Living Inside Poetry Thanks to Hermes

 Moonday. Waning moon.  Rain.  Despite having meetings and things, I'm treating this day as a poem.  Its all poetry from my ink blueberry smoothie to the "garbage truck's baptismal drizzle" on the street outside. (That phrase is by Audre Lorde.)  I have no choice in the matter. 


Prose won't come.

I'm humming inside mystery.

In love with luck-bringing Hermes.

He's taken me through the underworld again. 

He's stolen Apollo's cattle again.

He's raced through my life on his badass sandals, beat the turtle drum, and cozened my tribe throughout the dark night.  Again.

His snakes wrap around the inside of my skin to heal a long pain, the kind you can almost forget until you look in the mirror he made to remind you.  

Oh Hermes, beloved son of the son of Time and the shy goddess Maia, I'm a muse or a fury running behind you.  I'm a child in your cave hiding in sight.   Catch me if you want to tonight.


For this Moonday, tell me something, anything-- in the form of a poem.  It doesn't have to make any sense and might be best if it does not.  If that's daunting, just give me three words that you like because of the way they sound.

word food

If I had not read this poem as a teenager, its fair to say I may not have made it.  It's by Alice Walker from her collection Revolutionary Petunias.

Additional info-- this was first published with only those 2 above sentences.  I was talking about survival of spirit-- not literal survival.  I have a problem with brevity.  Brevity plus hyperbole= melodrama.  Ah well.  I'm sure I would have made it-- literally-- without the below poem.  But I might have done something stupid (for me) like go to a good university with a real campus and become an English professor instead of coming to NYC to be a theater artist.

Be Nobody's Darling

for Julius Lester

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.

Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave words they said.

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Is there some poem or song lyric that absolutely saved your ass when you were young?  (Of course there is.)  Please share.

What do Sartre, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, & T.S. Eliot have in common?

"Hell is other people."--Jean Paul Sartre
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." --Shakespeare
"Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company." --Mark Twain
"Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections."--T.S. Eliot

Hell is an interesting place, and one I find myself contemplating frequently while standing on a New York City subway platform in August.


I've spent time in Hell, listening to poetry.

What do you imagine hell to be?

postscript:  My neighbor read this and asked if I was alright, with a tone of voice that seemed to ask, 'are you going off the deep end?'  I do not believe that I am.  Its simply that hell is a very interesting place to contemplate-- in all seriousness, tongue in cheek, eyes closed, eyes open.... it has been obsessing the collective unconscious for a goodly time now.  I was born in the late 1970's around the time of the birth of heavy metal.  When I was three my dad watched the Omen with me.  The Exorcist was a big movie in the early 1980's.... hell and the devil were big right about then, after the Vietmam war and into the Regan era.  Now its all about vampire love affairs, so maybe we are collectively trying to make friends with our demons.  Who knows? 

Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells

I'm too inspired at the moment to write about it.  It bursts out of me and needs alone-in-my-livingroom-dancing time.  It needs waking-up-in-the-morning-and-starring-at-the-wall-time.  It needs walking-deep-into-the-woods time.  Then I'll be ready to share it.

I once needed permission to do those things, to require those things.  So, just in case someone reading this needs permission to stare at the wall or dive naked into a waterfall or cut their hair or go on a walkabout as part of their artistic process-- I humbly grant it, as a person who has struggled with my requirements and come to accept them. 

This poem is from the chorus of the play The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney about the story of the redemption of Philotetes, one of Odysseus' soldiers, who was abandoned on an uninhabited island because his wound, a symbol of his inner pain and separation from the Gods, stunk too much for the other soldiers on the warship to handle.

 

from The Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

What are some of your artistic requirements?  Do you accept them?  Do you honor them?

Its poem in your pocket day

Calloo! Callay!

From the Academy of American Poets Website:

"The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends (on April 29th)."

There are links on the site to local events celebrating the day.

Like all of us I have friends who will get funny little smiles on their faces and devilish glints in their eyes at the phrase "poem in your pocket"... but I don't care.

Since I'm such an exuberant poem sharer, maybe I'll fish out my old cargo pants today.

I just received this poem in a birthday card from a dear friend. (Thanks Gayla!) So this is one of the poems in my pocket.  Its by none other than the always gorgeous Hafiz.

Come, let's scatter roses and pour wine in the glass; 

we'll shatter heaven's roof and lay a new foundation.

If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers, 

I'll join with the wine bearer so we can overthrow them. 

