My Mary Oliver Moment

It seems weird to be writing this post to go live two days after my carpal tunnel and trigger thumb surgeries but it's on my dominant hand and it will be out of commission with a splint on it for a week. The problem with writing ahead is that I generally have to wait for more ‘life’ to happen for me to have anything to write about. I need at least a spark---a tidbit in a conversation, some quality people watching---to inspire a post. And as a secondary excuse, I’ve been sidetracked trying my hand at writing poetry and reading Mary Oliver books. She’s immensely popular and, to be honest, I can’t figure out why precisely. Poetry is a tough genre to make a name in and she’s managing to make it to the top of the modern heap. 

When I was a teenager I wrote long poems mostly about unrequited love and they were all rhyming verses with meter and metaphors. My very first attempt at writing a poem was for a high school assignment. It’s documented in an early 1950s diary and starts out, “Oh, how I hate to sit at home and rack my brain to write a poem.” One of the first poems I remember studying in school was Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. It’s included in Mary Oliver’s book, A Poetry Handbook. Here’s some gobbly-goop she says about that classic poem: “The initial four lines are rife with w’s and th’s; f is there and v. Three sets of double ll’s. The heaviness of the vowels is increased by the use of diphthongs.” Blab, blab blab. It’s too deep in the language weeds for me and it’s hurting my head to break down Frost’s poem into mutes and semivowels the way Mary does. 

Frost:

Whose woods these are I think I know

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

to watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

Me:

 

Oh, how I dearly hate to sit at home

learning the proper way to write a poem.

Even with Mary Oliver trying to teach me

I am like a blue bottle tossed out to sea

bobbing one way on the waves, then another 

as I recall the poems written by my brother.

My brother really could write heart-felt poetry and I don’t know where he got that ability or the desire to create them. He wasn’t the best student in high school---had the brains but he was more into  cars and girls instead of English Literature. And I’ve never known him to be much of a reader over the years. It wasn’t until the ‘80s when I got the rude awakening that he could write better poems than me. I was working on a family history book and had asked everyone in the family to submit something I could include…poems, essays, photos, special memories, recipes, answers to a questionnaire. That request revealed a lot of hidden talent. Both of my nieces sent me poems and one of their husbands did, my brother too, even my dad recited a poem on a cassette tape he wrote in the third grade. It was printed in his hometown newspaper where they called him the new Longfellow. We ended up with twenty poems and only four were written by me and I can honesty say my brother’s blew mine out of the water---thus the metaphorical bobbing in the waves (above).

From my superficial and extremely brief research I learned that poetry has been around in the spoken form since the twelfth century and much earlier in the form of verses sung to tell stories with its humble beginnings in ritual and religious chants. I have no trouble visualizing roaming bands of troubadours discovering words that rhyme and pleased the ear could bring more coins into their purses. I have no trouble visualizing monks doing their lovely chanting and receiving food offerings in their 'begging bowls.' Considering that music is universal in all cultures it safe to say that free verse and poetry is innate in all of us. In other words, we all could write it if we set our minds to do it, especial the newer free verse style where if there are any rules I haven't found them. Yet. It might not be good poetry but if we write about love, loss and life experiences other readers will find their stories in our words. If nothing else it’s good exercise for the brain to try to be our own versions of Mary Oliver. Or we'd accidentally write a few good old country western songs.

And guess what, I just finished writing a generic post for the week when I’ll be recovering from my trigger thumb and carpal tunnel surgeries. The eighth was the big day.  I'll try to update you in the comment section, should anyone leave one. ©

 

The Water's Edge and Angel Wings

Two perfect swans glide on the cloud’s reflection, their babies in tow as they approach a Great Egret standing on skinny stilts stalking minnows. The family stops to pluck their weedy dinner from below the water’s stillness. Geese touch down on the far side of the lake and Father Swan sets off on a mission to let the geese know the welcome mat is not out for them. The swans want to keep the aquatic plants all for themselves and the white creatures wins this round over the flock of honking, dark Canadians. But the war is not over at the water’s edge. It never is when territory is fought over to the amusement of those watching from the shore. 

Someone on the bank used their Boy Scout skills to build a tepee of sticks and twigs and they wove white swan feathers into a pattern at the bottom of the tepee, like spokes on a wagon wheel. I plucked three feathers from a pile of those not attached to the shire and carted them home. Three of anything is a collection. The longest one is 19 inches long and its a flight feather. I know that because google told me how to tell the difference between tail and flight feathers. “Tail feathers are balanced left and right of the center. Flight feathers have a wider and narrower side. This makes them better for flying because they can cut through the air with very little resistance,” according to Arizona's 'Ask a Biologist' website. And try as I might I cannot separate the barbules and hooklets. 

