UFO's and iPad Keyboards

In the view from my balcony, the UFO cloud, previously documented on September 25's blog post, appeared again this evening (which is coming entirely too early since going off daylight savings). It seemed to swoop in leaving that visible path and feathery accompaniments. No aliens were seen emerging.

And in other news of the day, behold the new, full sized, regular keyboard for my iPad.

The iPad sits in a channel and is magnetized to hold well.

The keyboard is bluetooth enabled, made by Logitech and becomes the cover for the iPad with a magnetized strip along one side (shown on the left) once the iPad is removed from the channel.

This is the super slim width when closed. It works like a charm, makes typing easier and I give it two thumbs up as a must have item for iPad owner writers.

When Poems Write Themselves

Sometimes they emerge whole cloth unbidden,
other times they bubble up in response to a prompt, emerging
from underground springs unremembered up to then.

Sometimes they flow from fingertips as if encoded in muscle and bone,
bypassing barriers in one swift leap to tell their story.

Words jump hurdles without help to have themselves heard,
run helter skelter to find the precise order that brings
recognition, consonance, the inner sigh of aha.

Might they have a life of their own apart from us
and seek a channel to sluice through and be spoken?

Might it be that I don't write some poems but rather
they write themselves and sing aloud to find their lovers while I
stand dumbfounded, shocked into remembrance, a re-collection of ancestors echos?



Gay is host today at the dVerse Poets Pub  with a wonderful post, Ars Poetica- Poems About Poetry to celebrate one year of poetry at the Pub. For information, inspiration and all round great poetry, check it out.
And a grateful thanks to Claudia over at Jaywalking the Moon for her wonderful "how i write my poetry" that sparked this poem of my experience when poems take over to birth themselves.

Brave Endeavors

My friend, Ruth, over at Synch-ro-ni-zing wrote a thought provoking post about living in the face of death, despair and fear. In her wise way she turned to poetry, bits of poems, she called a "found poem" to provide an important juxtaposition.
After reading it, the following quotes that I've collected because they spoke to me came together in a whole new way. They illuminate our work as writers and offer encouragement for this brave endeavor.



I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead. 
- Tom Stoppard


It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
~Frederick Douglass

So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you? 

-Rilke

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these-to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Writers' Week in Ireland

Here's what I like about the Irish: they're in a full blown economic meltdown and they throw a writers' festival and then flock to it. A whole week to celebrate good writers, good books, good poetry. And this is just one of many across Ireland. I love it. I stumbled on this literary happening on the first day I arrived in County Clare. I was graciously picked up at the airport and on our way to the house, we passed through Listowel towards the end of Writers' Week.

This is the Country of such great writers as James Joyce, Thomas Moore, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker and Samuel Beckett, just to name a few. Ireland boasts four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney. During Writers' Week, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award is given. There were five short- listed novels for this prize featured in the bookstore with readings and workshops by the authors.

As you can see from the sign, they also have a Seanchai Centre (pronounced shawnakee),  named after the traditional Irish lore keepers and tale spinners. It's an ancient form of story telling and passing on lore that was never written down from generation to generation by these custodians of Irish oral tradition. The seanchai were respected, even revered, practitioners who kept track of important information and wisdom then shared it in such a way that it was remembered and cherished down the ages.

I understand why the Irish came to love words and eventually writing those words to tell stories in whole new ways. I understand why welcome signs (fáilte in Irish) are flown for those who want to partake in this tradition. I understand why so many do; to feel this respect, this reverence, this love for the words that help us communicate with one another in ways that touch hearts and change minds. It's a worthy endeavor to improve such a craft. It deserves festivals galore no matter what the economic realities are. Economics will change, our efforts to reach each other remains.

The Kerry Literary and Cultural Centre is named after these fore bearers.

One of the sign posts pointed me to the statue of Bryan McMahon, a favorite son of this town, a writer and a poet who also ran a local bookshop. I picked up his book: The Master and read it while in Ireland. I highly recommend it for the glimpse it gives of Irish country life through the eyes of the school principal who taught the children of the town for 30 years. He instilled in them a love for reading and writing and helped inspire an amazing number of authors and poets in this Kerry area. His views on teaching and awakening the gifts in each child are remarkable given how long ago he taught. I found it to be a treasure.

It was a rare, sunny, warm day in Ireland and I strolled the river walk suggested above. People were stretched out reading, writing, chatting with one another. Made me proud to be part of this grand tradition. These are my people. Writers are my tribe.

"News from Poems"

On the last day of National Poetry month:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
   Yet men die miserably every day
        for lack
of what is found there.

William Carlos William







The wisdom of William Carlos William registers immediately when reading this.  We instinctively know this to be true and it drives me to read and, sometimes in gifted moments, to write poetry. I'm glad we have a month every year to celebrate this great art form and to share inspiration with one another. 