With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my friend, 

so we can clap and sing a song and lose our heads in dancing.

What's the poem in your pocket today? It'll make my day if you share it here in the comments.

Rainbow Jelly in an Underwater Passageway (a five-year-old named this blog post)

Moonday.  Waning crescent.  Dark spring moon just before Wednesday's new moon.   A subtle time.   So many changes on the earth.

Last year in April, National Poetry Month in the US, I took the 30 poems in 30 days challenge.  I posted them on facebook-- which felt both bold and terrifying, but I knew that if I didn't post them I wouldn't write them.  Some days the poems stuck in my throat and twisted out of me, and other days they flowed.

After it was over I felt restored.  I hadn't written poetry regularly in over ten years.  I'd gotten my poetry mojo back. 

But after the month of forced poetry I disappointed myself.  I didn't keep it up the way I'd wanted to.  I punished myself for needing that outside influence, the uncritical cheering voices of friends.  Real writers don't need that.

Of course I know that's nonsense.  Any artistic or creative enterprise requires a dialogue with an inner five-year-old, and that five-year-old needs a big cheering committee sometimes, especially when she's been living inside of a small box for too long.

Now the poetry is taking over again anyway, because who can stop from writing poetry surrounded by all these blossoms?

So I'll start the 30-in-30 challenge today, just before the new moon, and continue every day through the next new moon.  Along the way I'll find ways to cheer for the five-year-old, and (with luck) keep it up this time after the 30 days are over.  Will report back on the progress.

It isn't too late to join me.  Never too late, actually.

Here is today's poem:

violet flower
stalk water-green,
translucent cells
rising in tiny spring spirals

deep purple petals
unfolding like a fan
in the hand of a flamenco dancer

inward wrist circling outward
down circling up
meeting the sun
for a half-life
of pure delight

In the comments I'd love it if you'd leave your own poem of course, and/or an answer to this question:

What or who encourages your inner five-year-old to be creative? 

Slower and Lazier

Sleeplessly 
I watch over
the spring night--
but no amount of guarding 
is enough to make it stay.
 by Izumi Shikibu

----------------------------------

march sun
i dream of the farm
even during the day
as it was
as it became since
trees growing thick in fields
even the blackberries
once rampant
succumbing to their shade
i remember the call
the chill sun of that day
your hands
wet birds
your eyes cloudy clay
i miss the chestnut walls
sheltering hills
the trees dressing
for spring
softness of worn stones
found in
abandoned roads

by @ten_ten_ten on twitter.  Here is his poetry blog.  As far as I know he wants to be anonymous beyond this... (Just in case you weren't aware, twitter is a great place to meet poets.)

Late March Moonday. Its just after the Spring equinox, with a waxing crescent.   Today on the south side of Tompkins Square park I noticed that the daffodils were in full bloom.  I find it almost painful to look at daffodils because it makes me sad to see them crisp in the hot sun and fade.  It seems to happen so soon after they bloom. Spring is ruled by all of these gorgeous, short-lived blossoms.  We all deserve a holiday from our lives just to appreciate them properly.

As that hasn't been declared yet,  my antidote is to go into Pooh bear mode whenever I can.

Be slower and lazier.  I want to feel my spring.

Even in my 'leisure time' as a gardener I can get overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do now-- all the pruning, readying the soil for planting, clearing away the dead brush-- but the plants grow without me.  The mint grows around its long dead stalks, the un-pruned apple tree bore fruit for years without anyone's help but the sun and the rain.

So today I'm just taking it in.   

In the comments, I'd love it if you'd share something of your experience of the spring-- this one or any other.  Do you have a picture in your head that says 'spring' to you from yesterday, last year, or twenty years ago?

I'd also be thrilled if you shared poetry or art, yours or someone's who inspires you.

Sending Loving Kindness to Myself... Circa 1992

Moonday.  Just after the new moon, the start of the year of the Tiger, Valentine's and V day.

I feel the pull to turn inward, retreat.  After some powerful healing work this week with my Dancemeditation community, I'm standing very close to a young me.  Fifteen.  She is full of self-hatred worn like thick dragon-scaled armor.  She loves Rilke and the Bronte's.  She likes to sit on the jagged brown outcroppings and stare at the roiling river, especially because she's not supposed to be there.  Her chest is sunken.  Suicide seems romantic.  There are bars in her eyes.  Her voice sounds shrill and brittle in her head.

