slipping through her open doorway,
Who grew beyond bounds,
Whose walls dissolved in a grey mist
to let in a garden,
a star,
and a small silvery snake,
Who discovered the spiraling staircase
which led to the Aunt in the attic,
Who plied that old woman with indecent questions
and robed herself warmly
in old woman’s laughter,
Who carried the rage of the crone in her pocket
like a sculpted soapstone jackal,
Who suckled that fury–that ravenous infant,
Who knew a canary from plaster pretenders,
Who built her own cottage of clay, thatch, and brambles,
Who walked through the market,
unveiled by the eyebrows
of merchants and gabblers,
Who swam to deep waters
alone like a manta,
Who left the green waves for a road full of daughters,
Who shaved off her hair,
to step naked and newborn
among glowing embers.
 

 Gratitude List:
1.  Mid-day today, Ellis raced through the room (after 36 hours of intermittent up-chucking) and announced, “I feel so good!”  And promptly made himself a sandwich and ate it.  And kept it down.
2.  This image, which stays with me: The bluebirds at my parents’ house know that my dad goes out the glass doors at the back of the house to feed them.  On Sunday as we were sitting at the dining room table putting a puzzle together, one of them came and sat on the handle of the glass door, and peered around the door frame through the glass and watched us.  Apparently he often sits there to watch his friend drinking coffee or eating or working a puzzle.
3.  The release of a good stretch
4.  Eager new customers, and long-term customers who have become friends
5.  Planning and plotting
May we walk in beauty.

2012 February 058

Silly Song and Gratitude

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“. . .and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven and nature sing,
hi-ho, the dairy-o,
and heaven and nature sing.”  –Joss W-K

Gratitude List:
1.  Uncle Mallard floating on the pond this morning in the pouring rain.
2.  Choosing the exhilarating path rather than the bland one.
3.  Surfacing after reading an engrossing novel.
4.  A gift of bright red tulips!
5.  Earth, Air, Fire, Water
Namaste

Out in the Wind

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here was the prompt for a borrowed poem:  Because today is 3/11/13, I decided to go to a book near at hand, turn to page 13, scan down to the 3rd line, and choose eleven words to use in some form in a poem.  I sort of cheated, by looking through four books until I found one that I could work with.  This was Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales, from the tale of Princess Questa.  I chose the phrase, “. . .went out to walk the dunes in the wintry wind, weeping. . .”  The final poem is perhaps a little overwrought, but it was cathartic to run with it, to see where it took me.  (This was to be March Monday Morning, but I seem to have trouble posting poems in the mornings).

Out you went in the wintry wind
to walk the dunes, weeping
with only a scattering of sandpipers
to witness, and a scuttling crab.

The wind tore the tattered foam from the waves,
sent shreds of lather scudding like sailboats
over the sands, and wrenched your voice from you.

You keened your word
into the force of the gale
a wail, like a siren.

The wind snatched it up with such unholy force
it sucked the breath right out of you.

But your word was carried like a seed pod
in the womb of the wind, to break open
high above all our fields, releasing
a thousand seeds to fall to earth
as the wind itself grew ragged
and shattered into calmer breezes.

We felt them fall, like a net upon us,
and now we wait, our breathing bated
to see what will grow.

Gratitude List:
1.  The perfect hexagonal symmetry of a purple crocus in the lawn, three petals curving inward, three curling out.  No wonder the bees find themselves at home in there.
2.  Sorted Legos.  That seems a little OCD, but something about having them all sorted into piles of color shifted the boys’ attention, and their play become more focused and cooperative for a time.
3.  Tiny green things poking up their heads in the greenhouse.  The way onions come up folded like laundry and then gently unfold into the sun.
4.  Corn casserole–yay for last summer’s frozen bounty!
5.  Courage for the difficult conversations.

Namaste

One way to keep the cats from actually sitting on the counter. . .

2013 March 025

Monday Mornings in March

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I have had my February off from writing poetry.  January’s poems were more challenging for me to write than the November batch, and they all came out more roughly cut, more in need of attention.  In the next few days, I hope to have the chapbook “Holding the Bowl of the Heart” off to Finishing Line Press for the Emerging Women’s Voices contest.  But meanwhile, I feel in need of a little discipline to keep me writing.

