Friday Writings #151: “a box full of darkness”

 

Greetings, dear poets and storytellers. How’s life in your bit of the world? Did you have a good Halloween? Do you celebrate Halloween? I do. I spent the day making pumpkin chili for my family and readying my mind and flesh for another surgery. As part of the mental preparation, I’ve been reading poetry and stories that celebrate silver linings (even when they’re barely there to be seeing). 

With that in mind, for today’s optional prompt, I invite you to find inspiration in the following lines, from Mary Oliver’s “The Uses of Sorrow”: 

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness. 

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift. 

I’m looking forward to reading what you and your muse brew out of Oliver’s words. 

Please, add the direct link to your response to Mister Linky. One post per participant. 369 words maximum (excluding title), for prose and for poetry. You may share old or new pieces. You may write to the prompt or to a topic of your choosing. Try visiting other poets and storytellers. Read their words. Comment on the word-tapestries they weave for us to delight in. 

for next week, Rommy will invite us to write about the phrase “holding your breath”.
 

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Weekly Scribblings #83: Pay Attention

Offline, one of the writers’ groups I belong to is the LitChix – a small group of women who are basically poets but have been known to scribble some prose too.

At our latest meeting we got talking about Mary Oliver. It turned out that one of the LitChix had never encountered any of Oliver’s poetry. The others hastened to find examples on our devices, to recite to her. Of course it only took one poem for her to realise she could no longer live without reading every Mary Oliver poem she could find!

Meanwhile I’d submitted a piece for workshopping which was descriptive of nature – a piece which I thought had some possibilities yet was in the end, as it stood, a big ‘so what?’ My friends agreed with my assessment on both counts.

After we’d delved into Oliver for a while, one of the others asked me,

‘What would you say is the difference between your poem and Mary Oliver’s poetry?’

‘Well,’ I began, ‘my piece was written from memory, a  memory of something which took place a long time ago. Her poems stem from the immediate moment.’

One of the others pointed out that, whereas mine described a whole landscape, Oliver tends to concentrate on one particular piece of nature – such as that grasshopper she describes so exactly and uniquely in the poem, The Summer Day (from House of Light, 1990). 

So it became clear to us that what Oliver does is focus. Very closely, very narrowly.

She tells us so, quite clearly, when she says (as our Magaly recently quoted to us):

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

(from Sometimes, published in her book Red Bird, 2008)
.

She also tends to come to some striking conclusions, which grow out of that specific focus – such as the lines just quoted.

We decided to try and emulate that approach – realising with some chagrin how seldom we really, really look at things, paying attention to every detail. Surely that is what writers do? You'd think. Yet we all seemed to have fallen into a habit of giving only hasty and shallow attention to the world around us, and without even noticing we'd done so. Shocking!

One of us had brought the hostess a sunflower. It stood on her table as we worked, in a graceful big jug of water. Our exercise was to focus closely on it, and write about it with that focus.

 

The results were fascinating. We came up with very different poems, reflecting our different selves and world views (for instance, I anthropomorphised like mad – and indeed, I do regard all living things as highly sentient) but what they had in common was detail and originality. They’re not very Mary Oliver-ish – but then, we weren’t seeking to be influenced by her words or style but her method.

I invite you to choose one object in nature, examine it closely, letting it inspire in you a sense of wonder, and then write your new poem or prose piece about it (prose to be 369 words maximum).

The point of our Weekly Scribblings is for you to be inspired to write something fresh and new – but if there's something very recent (within the last month by calendar date) that really fits the prompt, we'll accept that. Ditto for older pieces extensively rewritten (if possible, link to the original). Though in this case, as the exercise starts with looking at something closely in the immediate moment, brand-new is obviously the most fitting response of all.

 

Material shared here is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors. (Older material may be out of copyright). The Sunflower photo is © Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2021.
 

Writers’ Pantry #70: Words for Healing

Well, dear Wordsmiths, poetry won’t set your broken leg, detoxify your swollen tonsils or stop a burn from blistering – let alone prevent the spread of COVID – but it has at times helped me get through grief and other emotional trauma.

