a flower so crooked & obscure?

i was gonna write something about last week, a list or movie review, but everything seems so trivial compared to what julie turley has been through.

i'm so glad she's okay & blogging again.  i hope she'll share some of the journal she kept during that epic time.

one thing that didn't feel trivial to me this week was "the yellow flower" by william carlos williams.  more and more i realize he's my poetic ancestor, and i owe a lot to his influence.  this is a later poem, and sounds broken--it is broken, actually--look at the lines.  he was a little bit broken

as we all are.

so, in honor of the broken

but still breathing,

a poem:


The Yellow Flower

by William Carlos Williams

What shall I say, because talk I must?

                        That I have found a cure

                                                for the sick?

I have found no cure

                        for the sick       .

                                                but this crooked flower

which only to look upon

                        all men

                                                are cured.  This

is that flower

                        for which all men

                                                sing secretly their hymns

of praise.  This

                        is that sacred

                                                flower!

Can this be so?

                        A flower so crooked

                                                and obscure?  It is

a mustard flower

                        and not a mustard flower,

                                                a single spray

topping the deformed stem

                        of fleshy leaves

                                                in this freezing weather

under glass.

An ungainly flower and

                        an unnatural one,

                                                in this climate;  what

can be the reason

                        that it has picked me out

                                                to hold me, openmouthed,

rooted before this window

                        in the cold,

                                                my will

drained from me

                        so that I have only eyes

                                                for these yellow,

twisted petals   .           ?

That the sight,

                        though strange to me,

                                                must be a common one,

is clear:  there are such flowers

                        with such leaves

                                                native to some climate

which they can call

                        their own.

But why the torture

                        and the escape through

                                                the flower?  It is

as if Michelangelo

                        had conceived the subject

                                                of his Slaves from this

-- or might have done so.

                        And did he not make

                                                the marble bloom?  I

am sad

                        as he was sad

                                                in his heroic mood.

But also

                        I have eyes

                                                that are made to see and if

they see ruin for myself

                        and all that I hold

                                                dear, they see

also

                        through the eyes

                                                and through the lips

and tongue the power

                        to free myself

                                                and speak of it, as

Michelangelo through his hands

            `           had the same, if greater,

                                                power.

Which leaves, to account for,

                        the tortured bodies

                                                of

the slaves themselves

                        and

                                                the tortured body of my flower

which is not a mustard flower at all

                        but some unrecognized

                                                and unearthly flower

for me to naturalize

                        and acclimate

                                                and choose it for my own.

something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky

yesterday ingrid said she couldn't wait to get back to school so she could have anxiety about real things rather than what she called "freeform anxiety." i laughed, and knew what she meant. i've had my own bout with freeform anxiety this week. it seems so stupid, and so in the domain of a person who doesn't need to worry about her next meal or where she will lay her head at night. and yet it's difficult to talk oneself out of it.

i see it as a moral failing in my personal character as well as in my own social milieu. why the constant fretting over things as minute as paint color or ten extra pounds to things as big as your kid getting bullied or a cancer diagnosis? all with a similar amount of nervous energy? it needs to stop. a project.

but what deep solace i get from the poet. today i'm reading w.h. auden's musée des beaux arts. it's because of auden that i can maintain faith. no lie. i love that dude.

check this out:

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

i recommend reading the whole poem if you have the winter blues, the mean reds, freeform anxiety, hysteria, the noonday demon, or if the black dog is chasing you. it seems ailments of the spirit are rampant in this new season. some readers might like cotton candy cheer, but me, i like to know that i'm not alone in my suffering, that most people in the world have most of the same feelings as most other people in the world, in one form or another.

while you're at it, william carlos williams has a poem about the same subject, landscape with the fall of icarus. i'm teaching both williams and auden for my ekphrasis class. i'm not as fond of the painter as i am of the poet, but i love how the works inform each other in remote collaboration.

(how i dealt with my freeform anxiety today was by wearing a pair of supportive black tights and a structured grey shift with a tiny houndstooth pattern, and black mary jane pumps. like i'm going to the office. i'm currently writing from the coffee pod. needed to get out of the freeform house. back in college a good friend taught me that when you're floundering, you should put on a structured outfit and leave the house. in other words, no sweatpants, yoga pants, or jeggings, and no hiding under the covers.)

p.s. don't you wish you could have heard julie's reading?

that greeny flower

i spent a couple of hours with william carlos williams' poem "asphodel, that greeny flower" this morning (one hour of this study time was during church this morning, testimony meeting, which my hilarious daughter lovingly calls 'open mic night.')

it's a beautiful confessional love poem, about gardens, love, forgiveness, death, the sea, hell, and the way in which the atom bomb changed love, forgiveness, and the poetic line forever.

"I bring you/ a last flower. Don't think// that because I say this/ in a poem/ it can be treated lightly// or that the facts will not uphold it./ Are not facts flowers/ and flowers facts// or poems flowers/ or all works of the imagination,/ interchangeable?"

williams asks his wife's forgiveness for his infidelity and his inattention to her because of the time he spent living two lives crammed into one. you want to think he's a d-bag (he's always asking forgiveness--remember the plums? i always thought the speaker in that poem was a little d-baggy), but he manages to come across as so honest and vulnerable and broken that we forgive him, and in the end, she forgives him, too. he writes from the winter time, but imagines spring, and her forgiveness enables a sort of new flowering, albeit by a pale and odorless flower, for williams at the end of his life.