Books are rafts.  Dogs are guardian angels.  Nature is Mother. Those things haven't changed.  This is a poem she loves. Today I send her my love, laughter, and I'm listening.

The night is darkening round me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot cannot go


The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go

Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing drear can move me
I will not cannot go


O mother I am not regretting
To leave this wretched world below
If there be nothing but forgetting
In that dark land to which I go


Yet though tis wretched now to languish
Deceived and tired and hopeless here
No heart can quite repress the anguish
Of leaving things that once were dear

--Emily Bronte

(It goes on and on like that.)

If you have a poem, song lyrics, an image, or a thought that a younger self who could use a little TLC might enjoy, I'd love it if you'd share it in the comments, or any other Moonday artistry.

How very bad poems can heal the spirit

I've been writing, lately, what my critical judging mind calls (very) bad prose poems. These are free verse, plain, and just for me.  They've been helping me with my journal practice.  I write in a journal every day in the morning as a way to ease into the day, get the writing muscle moving, write down my dreams, and get unstuck creatively.  Only sometimes I feel stuck even in my journal writing.

The poems help me out of journal ruts-- when all I seem to write are lists of things I want/need/ can't seem to do, and lots of blah blah about my feelings.  They help me to articulate large experiences in few words when writing in prose seems daunting.

Because I'm letting them be bad, and just for me, they aren't stuck, and don't take long.  Usually they illuminate ideas or feelings.  There is always more of a quality of witness about them.  When I write prose, I'm in it-- mired inside the feelings, actions, ideas.  With poetry, I feel freer.  I feel more spacious.  I don't feel compelled to explain or understand every thought, emotion, or turn of event.  I simply write impressions.

I thought I'd share one of them, written soon after a Dancemeditation workshop at Kripalu with my teacher Dunya.  We had been listening deeply to our bodies.  Some of them are more story-like than this one.  I'm sharing it even though I don't think its a 'good' poem-- (it isn't one that I label very bad, though.  I'm not yet brave enough to share one of those) because it helped me, even though it is a 'list poem', which my poet friends mostly sneer at as a form.  Hoping it will inspire someone else to write their own medicine.

Witnessing the Self

Grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Inflamed fear inside my face,
swollen passages
with doors on fire.

fingers and toes,
dried leaves possessed
in a windstorm.

Grief-- my heart, no more words for it.

Strong limbs,
ancient oaks unfurling green.

faith-- my breath,
open windows with white curtains
blowing into mystery.

My upper back,
wide oval lilies floating
on a glassy lake the hue of sky.

Passion-- my heart,
blood roses blooming
out of wet earth,

even with the grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Deep Dark Moonday

Happy Moonday!

'Why, what's Moonday?' you ask.  I'll tell you. This marks week six of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever else wants to play, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness, in the hope that it will spark some of our own wildness and unbridled creativity.

Personal update on the experiment:  I've been having a bit more fun playing around.  Last Moonday I collaged a card in my journal.  I decided that it was a note from my fairy godmother telling me that she had my back, used lots of glitter, and the next day I happened to find the perfect dress for an upcoming performance-- bippity boppity boo.

If you've been reading this blog for a little while, you might have noticed that I've been sort of play-challenged recently, and have had to go to some lengths to bring out my silly side.  Celebrating Moonday every week seems to be helping me to get over myself loosen up.

Today's waning crescent moon is going into the darkest phase of a dark month.  I shouldn't be surprised that I'm feeling internal, desiring to hole up.  I long for a snowy cabin and silence.  Spring is just around the corner, and for a gardener that means work.  I have a lot more deep dreaming to do between now and then. 

I've been thrilled by the stories, poems, and links to artwork in the comments each Moonday.  They are fantastic.  Worth checking out.  Skip over my old Moonday posts and go right to the comments.  I hope some of you will grace me with your Moonday inspirations again or for the first time this week. If you would share a poem, or links to artwork, stories, songs, dances... any art--in the broadest sense of the word-- that you want to share or that inspires you.  No theme, just something that jazzes you up, that makes you want to dance, or  bust out your crayons, a poem or scribble you made in a burst of exuberance or  painstakingly crafted (though I am very pro burst of exuberance creating--- internal critics can go stand in the corner.)

Here's mine-- my internal critic wants to warn you that it may not be very good at all, especially as I'm making it up on the spot.  Now I'm putting duct tape over her mouth.  Ah.  Better.

Slippery green snake
undulating in a bowl of twigs and dead leaves,
your back glistens with honey,
your forked tongue flicking in and out
for the delight of the feeling.

