searching for radiance

POETRY SEARCHES FOR RADIANCE

by Adam Zagajewski

Poetry searches for radiance,
poetry is the kingly road
that leads us farthest.
We seek radiance in a gray hour,
at noon or in the chimneys of the dawn,
even on a bus, in November,
while an old priest nods beside us.

The waiter in a Chinese restaurant bursts into tears
and no one can think why.
Who knows, this may also be a quest,
like that moment at the seashore,
when a predatory ship appeared on the horizon
and stopped short, held still for a long while.
And also moments of deep joy

and countless moments of anxiety.
Let me see, I ask.
Let me persist, I say.
A cold rain falls at night.
In the streets and avenues of my city
quiet darkness is hard at work.
Poetry searches for radiance.

I seek radiance in my backyard, in all its imperfections. I seek radiance in the grey hours, and through bleary eyes. I seek radiance in the middle of the night, awakened from a dream, heart beating like a bird cupped in a hand. If you let it go it might not come back.

Let us persist.

Radiance is easy to find after a good rain. Maybe that's true.

I've placed a couple of Adam Zagajewski's books up on my recommended shelf, above.

He's a poet I deeply admire. There's an interview with him at Poets & Writers that's worth reading.


A short excerpt:



P&W: Your poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” speaks to the hope that may persist in the wake of devastation. What role does poetry—particularly lyric poetry—have in this endeavor? Does poetry, with its tiny audience, have the power to restore the mutilated world?

AZ: Of course not in a big, perfectly visible way, but don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and prehuman, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.

you are pure poetry

Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.

- Bernard of Clairvaux

"I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes
I want my face to be a poem"

- from "Ars Poetica" by Dorothea Lasky

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

There is no fixed path to enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a destination, a goal, the resting place at the end of a long journey -that’s the mind’s version of enlightenment. Enlightenment is the lighting up of where you are right now.

This is very good news. It means that nobody is the authority on your path - no teacher, no guru, no religious leader. It means that nobody can tell you the right ‘way’ for you. It means that you cannot go wrong, even if you think you’ve gone wrong. It means that nothing that happens can ever lead you off the path, for the path is whatever happens, without exception. Nothing can take you away from the miracle of life, or bring you closer to it for that matter, since the miracle is all around, already shining brightly, as every thought, sensation, image, feeling, smell, sound, and as the deeper miracle of the one who is aware of all of this.

Be the awareness, shining on the moment, whatever its contents. Doubt, fear, sadness, anger, intense confusion - maybe, just maybe, these are neither enemies nor blocks to enlightenment, but expressions of a deeper intelligence, the same incomprehensibly vast and awake intelligence that gives birth to stars and moves the ocean tides and sends each and every living thing off on its paradoxical journey towards its own being.

Come out of the story of time and space and progress towards a future goal, and trust a sacred moment. Take any moment. Any moment at all. This moment. For any moment is the access point.
There are never any blocks - only access points. You are not some separate entity on a long journey towards a future completion.

You are pure poetry. ”

- Joseph Campbell

That we are pure poetry, yes.

But also that there are days of pure exhaustion. Days utterly lacking in poetry. This is when I most crave the silence of a forest. The sound of leaves. 

If it were only possible to write poems every day. Maybe this can happen when you're young, a student. But the more you go on as a writer, you know this to be just one of the impossible dreams you live with, the one that haunts you. Some days you feel yourself yearning and you can't quite remember what it is you lean toward, what makes you so heavy, why your heart feels like it's not quite in the proper position - pinched. 

But this, too, must be trusted as a sacred moment. 

That the absence of poetry

is a kind of poetry. 

rehearsed by the sorrows

W A I T 

by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything, if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. And the desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

    

Wait.

Don't go too early.

You're tired. But everyone's tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a while and listen.

Music of hair,

Music of pain,

music of looms weaving all our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear,

the flute of your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

It bears repeating:

"Wait, for now.