To that end, I am going to do a Monday poem each week in March.  I’ll try to post a prompt or discuss an idea a few days before, in case anyone wants to write with me.

For Monday, I am working on a poem about dreams.  I know I’ve done this before, but I have one in the kettle, cooking up, and I need a deadline to get it onto paper.  Where do dreams come from?  Or what connection do dreams have to our everyday landscapes?  I am working with images of trees and spiderwebs.

Join me?  Dreams, webs, trees, something like that. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  The bald eagle that flapped around the hollow this afternoon.  I had been looking out the dining room window when I saw a large buffy shape in the woods that put me in mind of a large bird, though I could tell it was just place where a branch had broken off a tree.  I sort of fell into a reverie, thinking about giant mythical birds, and what it would be like to see a really large bird like a roc out in the woods.  Suddenly, from the trees off to the left, by the pond, a bald eagle flapped outward and upward.  It sort of twisted around and looked like it was going to rest in the poplar tree before it took off.  I felt like I had recognized its energy signature before I even saw it, like I intuited its presence.
2.  Crocus and honeybees (I have seen both this spring, though not together.  The photo of the bumble below is from another spring.)
3.  The courage of the women of this article.
4.  The warm time is coming.
5.  Planting onions in the greenhouse today.  Getting my hands dirty.  Worm poop.

May we walk in beauty.

Coming soon to a yard near you. . .

2010 March 160

Bluebirds and Miracles

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Bluebirds.   When I went out to tend chickens this morning, a pair of them sat in the little tree nearby and talked to me.  The wrens yell, “Here’s where I belong and don’t anyone get into my space!”  The yellow-throat sparrows call, “Here!  I’m here!  Won’t somebody please notice me?”  And other birds sing joyfully and exuberantly.  But bluebirds sing so quietly and sweetly, you could almost miss them: “Everything’s going to be okay, you know?  Here, let me tell you a little story.”  And there’s a bluebird that signals my father when his meal-worm feeder is empty.  But then when it’s filled and the bird has eaten all it wants, it comes back and sits on a little perch my dad put up outside his window–you can’t tell me that bird isn’t there to say thank you.  Oh, and there’s a pair inspecting the birdhouse out back for a potential nesting site.
2.  The laughter of chickens.  Okay, so they don’t actually laugh.  They sort of fuss and dither and clook about the daily fare.  They’re probably a little too simple-minded to get the joke, so they don’t laugh much.  But Jessica thought that’s what I wrote yesterday (see below), and I love the whimsy of the thought of laughing chickens.  Delightful.
3.  Meeting an online friend in person.  These connections we make with other people (in physical life, in computer realms) are like spiderwebs–gossamer, exquisite.  Treasures.
4.  Cerulean.  I’m back to bluebirds.  Isn’t that an exquisite color when the sun shines on their shoulders?  Thoreau said that the “bluebird carries the sky on his back.”  Oh yes he does.
5.  Milagros.  Doesn’t that just sound like a pleasant word?  Even before I looked up the meaning, and having heard it in various contexts without knowing its meaning for sure, it was a word I wanted to carry around for a while.  It’s Spanish: miracle, wonder.  Paul Simon could have just said that these are the days of milagros.  Oh, “the way we look to a distant constellation that is shining in the corner of the sky.”

May we walk in beauty like the bluebird walks on air.

 

February 25, 2013

Gratitude List:
1. The laughter of children
2. The curiosity of chickens
3. The steadfastness of friends
4. The healing powers of the body
5. The nourishment of food
Namaste

2012 August 018
Sunny in the summertime

From Angh to Ma

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments

2012 November 144

This morning when we were playing with our gnomes, Joss decided that the gnome house was on fire, and he raced to get a group of gnomes to put it out.  “Red!  We need all the red gnomes!”  Exactly–to put out a fire, it takes lots of red gnomes.  Ellis chimed in, “And Minus!  We need the Minus Gnome!  Because a house with fire Minus the fire is just a house!”