Carrying my stolen treasurers home, someone along the trail told me it's illegal to keep them but my fear of going to feather hoarders’ prison didn’t last long. Google told me that people are selling them in plain sight. Yup, you guessed it. I fell down the rabbit hole of learning everything there is to know about features including how bags of white feathers are sold for weddings and others have their quill ends sewn on webbed ribbons and sold by the yard presumably to those making Native American ceremonial costumes or Victoria Secret type angel wings and capes. Those angel wings the models wear, by the way, are made of ostrich feathers and they weigh between 12 to 18 pounds. If you’ve always wanted one you’re in luck because there are tons of DIY videos online on how to make your own wings which begs the question: who is making themselves a set of wings and where do they keep them when they aren’t parading them around in the bedroom or on Halloween? There are videos on how to make your own feather capes and headdresses, too. 

But down duck and goose feathers sold by the pound make me sad thinking about all the birds that had to die in some smelly processing plant and get their feathers plucked out moments after death. No time to grieve their friends also going down the line to get their heads ground off in the cruelest looking machines I’ve ever seen. (Remember Sarah Palin doing a promo at Thanksgiving while a turkey was being jammed head first down a machine in the background and the guy holding the bird by its feet was waiting to pull the headless bird back up after the cameras quit rolling?) We mammals pride ourselves on standing upright and living in houses but we are no different than the swans. We take what we want from lower down on the food chain. Some of us more cavalier about the process than others. Native American's in the movies of my youth, at least, thanked the spirit of the animals they kill for dinner. Sarah Palin laughed at the reporter who asked if she really wanted to do the interview in front of the turkey guillotine.

I thought my collecting days were over when I downsized and moved here last October. But now I have a collection of owl and swan feathers and I am resisting picking up goose and duck feathers. What are the possibilities they’ll give me salmonella? Growing my mom caught me licking a turtle once and gave me my first salmonella lecture. What are the possibilities an apartment filled with nature’s discards won’t lead to me becoming what I’ve always feared---that in my old age I’ll start saving creamer cups and picking lent off the hall floors and hoarding my ‘treasures’ in a dresser drawer. My husband’s mother did those things in her dementia. 

Lately I’ve been spending more and more time at the water’s edge. I come prepared with my notebook and book of inspiration, intending to go back to my writing roots when my teen-self tried to create poetry. But so many people walk by on the trail and stop to talk that I don’t get very far trying to channel Mary Oliver. I carry around her book, A Poetry Handbook as if just holding it will give me an ear for meter and rhyme. It’s not working. Nor did the two times I actually read the book impart me the ability to do more than learn to look longer and harder at nature and write opening lines like, “Two perfect swans glide on the cloud’s reflection, their babies in tow as they approach a Great Egret standing on skinny stilts stalking minnows.” ©

Sarah Palin

 P.S.  I ran across a blog post that might help those of us having trouble posting comments on our own and/or other people's blogs---they come out as anonymous instead of with our google account name and link. Life and Linda has helped many of us bloggers with technical stuff and gives great, detailed instructions. I followed her directions for Firefox but she gives them for Chrome and Safari as well. A Fix for Anonymous Comments.  Good Luck!

 

My Mary Oliver Story

 

I knew I was overdue to make a run to the grocery store when I found myself standing in front of the open refrigerator in the middle of the night snacking on cooked, cold cauliflower with the dog. He loves it and I only eat it because it’s good for something besides adding pounds on my hips or spiking my blood pressure. Levi will probably out live me; he loves all the vegetables on the ‘color wheel’ and I’m all about the dressing and croutons that goes on top of salads. My normal mid-night raiding bounty is sugar free parfait snack cups. Twenty-five calories topped with twenty more calories of sugar free whipped cream from a can. You gotta love whoever it was who invented spray cans and sweet, bread and butter pickle chips. I’ve never eaten the two together but I’m not dead yet and that’s still on my Bucket List.

Seven years ago when I couldn’t sleep I wrote new blog posts. My husband had recently passed away and I wrote more philosophical stuff than I do now. Case in point: “I am reminded of a passage I read in a book a long time ago, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: ‘We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.’ Grief and its aftermath is that kind of a force that makes us find a new direction in our lives, an uncharted course that eventually picks its way back down the hill with the volume of our tears added to its flow.” I’m not sure if my sentence about grief and its aftermath is brilliant, sappy or cliché but it’s as close to Mary Oliver as I’ll ever write.

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'”

Mary Oliver

Do you know how hard it is get a Pulitzer Prize in poetry? Actually, I don’t but considering how few people voluntarily sit down and read a book of poems I’m guessing it’s pretty difficult. Mary also got the prestigious National Book Award as well as other great honors to add to her resume. She started writing poems at fourteen. And so did I. Her writer’s voice came from living a hard life in a dysfunctional family that included sexual abuse that caused her to focus more on poignant observances of the natural world around her instead of on what was happening to her. My early poems came with common teenage hormones---little, love sick crushes and bruises that no other eyes than mine has ever seen. It’s on my Bucket List to destroy those poems soon, another part of my past gone. How many parts will end up on the trash heap before I’m no longer me?  