Two places, just in my limited blog world, that offer poetry to startle, delight, and expand are: Ruth at synch-ro-ni-zing and, through the wonders of blog sharing, Ruth introduced me to Terresa at The Chocolate Chip Waffle. Ruth featured Terresa's wonderful poem "Red Shoes" and Terresa featured Ruth's amazing poem, "I Dreamt You Were Eating Dirt" as well as poems of other bloggers. Give yourself a treat and check out these blogs. Then seek out favorites sites for yourself and continue to spread the news because: 
it is difficult

to get the news from poems

   Yet men die miserably every day

        for lack

of what is found there.

"Digging"

From an Irish Poet during National Poetry month:

A great and important Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, shows in this poem his sharp, accurate description of what he sees and hears that nonetheless brings us, his reader, to a whole other more universal meaning. It's the absolutely gorgeous, astounding delight of poetry that it can accomplish this time and again.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into the gravely ground:

My father, digging. I look down.

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The course boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

from: Selected Poems 1966-1987

My husband's cousins live in the west of Ireland, County Clare. Their home backs up to bog land and Aidan still digs turf for winter fires which fill the house with an ancient earthy scent. So this poem rings ancestral chimes for me on the one hand and accurately depicts the sight and sound (the sheer sound of this poem is a delight) of work that's still going on and that I've seen on the other.

But on a another level, I love his reference to his father's and his grandfather's digging "down for the good turf" and his own digging with his pen knowing that as a poet he must dig deep as well. And isn't that our challenge, too?

County Clare bog land and lake.

Turf drying.

"The Glass and the Bowl"

From a Native American writer during National Poetry month:

I love the writings of Louise Erdrich, a prolific author of novels, including Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves, children's books, including The Birchbark House  and poetry, including Baptism of Desire that contains this lovely poem.

Her poem captures that incomparable fullness of feeling that comes unbidden in precious moments of parenting when "nothing seems withheld" even in the "absence of refuge in the design". Those moments are sweet and we need them.


The Glass and the Bowl


The father pours the milk from his glass
into the cup of the child,
and as the child drinks
the whiteness, opening
her throat to the good taste
eagerly, the father is filled.
He closes the refrigerator
on its light, he walks out
under the bowl of frozen darkness
and nothing seems withheld from him.
Overhead, the burst ropes of stars,
the buckets of craters,
the chaos of heaven, absence
of refuge in the design.
Yet down here, his daughter
in her quilts, under patterns
of diamonds and novas,
full of rich milk,
sleeping.


Louise Erdrich

What sweet moments are you savoring?

Sonnet 18

From a British Poet during National Poetry month:

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is perhaps the most famous of his 154 sonnets.  Reference to the first line pervades our literature and language. Some see this sonnet as a tribute to the power of art or as the appreciation of the transient nature of life and beauty. But the sonnet is also a beautiful tribute to love.

So I dedicate this sonnet to my love, John, to celebrate his birthday and his exquisite love for me, our daughter and our grandchildren. "As long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Those who know John know how true this is, his love for family and friends defines him, gives him life.

Give yourself a treat, read this with fresh eyes as if you had never heard it before. Let it delight you.


Sonnet 18


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest:
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare
(1564 - 1616)

This is quintessential John: piled high with stuffed animals and dolls by our granddaughter for their photo together and he just said "sure".

p.s. Buona Pasqua (Happy Easter)!

"Love After Love"

From a West Indian poet during National Poetry month:

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia and now lives in Trinidad where my daughter and her family lives. My favorite poem of his is one I've treasured for a long time. It gave me hope that I could be found when I felt lost and then it gave me back my heart when I was in need of that gift. I've loved it ever since and it means more to me each tine I read it. It's wise.


Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott
From Collected Poems 1948-1984

Has a poem ever helped you through a tough time?

" The Necessity for Irony"

From an Irish Poet during National Poetry Month:

Another of my favorite poets is Eavan Boland, an Irish poet who writes about myth, history but also her life and the experiences we all have. She writes in a fresh way that makes things, nonetheless, familiar.


The Necessity for Irony

On Sundays,
when the rain held off,
after lunch or later,
I would go with my twelve year old
daughter into town
and put down the time
at junk sales, antique fairs.

There I would
lean over tables,
absorbed by lace, wooden frames,
glass. My daughter stood
at the other end of the room,
her flame colored hair
obvious whenever-
which was not often-

I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out it's promises
of small histories. Endings.

When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament: and was always drawn
to a lyric speech, a civil tone.
But never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one:

Spirit of irony,
my caustic author
of the past, of memory,-
and of it's pain, which returns
hurts, stings-reproach me now,
remind me
that I was in those rooms,
with my child,
with my back turned to her,
searching- oh irony!-
for beautiful things.