Sometimes I sure would like to use some of Minus Gnome’s magic on me.  An anxious Beth Minus anxiety is just Beth.   Angst-ridden, anger-struck Beth Minus angst and anger?  Beth.  So that’s a nice little thing to do with meditation.  Of course as soon as I began to work with the idea, it hit me again that the angers and angsts are so often born of compassion and caring, and for those I have been seeking the services of Multiplication Gnome.  I need to untangle the compassion from its attendant anger at injustice, its partner anxiety at losses to those I love.

Wow.  Look at those words that I wanted to get rid of: Angst, Anxiety, Anger. . .I looked them up, along with their sister Anguish.  There at their root is angh-, which comes from the Indo-European language tree, and generally refers to distress of some sort.  That lovely vowel–ah–cut short in the back of the throat, closed up along with all hope of breath: Angh!

Fear, shame, anger, distress: what sound emerges when you truly feel them?  Angh!  Choke.

But still, that lovely vowel–ah–the first we say in so many languages: Mama, Abba, Baba, Dada, Nana, Papa.  The opposite of the choke, our family names, our names for the Ineffable Mystery: they release the breath in a tender sigh.  Ah.  There we go.

When I get really stuck in the Angh, I can dislodge that choke with a little Hahaha, a great belly laugh to force the air back through, a little spiritual CPR, so to speak.  Or skip down the street with a Tra-la-la, a little song to start up the rhythm of breathing again.  Or a little eureka, a bright discovery with a great Aha!

So the next time I wake up at three in the morning, suddenly filled with the dread of what is happening to this world that I have brought these light-filled children into, or choked with shame for some harshness I have spoken to their tender hearts, I think I will apply the Ah!, the Mama, the Ha! and see if that breath can be a lullaby to take my spirit back to sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Moving out of Angh to Ma, Aha! and Hahaha!
2.  A shining piece of quartzite, white as ice, in the field by the henhouse.
3.  The things the gnomes teach us.
4.  A swept and dusted house (partly, anyway)
5.  Love, love, love: oh, you, and you and you!
May we walk in Beauty!

Jan. 7 Poem, Jan. 8 Prompt, and a Gratitude List:

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

I am not planning to make a habit of waiting until the next morning to post.  But here you have it.  I am coming to terms with how much daily events and needs can take over the poetic process, even when I am managing some personal writing time each day.  I do not mean this as a complaint, just an observation–I feel pulled lately between the extreme neediness of a three-year-old and the writing of the poem.  My heart and soul are bound up in figuring out how to meet his deeper needs beyond the moment-to-moment challenges, and so what is left for poetry is my head.  Here’s the glosa from yesterday:

Be Melting Snow
“Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.”  –Rumi

To pursue the path of the poet
apprentice your soul to nature.
Mark how she moves, moment to moment
dance her wheeling rhythms
follow the pathways of water
wander down to the meadow
taste the nectar of the poppy
listen for the scree of the hawk above you
stand silent in the shadow of the crow.
Be melting snow.

Be the thrust of the thaw
the clashing of ice on the river
the flow and the flood
the bursting of seed, the forces of growth
the blood: vitality, fertility, health.
Be the fire at the heart of the sun
the raging, whirling winds of summer.
Become the heartbeat of the Earth Herself.
Wash yourself of yourself.

Then let it go.
Be wide and open as the ocean.
Let the sky unfurl within you.
Be the whine of the mosquito
the whisper of an owl’s wing.
Be patient, forceful, fearless.
Be the dream of the trees
the secret hope of the sparrow.
Go into the stillness.
A white flower opens in the quietness.

Hold that perfect form
within your soul’s eye.
Unhitch the horse of your brain.
See it with your heart
with your hopes.
Feel the bud’s birthing power.
Long for its blooming.
Feel it quiver with wakefulness.
Begin to open, hour upon hour.
Let your tongue become that flower.

 

Prompt

Today I am going to write a list poem.  I like lists, and I like the stacking together of images to see what sort of house they make.  Care to join me?

 

Gratitude List

1.  Grandparents–the kids get a day to re-set after almost two weeks of quarantine and crankies.
2.  Spiders
3.  Stretching and yawning
4.  Radiance–what a marvelous place to spend a day!
5.  Sunrise.

May we walk in beauty.