You ate the eggs last summer.
The birds have long since flown.
You are alone and sated
in a nest under a broken hive
honey-coated against the cold.

Happy Wolf Moonday!

Happy Moonday!  Its just past the full wolf or purge moon, which this year happens to be one of the biggest and brightest of the year.

This marks week 5 of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever else wants to play, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness. 

Personal update on the experiment:  Lots of  exciting creativity seems to be seeping into my life from all sorts of places.  This is making me happy.  Something is shifting...

Today is also my very dear friend Eve's birthday and so my Moonday offering this week is a poem about Eve the first in honor of both of them.  

From  Applesauce for Eve by Marge Piercy

You are indeed the mother of invention,
the first scientist. Your name means
life: finite, dynamic, swimming against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like any other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple,
the seeds were freedom and the flowering of choice.

                                                       Picture of Eve's Apple, sculpture by Edwina Sandys
 
I would love it (actually, I'm squeezing my eyes shut, crossing my fingers tightly, and holding my breath) if you would share a poem, either one of your own or another one that you like, links to artwork, stories, songs, dances... any art--in the broadest sense of the word-- that you want to share or that inspires you.  May your day and night be peppered with unbridled laughter, wise foolishness, and unexpected delights.

Who Inspires You?

I just finished a phase of a big creative project.  I directed a staged reading of a play that took several years to complete.  Today I've been itching to write, but also feeling listless, creatively drained, and antsy, so I scanned my shelf of poetry books, and found myself reaching for Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Don't you wish you knew Edna St. Vincent Millay?  If you've read any of her work this is a rhetorical question.  I love my little Dover Thrift addition of First Fig and Other Poems.  This is how it starts:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;

   It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends---

   It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

**image of Edna St. V. Millay by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  It is actually for sale here. (clearly she uh..inspires him too.)

Years ago I found myself at an outdoor flea market on Canal St. in Manhattan.  There was a big pile of old books that looked slightly moldy and partially burned.  Of course I had to check them out.  I found this amazing old pocket dictionary.  I don't know the year it was published because the cover was missing, but in the back, written in pencil in a beautiful hand was this:  'Collop Monday, Pancake Tuesday, Fritter Wednesday, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday Hot cross buns. ' There are so many great words in this dictionary-- depauperate v. : to make poor.  Mayling s.: a gathering flowers on May Day.

Then I came across this charred blue book.  I opened it up and on the first page was this inscription in a small, tight hand:  From your two friends with loads of love, Mina and Edna-- July 26th, 1937.  And below it in a much broader, more florid hand:  Hope you like it-- I worked hard on it-- Edna St.--

It is a first addition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's play, Conversation at Midnight.  I love that inscription, 'I worked hard on it.'  I found the book when I was deep inside a blocked writing phase, but the sentence rang in my ears.  It was like Edna St. was shouting through time at me, 'work hard! work hard!'

I imagine she did work very hard on it.  Conversation at Midnight is written in gorgeous verse.  Its funny, philosophical, both deep and silly.

Here are a few lines that make me think:  Carl: "...the English primrose pressed in your copy of Wordsworth means nothing to me, And it is nothing more.  God, I'm so sick of the smell of faded personal tokens fluttering out from between the leaves of second hand books! Oh, let the dead past cremate its dead, I say!  We have no room here even for its bones in these city blocks that must house the living world!"  I totally get it, Carl.  But all the same, I'd never part with my copy of Edna St.--- I like to imagine that she's my mentor, and right now, in my tired, antsy, keyed up mind I hear her shouting, 'Work hard! work hard! as I watch her dance down a West Village side street, drinking wine and laughing with her poet friends.

Is there a person from the past who inspires you creatively?  I'd love to know...

Mint and Mangoes

Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the backyard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in the green valleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday 
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenseless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.
                                                --Seamus Heany, from The Spirit Level

That line-- my last things will be first things slipping from me-- always gets me.  I thought of this poem tonight sitting in my tiny Manhattan kitchen eating a mango that I've watched ripen for a week.  I cut it carefully, and as I ate it I closed my eyes and savored it, trying not to be greedy for the next bite and the next, which was almost impossible.

When I was very young I lived in Florida.  We had a mango tree in the back yard.  I was the only one in my family who was not allergic to the skins and so from a very early age it was my job to pick and peel the mango for everyone. I treated it as a sacred ritual.  I remember that my mother would hold me up to the tree because I was too little to reach the ripe fruit, and then I'd pull as hard as I could with both hands to get the fruit off its stalk and into her basket.