Sometimes that's been due to reading poems which express similar grief and trauma. When someone manages to convey exactly what you're feeling, in all its anguish, it can have a cathartic effect more deeply healing than any soothing words of comfort.

A E Housman’s White in the Moon the Long Road Lies is one that has helped me through loss of love in the past. And his The Rain It Streams On Stone and Hillock, a denial of grief which utterly fails to deny it, has helped me mourn my dead. Beneath a bleak but stoical tone, both these pieces are full of anguish.

Or, it can help to read poems which have nothing to do with such emotions but instead remind us of the glories of nature, in such a way as to take us out of ourselves. Pretty much anything of Mary Oliver’s can do that for me.

Oliver knew she was doing it, for all the me's out here whom she would never meet. She accepted it as her task. 'My work is loving the world,' she said, 'Let me / keep my mind on what matters, / which is my work, / which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.' And she said it in a poem called Messenger.

She did it for herself too. In another poem, Dogfish, she said: 

  I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

Quite so. Writing one’s own poetry can be deeply healing. Sadly, over the last year many poets have found themselves unable to write, ground down by the pandemic and other horrors. It's not surprising; we are sensitive souls, let's face it. Yet for poets to be unable to express themselves is surely the ultimate in despair!

At such times, I find it helps to (a) look outside myself, and (b) turn to the short forms – to capture a moment, an impression, rather than dwell on the larger picture.  Haiku and senryu are ways to do that. I also love trying UK writer Satya Robyn’s idea: ‘small stones’. (I’ve mentioned them before, a time or seven. They’re a favourite practice for me. But for anyone who hasn’t heard of them before:) You focus on some small thing you encounter in your environment, whether beautiful or in some other way interesting, pick it up as if it were a small stone, take it home and polish it. My own small stones are most often in verse, but that's not a requirement.

 

Perhaps it is stories which heal you? There are times when I disappear into a wallow of escapist reading. Regency Romances work; so does Young Adult Fantasy. I have friends who love detective stories; others who create their own fictional adventures as gamers. (Never appealed to me – I'm not much of a fiction writer anyway – but my Firstborn is an avid gamer, along with many of his mates.)

As I so seldom write fiction, if I’m going to try and help myself in prose, it’s likely to be an account of what I’m feeling and why. Writing it out, a bit like a journal entry – if I kept a journal. (My poems are my journal.) Such an account might turn out to be a prose poem, or an excerpt for a memoir I may possibly complete some day.

I'm curious. How do words help you find healing when you need it? Perhaps you are one who prefers to read soothing, comforting words? Or maybe you turn to comedy to take your mind off things? Some of us, I know, in times of need, write poems which are essentially prayers – for ourselves and/or the world. And very beautiful they can be. I think the act of praying, publicly or privately, can be immensely healing for oneself as well as those one prays for.

I’d love you to leave a little note here in the comments, if you care to, to answer my question. 

After all that – please regale us with a poem or story, old or new, on any subject. If you’re giving us prose, please make it 369 words max, excluding title.

 

For those who like a little advance notice:

Next Wednesday Rommy will be inviting us to compose either a list poem or a prose piece that incorporates the idea of a list.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Material shared here is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors. (Older material may be out of copyright).

Photo of river pebbles by Fyre Willow on Unsplash.

Writers’ Pantry #59: Love and Loss

Greetings, dear poets and storytellers. I hope you are well. I hope life is being good to you (or, at the very least, fair…). I’m in a melancholic mood, thinking about love and loss, about the connections between the living and the dead, about the truth weaved into this Sarah Dessen’s quote:

“You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it’s reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again”

If you have ever lost someone, you know just how true Dessen’s words are. Grief, like love, is forever—it dulls, it grows, it changes... but it never truly dies. Living, after loss, can be easier when we remember this. Or, like Mary Oliver says:

“To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

Don’t let my mood affect your ink. Let your prose or poetry be cheerful (unless you aren’t feeling it). Let your words be new or old, short or long, fiction or nonfiction... One link per participant, please. If you choose to give us the gift of your prose, let the word count be 369 words or fewer. Let us write, read, and share our thoughts.