"after a lifetime,/ it is as if// a sweet-scented flower/ were poised/ and for me did open."

this took me to new years, the snow outside, a very faint glimmer of spring at the edges of my imagination. i always go through the same process at new year's time:

1) i vow to not make any resolutions
2) then i vow to only make one resolution
3) then i vow to make only three resolutions
4) then i make a whole complicated list
5) the next year i realize that i sort of did one or two things on the list
6) i repeat the process, often including some of the resolutions that i've made year after year and not even been moderately successful in keeping

so.

here's my long and unwieldy list, which i probably won't keep, but is at least an expression of intent:

MUSIC

this year i did less music than in almost any year of my life. sad. maybe that's why i feel empty? thus i want to:

*take voice lessons
*sing in church choir
*rehearse once a week with lalage
*start a youtube channel for lalage

POETRY

i have a chapbook and two complete manuscripts of poems pretty much ready to go, but lacked the wherewithal to send to publishers, etc. last year. am toying with the idea of publishing them under christian's record label, and circumventing the vast amount of time and money it takes to get a "real" publisher to put them out (i spent two years and probably 1500 bucks on submission fees and mailing fees getting Alburnum published). would love to hear other poets' thoughts. i know it totally de-legitimizes your work to self-publish in the eyes of certain people, but if you look carefully, it's pretty much a racket. and hey, william blake did it.

but, as i've said before on my other blog, one of my rules is no work on publication unless i'm spending a certain amount of time writing.

*continue daily poetic practice
*publish a physic at the table--chapbook
*publish gentian weaves her fringes--full length book
*revise and send out four windows with flamboyant tracery--full length book

HEALTH

*get outside more (this is one i make every year and NEVER do. i can't explain my aversion to the outdoors. could it be agoraphobia?)
*continue yoga practice
*drink more water
*limit screen time

SCREENWRITING

two screenplays i want to write, and i'll just give their code names below in case someone decides to steal my amazing ideas and make millions off of them.

*alice
*francesca

SPIRITUAL/EMOTIONAL

*judge less (another every year res--i think i got a little better on this one this year, even if only i can tell)
*pay attention more

i really, really love new year's resolutions, i have to say. i have a penchant for starting over. my therapist once told me, "you're good at beginnings. we have to figure out how to make the middles more fun for you."

a good thought. i'm working on it.

but i figure it's totally legit to start over again in january, so here i am.

where are you?

p.s. legwear: leopard tights. and i wore my new pearl colored h&m dress. i spotted women at church wearing: black tights, grey woolen tights, blue striped tights, houndstooth tights. it's tights season here in utah. i spotted younger girls in red tights, mustard tights, sparkly tights, black tights and white tights. it's a festival of legwear.

only the poem

"How shall we get said what must get said?

Only the poem."

writes physician-poet william carlos williams near the opening of his poem the desert music.

outside, fat flakes of snow are falling, the first of the winter season, and inside i'm reading and re-reading the desert music and listening to steve reich's piece set to williams' text. a blissful two hours of reading, writing, and listening, warm inside, cold outside.

funny how one day you ask a question and the next day you get some sort of answer. today i read this about williams on the poetry foundation website:

"From the beginning," disclosed Linda Wagner, "he understood the tradeoffs: he would have less time to write; he would need more physical stamina than people with only one occupation.... [He] was willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one,... learning from the first and then understanding through the second."

williams is one of those poets with which i feel a great affinity. i often fall in to the triadic line--i love the idea of two lives in one--i love the caretaker poet, --the crooked, greeny flower, --beauty emerging from the rubble of apocalypse,--the experimenter,--the americanist--the poet who dictates terms from which he cannot depart, no matter how his poems are received.

(in the poem, on his way to texas, williams passes through yuma, julie's hometown, and a town i have visited twice, once for a high school swimming meet and once on my honeymoon when our car broke down on the way to san diego. we spent a night at the space age motel in yuma.)

in texas, some tourist recognizes williams as the famous american poet:

"So this is William

Carlos Williams, the poet .

You seem quite normal. Can you tell me why? Why

does one want to write a poem?

Because it's there to be written.

Oh. A matter of inspiration then?

Of necessity.

Oh. But what sets it off?

I am he whose brains
are scattered
aimlessly"

my favorite thing in this passage is the ambiguity around the reply "of necessity." is inspiration necessary to the poem? or is the poem written of necessity "because it's there"? does what is there necessarily get written (it is written)?

i feel the powerful poetry of those brains "scattered aimlessly." i feel that necessity of making the world look at what is there. necessity is one of the only answers that makes sense, though the poet is so often accused of her irrelevance.

no. she is not. irrelevant, i mean.

necessary.

if you don't feel her/it's necessity, you should work on that, because your soul is in danger of a gangrenous death.

don't think i'm being hyperbolic. i mean it.

it's also comforting that williams, in his first thirty years of writing, made 132.00 from his work, and received very little major recognition. and yet he continued to work according to the calling he had listened to, according to the dictates of his conscience. poems emerging on prescription pads, following the material of his own lived life, in the world of the physical body, the births and deaths, the illness and poverty he witnessed.

and then, the closing stanzas made me cry:

I am a poet! I
am. I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed

Now the music volleys through as in
a lonely moment I hear it. Now it is all
about me. The dance! The verb detaches itself
seeking to become articulate .


And I could not help thinking
of the wonders of the brain that
hears the music and of our
skill sometimes to record it

it's so beautiful that williams knows the "wonders of the brain" as both a physician and as a poet. his double life inspires this desert girl today to continue attempting to crowd "two lifetimes into one" with faith and vigour.

p.s. legwear=snakeskin jeans, day two. a little baggier today. i don't love wearing jeans, but it's cold out, and i'm wimpy about cold these days.