I almost never eat them now.  We moved to Virginia when I was five.  Seeing them all green and uniform under florescent supermarket lights still seems like sacrilege. But when I'm sick I crave them.  There's good medicine in mango.

Eating that mango tonight, peeling it carefully, sucking on the juice from the pulp around its core, put me in touch with my grief.  There's my small, personal grief, honoring my losses, remembering my first things, thinking about my last, and then there's grief over the earthquake in Haiti.  Mango trees represent the largest tree population in Haiti.  Its a country full of mangoes.  Environmentalists have been using mangos and other tree crops as a way to both repair the damage done to the earth and at the same time improve the nutrition and earning potential of the people.  In my mind I see a tree on its side, uprooted, its fruit smashed and scattered.  I think of a child.  Those small hands.  I think of my last things, slipping away from me.

Lazy

"Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out."
                                 ---Ryokan, trans. Stephen Mitchell

My life is the opposite of this poem at the moment, but reading it is like a mental hot bath.  Aaah.

Happy Moonday!

0 Lady Moon, your horns point toward the east;
     Shine, be increased:
0 Lady Moon, your horns point toward the west;
     Wane, be at rest.

From Sing-Song by Christina Rossetti

Here's an interesting bit of info in case you didn't know:
"The Helinistic seven-day week was essentially astrological, linked to the stars, an amalgam of astronomy, astrology, and math of the great scientific cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece.  The days of the week were associated with those (seven) heavenly bodies that could be seen with the naked eye: the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.... the English weekdays come from the Anglo-Saxon translations of the planets as well as the god/goddess in whose honor they were dedicated." ~from Celestially Auspicious Occasions: Seasons, Cycles, and Celebrations by Donna Henes. (A fantastic book)

So what day does the moon, that most feminine of heavenly bodies, associated with Isis, Artemis, Oshun, with art, women, wildness, and mystery get?  The moon gets Monday, a day known in the modern world for its drudgery after the fun of the weekend.  Even though I work for myself, and could theoretically make Monday mean anything I want, I often get pulled along by the 'get to work!' vibe, doing my banking, going to the post office, and don't find myself honoring the moon much on manic Monday. 

I want this to change.  I wonder what a little conscious, weekly honoring of the moon will do for me.  I think it may do great things.  I'm excited to experiment.  So to help me in this venture, for the foreseeable future I'll be posting bits of art, poetry, and stories of wildness here on Mondays, and invite everyone to share any art/craft/ or bit of wildness here in the comments-- post a whole poem,  or link to your site with artwork of any and all kinds.  I vow to make art for art's sake on Monday-- write a poem, make a collage, dance, sing, and/or to get out in nature and howl at the moon a bit.  Hope you'll join me.

Goblin Fruit

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

their hungry thirsty roots?....

'Nay, hush, my sister:

I ate and ate my fill,

Yet my mouth waters still...

~ Christina Rossetti from Goblin Market: a Tale of Two Sisters

I adore this ballad by Victorian poet Christina Rossetti.  Much has been written about the meaning behind Goblin Market.  The author herself said that it was meant as a simple fairy story, though not for kids.  I think it has many layers, like dreams.   The words and images are as rich and sensuous as almost anything I've ever read.  If you don't have your own paper copy, I suggest printing it out and reading it when you are lounging and eating delicious fruit.  Maybe in the bath.

Post inspired by Day 12 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: What was your favorite new food 09? (still haven't tried goblin fruit, but know I'd love it.)

An artist who is infusing your world with beauty, whether you know it or not.

My celebrity heartthrob is a man who died before my parents were born. Federico Garcia Lorca, in addition to the eye candy, is arguably Spain's greatest playwright and poet. I was lucky to be introduced to him in 5th grade Spanish class where I first fell in love with his poetry.

When I'd get drunk in college I'd start scribbling letters to Lorca on bar napkins, shutting out the rest of the world unless they wanted to listen to me recite his poems. He has that effect. In Spain he is rarely referred to as Garcia Lorca. It is usually just Federico.

Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen are some of his devotees, cultivating that elusive, fiery earth spirit called duende that Federico passionately describes in his brilliant treatise on the subject. It is a must-read for any performing artist. L. Cohen talks about how he first discovered Lorca in a bookshop in Montreal when he was a teenager. He says, 'I stumbled on a book by a great Spanish poet and in this book he invited me to enter a universe of ants, crystals, arches, minnows and flies that slipped away like herds of tiny fish. I entered that world, and I am so happy to say I never left it.'