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver

While Mary was writing about things that resonates world-wild, my teenaged mind was coming up with trite like this: 

My heart stands naked

Like the wintered dogwood tree

And the wind blows strongly

Through the branches left to see.

The snow lies heavy

On the cold, harden bark

And the limbs bow lowly

As the day turns dark.

Yadda, yadda, yadda and after a few more verses I predicted the boy who dumped me would come back in the spring when dogwood blossoms. Re-reading some of my old poems this morning reaffirms the fact that I need to stick to writing memoir-style prose. And here's your laugh for the day: I don't even remember the guy's name who broke my heart. ©

 "Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

Arthur Golden

Mary, Hillary and the Handyman---Sounds Kinky, Doesn’t it

A few months ago I signed up to get Merriam-Webster’s Word-of-the Day delivered to my e-mail box. The idea was to build my vocabulary and I had planned to use a new-to-me word in each blog entry. That didn’t work out. Although I still read, listen to and study each daily word, I’ve only used two of them in my own writing. Today is my third attempt and the word is ‘holus-bolus’ which means “all at once.” The example they gave was this: “If you shout your questions at me holus-bolus, instead of asking them one at a time, then I won't be able to hear any of them.” The minute I read that word I thought of Mary Oliver. I think she’d like ‘holus-bolus.’ I’ve been reading her book titled, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.” I bought it because I have a secret desire to write poetry and because everywhere I go lately Mary Oliver’s name shows up. Even Hillary Clinton mentioned Ms. Oliver in her new book, What Happened. (I’m reading both books at the same time. Well, alternately but wouldn’t it be cool if we could read one book with one eye and another book with the other eye? Think how much smarter we’d be if we could maximize our reading time like that.) 

Mary’s book starts out with gobbly-goop about the alphabet of familiar sounds. Vowels and consonants and semivowels and mutes. Oh, my! She writes stuff like, “In this run of short i sounds, the i used as part of a diphthong (in ‘their,’ ‘coin,’ ‘eerie,’ and ‘fusion’) is not a part of the assonance proper; neither, of course, is the long i in ‘spinal.’ But the y sound in the word ‘crystal’ is.” If I have to understand gobbly-goop like this I’ll never learn how to write poetry. It doesn’t help that I never learned how to sound out words. Still can’t. But I can still remember the opening line to a poem I wrote in high school: “Oh, how I hate to sit at home and rack my brain to write a poem.”

Hillary’s book is much easier to understand. In the early pages she wrote about how she reread one of her favorite books after the election, The Return of the Prodigal Son. She quotes the author, Henri Nouwen’s, lesson of the parable of the Prodigal Son---“I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.” Hillary says Nouwen’s “discipline of gratitude” to her means that having gratitude for the good things isn’t enough, that’s too easy. She says we need to be grateful for the hard things too because, “in the end, they make us stronger…. My task, “she wrote, “was to be grateful for the humbling experience of losing the presidential election. Humility can be such a painful virtue.” Personally, I don’t know how she ever got out of bed let alone go through the cathartic process of writing a book and going on a book tour.

This week I finally got into the ears, nose and throat doctor. He was running nearly an hour late but it was worth the wait to have him find a ball of gobbly-goop---I love those words---in my ear made up of blood, dead skin and wax. He suctioned it out and wrote me a prescription for ear drops for the infection left behind. Afterward I rushed home to meet with a contractor I found on Home Adviser, a franchised service called Handyman Connections. I had a piece of siding in the peak of my garage, that had fallen off and it required a fifteen foot ladder to put it back on. I only have a two step ladder lest I’d be tempted to do anything farther off the floor than that. He was ten minutes late and he got the job done in fifteen minutes but it could have been done in ten if a family of wasps hadn’t built their nest on the vacated space left behind when the shingle fell off. Ninety-five dollars and I was glad to pay it since two other near-by siding companies I contacted didn’t even bother to respond. 

When I think of all the ‘honey-do’ projects like the shingle job that my husband did for us, his mother, my parents, the neighbors and other people who knew he always had the right tools for any job, I realize how under-appreciated he and most handy husbands are. Handyman Connections earned extra bonus points because I didn’t have to nag the guy to get the work done in a timely manner and he picked up after himself and that can’t be said about all handy husbands. What more could I have asked for on a bright, sunny day? Well, I could ask for my husband back but we all know that’s not the way the world of wishes works. (Did I just write an assonance at the end of that last sentence? Mary has me so confused!) ©

“In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question.

Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.”

Mary Oliver