Eavan Boland
From The Lost Land


This reminds me to cherish each moment of now less I search for beautiful things and miss what's most important in my life.


Dedicated to my daughter.

"The Wild Iris"

From an American Poet during National Poetry Month:

Louise Gluck is one of my favorite poets. One I go to when I want to enter a new world, want to see things in a new way or to be amazed and delighted. My copy of one of her books, The Wild Iris, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993, is worn by my many returns to it's pages. The signature poem of this remarkable series is entitled "The Wild Iris" and, like all the poems in the book, speaks in the voice of the flower.


The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Here me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Louise Gluck


How remarkable to see the world through the eyes of an iris, to hear its descriptions of the world, to recognize its wisdom.

"I Said to Poetry"

From an African American author during National Poetry month:

I Said to Poetry

I said to Poetry: "I'm finished
with you."
Having to almost die
before some wierd light
comes creeping through
is no fun.
"No thank you, Creation,
no muse need apply.
Im out for good times--
at the very least,
some painless convention."
Poetry laid back
and played dead
until this morning.
I wasn't sad or anything,
only restless.

Poetry said: "You remember
the desert, and how glad you were
that you have an eye
to see it with? You remember
that, if ever so slightly?"
I said: "I didn't hear that.
Besides, it's five o'clock in the a.m.
I'm not getting up
in the dark
to talk to you."

Poetry said: "But think about the time
you saw the moon
over that small canyon
that you liked so much better
than the grand one--and how suprised you were
that the moonlight was green
and you still had
one good eye
to see it with

Think of that!"

"I'll join the church!" I said,
huffily, turning my face to the wall.
"I'll learn how to pray again!"

"Let me ask you," said Poetry.
"When you pray, what do you think
you'll see?"

Poetry had me.

"There's no paper
in this room," I said.
"And that new pen I bought
makes a funny noise."

"Bullshit," said Poetry.
"Bullshit," said I.

Written by Alice Walker

Alice Walker is a wise woman and a poet/ writer who understands the world around and within her. You know what she's saying, don't you? But, April is the month that celebrates the taking of pen to paper (or cursor to screen) so that poetry can say to us: "think about the time…" and we do and we capture it.

Do you write poetry?

Whew!

I'm not good at writing when there's lots going on to distract me. Obviously. Not that I'm complaining about my FULL summer, but the blog has suffered and I've missed my blog friends. A quick recap: 2 weeks in FL for vacation and a family gathering, 4 weeks here in Italy for my daughter and 2 grandchildren, 5 days at a friend's wedding in Tuscany and an 8 day visit from my niece and her life partner. Each one special and treasured. It occurs to me that those events would be great topics for sharing more extensively in the blog but I haven't perfected how to take time out (more than once a week) to write with everything happening around me and me wanting to be part of it all.

So, here I am, my heart full of wonderful memories. The good thing, of course, is that I am actually changed by these people and events as I enter into them fully. More important than writing about them I suppose. But still... It's like I have 2 lives and I want to integrate them more. If I write, I don't have time to keep up with friend's blogs. If I read, I don't have time to write. If my life is busy, I don't do either. How do others handle life and blogging?

Changes: I'm more in love with my amazing husband, I'm closer to and had more fun with my daughter and grandchildren, I'm more familiar with and in awe of my little corner of the world in Italy, I made new friends, I deepened bonds with my extended family. I even got my Italian driving license and Health Care Card. All in all, a great summer for which I'm grateful!

My daughter and grandchildren are now home in Trinidad, my grandson is back to school and my granddaughter had her first day of school ever. May they prosper. And, as things slow down to an earth rhythm here, we finally have ALL the documents we need to be elective residents of this beautiful country. Whew!

Portrait of a Writer

This is in response to the prompt: "Portrait of a Writer" from the Inferno at the Artist Challenge.


Writers

arrange words with assurance
calculated to break open minds,
a conspiracy of words
intended to lay bare the heart.
Writers decipher life, give back our breath.

When given chaos, writers make maps,
an overview when view is overwhelming.
When words elude, writers invade life in search of them.
They spot new words, ascribe powers to them,
chant them again and again,
and they work magic.

Selected words
cast upon the wind of breath
astound, confound and dazzle,
a deluge of words
to electrify, jolt and startle.

Writers devise words, revere words, mint words,
make veracity vivid.
Writers controvert and make a difference.
Some maintain, some negate, some rupture,
some pronounce their pounce
then take it.

Writers speak up , speak out and witness.
They touch, invoke, invite.
Writers slip from the pack
wipe lipstick from their mouths
splash speech across the page
ignite sparks to blaze
full of flame.

Mary H Warren 20/5/10