Federico was also a talented composer, actor, theater director, and visual artist. The worlds he created are full of music, imagery, and raw emotion. They envelop. He is as much a great teacher (he would hate to be called a muse) as he is a writer, inspiring important works of music, dance, poetry, film, theater, and visual art in his time up through the present day.

Federico set Spain on fire for flamenco, heightening the prestige of this homegrown gypsy art form so that it could be seen as a jewel of Spanish culture throughout the country and around the world. He was a champion of the rights of gypsies and women, coming from a place of privilege and power, even as his open homosexuality may have cost him his life.

I spent a couple of months in Spain making a pilgrimage to all of his beloved places, as well as a somber trek to the dusty little town outside of Granada which contains what is believed to be his unmarked grave.

On August 19th, 1937 at the age of 38 he was murdered by 'nationalist militia' during the Spanish Civil War. The details of his murder are still obscured, and his death is an open wound. But while the anniversary of his death is a reminder of how much we lost that day, his writing and spirit are bathing the world in passion and beauty every minute.

Casida IX (translation below)
De la palomas oscuras

Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
Vecinitas, les dije,
donde esta mi sepultura?
En mi cola, dijo el sol.
En mi garganta, dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos aguilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la orta
y la muchacha era ninguna.
Aguilitas, les dije,
donde esta mi sepultura?
En mi cola, dijo el sol.
En mi garganta, dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.


Qasida of the Dark Doves

Through the laurel's branches
I saw two dark doves.
One was the sun,
the other the moon.
Little neighbors, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
And I who was walking
with the earth at my waist
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was neither.
Little eagles, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
Through the laurel's branches
I saw two naked doves.
The one was the other
and both of them neither.

(trans. Catherine Brown)

The Best Advice Ever

With that Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, love me.
Of course you do not do this out loud,
Otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect,
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying
With that sweet moon language
What every other eye in this world
is dying to hear.

--Hafiz

Poetry in Hell

I used read my poems, the ones I wrote incessantly, at a bar in Adam’s Morgan, Washington D.C. called Hell. It was in the basement of a club called Heaven, which I never visited. The walls and ceiling of Hell Bar were painted red with Halloween zombie hands sticking out of the light fixtures. The place felt safe: part womb, part pirate hideout. I made certain to be there every Sunday night.

The bartender would turn off the heavy metal screaming from the speakers. I would sit at a tiny round table nursing a beer and let the poems wash over me. 

A rumpled balding man played the dulcimer every week as he recited long poems about herons. A Capital Hill type guy in pressed khakis and shiny loafers read acidly funny treatises in the persona of Wile E. Coyote. 

I nicknamed a Courtney Love-esque punk girl the cum poet because she recited her opus on cum at least once a month. I’d smirk in a dark corner as she spoke, clutching my Sam Adams, a grown-up beer, something a teenager would never order, I calculated, because I was in high school and there illegally.

I usually kept to myself. I listened to the poets, read one to three short new poems that, to quote the founder Greg Gerding, I ‘soberly, painstakingly, worked on’ during the week and left as soon as the heavy metal resumed to catch the last metro train back to Northern Virginia. 

But I felt connected. Over time the hell poets became my congregation. Greg’s poems inspired me to write on bar napkins. We were all there for the love of the word, small w. Clapping at the end, no heckling, and a generous time limit for each poet were the only rules.

When I got to New York to continue my study of theater at NYU, I went to the Nuyorican and was lost. Some of the poetry was phenomenal, but it was all so…. DECLARATIVE! I didn’t see a place in the Slam world for depressed middle-class suburban girl verse full of gentle sadness and a love of the small.  Where was the equivalency of Poetry in Hell? The anything goes kind of place? My studies took over; I never found it. I stopped writing poetry.

This lead in part to a toxic writer’s block which leached beyond poetry into everything else I tried to write. Poetry had been my first church. Time unwound; meanings were illuminated; my deepest self was given voice. Without it I was silenced in ways I hadn't anticipated. 

The block lasted from age 19 to 29. I twisted, cajoled, bullshitted, wept and fasted, wept and prayed my way out of it, along the way finding new congregations of actors, dancers, seekers, gardeners, and herbalists. But I think that I may have bypassed years of struggle if I had simply sought out other people who wrote poetry. ‘They’re doing it. I can do it too.’ I need conspirators. I know this now.