Distrust everything, if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?"

I'm tired, but everyone's tired.

Woke up at 4am, and finally gave up on sleep at 5am. Read poetry for a couple of hours. Waiting for things to become lovely again....

all obstacles overcome

Last Spring

by Gottfried Benn (trans. Michael Hofmann)

Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you

into June, when the roses blow.

Our forsythia hedge has lost its blooms. The lilacs are flowering now (our yard is somehow wildly abundant in lilacs), and the poppies are blooming intermittently now. Some we planted last year coming up again, and some are newly planted, the flowers in bloom when we bought them from Home Depot. These for example. Which you will remember from a few posts back.

A further state of decline, decrepitness. Stir these in too with, as Benn says, your blood and happiness and wretchedness.

 So, all these photos and there were more at the beginning, maybe twice as many. I deleted, and deleted, the best editing tool of all, isn't it, the delete button? And now out of these, I select the one I like best to post on Flickr. Which is the one directly below. (The opposite focus of the one above).

Though I do also like this one quite a bit. The lonely wretchedness.

And I like this one because of the contrast with the lighter pink poppy, with its missing petal, the way its faded, and the way it's managed to stave off the withering.

And I like this one because of the glimpses of the rest of the bouquet.

This one is very similar to one a few above, but the colours are a bit more saturated and the pink blur is a bit less defined.

And this one I like because of the strange focus - on the yellow center of the pink poppy, and on the stem of the darker pink-red one.

Thank you for your beautiful comments this week, which I treasure. And thank you for looking at my photographs and reading poems along with me, and drinking coffee along with me, or maybe it's tea. I'll finish the cup I'm drinking now, then it will be time to wake up our daughter, to get on with the making of breakfast. All of those rituals of the morning. I'm wishing you all calm things this Friday. I'm wishing them for myself, too.....as I head into work for a full day today.

everything you need

"If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need."

- Cicero

Isn't this true? On break one night, I took a few photos of the library branch where I work.

And this is my funny little backyard garden in the rain one morning.

So there, you could say, I have it all.

myself being myself

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”



“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves

It's time to sit quietly, let myself be myself. Time to revisit favourite books, favourite authors. Time to write in notebooks and journals and see what emerges. Time to watch beauty break, how every day, it renews itself.

Today there is rain, and I'll watch that, too. I'll listen to the music of the rain, that silence.

a life without boundaries

"Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy...."

from "Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings" by Juan Felipe Herrera

{read the entire poem here}

I use this blog to work out some ideas, to try out ways of thinking and seeing, to see how a photo changes when you post it for all to see. These ones for example. I use this blog to record my everyday life, those things I encounter, to keep things fresh, and to look at old things in new ways. I use this blog to find poems. To surprise myself that way. (There is no poem to speak of....) To remember that through poetry it's possible to attain a life without boundaries. Yes.

There's something I love about these photos of our house. First, our living room, Rob's working photographs, potential paintings, lining the coffee table. The big couch we've had for twenty years. The painting of pomegranates that graces the front cover of my first book. The dog a black shadow between couch and coffee table.

I love the Cy Twombly silk screen that we bought for a Christmas present to each other this past year and the angel wings I've had for years now and that we bought at a local garden shop.

I love sitting in this room and contemplating all the things we've made and will make, each of us, Rob and myself, over so many years together. I love to sit on that big old couch that we'll probably have until forever, and daydream.

Yes, I love the crazy dog. You know that already.

And I love this crazy table that we found discounted in a store, maybe 20 years ago now. Probably everyone else thought it was a bit over the top. And it is hell to dust, I'll give you that.

Another room, with my turquoise table that appears so often in photos. The chair that Rob found in a junk shop long before we were married.

Last on the tour is my study, where I spend most of my time, when I'm not at work. It's the place in the world where I breathe the best, where I am most myself. Where I most feel that life has no boundaries.