- for our next Weekly Scribblings, our Rommy would like us to create new poetry or prose inspired by one (or all) of the following Hamilton quotes: 1. “I’m looking for a mind at work.” 2. “History has its eyes on you.” 3. “Talk less. Smile more.” 4. “Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.” 5. “Love doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints.”

photo by Jill Dimond, on Unsplash

Writers’ Pantry #53: The Bicentenary of Anne Brontë’s Birth

Greetings, dear poets and storytellers. I hope you and your muse are having a good day. If not, well… then let us make each other’s day a bit better through words.

One of the gazillion literary trivia sites I follow informed me that today is Anne Brontë’s birthday. Yep, if she had still been with us, she would’ve been turning 200 (and very likely be suspected of vampirism). When I was done reading about her accomplishments—novels, a book of poems with her sisters—I realized that I have never read anything by her. I shall remedy that soon. I just have to decide if I want to start with Agnes Grey or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Have you read them? If so, which would you recommend I read first?

In the meantime, here are some of the lady’s words:

“The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.” ~ from Agnes Grey

“Oh, Youth may listen patiently,
While sad Experience tells her tale,
But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,
For ardent Hope will still prevail!”
~ from “Views of Life”

And because today is also the second anniversary of Mary Oliver’s death, here are a few lines from our beloved Mary (which brighten my day whenever loss shrouds it in gloom):

“maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us”
~ from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

Now, the Writers’ Pantry is open for word yumminess. Add your poetry or prose, new or old, short or long(is), jolly or growly; the choice is always yours. If you choose to delight us with your prose, let the word count be 369 words or fewer.

Please remember to add the direct link to your contribution, not just the link to your blog. That way we can find your post easily, especially if it takes us a few days to visit you. Take a moment to visit other participants, and let them know what their words do for you. As always, Mr. Linky will remain open for a week.

- for our next Weekly Scribblings, Rommy would like us to create new poetry or prose using one (or as many as we want) of the poetic terms she selected out of Bruce Hamana Sosei’s book, 100 Beautiful Words in The Way of Tea, which we can find in this link.

Let us write. Let us read. Let us grow and grow (with words).

Anne Brontë (at age 13) sketched by her sister, Charlotte Brontë

Weekly Scribblings #52: Something About Mary

Hello, dear wordsmiths. It was good to have our little holiday over Christmas and New Year – very refreshing – and it’s good to be back!

One of the things I did in the break was lots and lots of reading. And one of the things I read, cover to cover, was Dream Work by Mary Oliver – many people’s favourite poet, and definitely one of my favourites. I don’t think there could be a Mary Oliver poem I would dislike, just not possible! 

This is one I like especially:

Prompt:

I invite you to choose a line or phrase from this poem and use it to inspire a new piece of your own writing.

You don’t have to use those actual words in your piece, though you certainly may. 

Reminders:

As always, we welcome both poetry and short prose. Prose is limited to 369 words max, and may be either fiction or non-fiction. 

Do tell us, in a note on your blog post, which of Oliver's words inspired this piece of writing. (Even if you quote from them – to save us having to check back.)

We’d love you to link back here in your post, and to leave us a quick comment below. 

Please visit other participants to read their work and leave an encouraging comment.

This Mister Linky will stay open for one week. 

Material shared here is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors. (Older material may be out of copyright).

Wild Fridays #17: The Living Dead

Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

that we live forever.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

In whatever sense she meant that last line, perhaps not even Mary Oliver would be thinking now that we live forever – not even as a species ... not even, perhaps, the planet as a whole. (She left us before the fires in Australia last year, or the plague throughout the whole world this year.)

And yet, I doubt she was referring to physical mortality; but rather, perhaps, an experience of the ineffable.

In any case, it's been a long April – for some of us gamely producing a poem a day, and for all of us dealing with the strange new reality we inhabit of lockdowns and compulsive hand-washing, sudden loss of income for many, and the horrifying numbers of the sick and dead.

I won't dwell more on the facts of the pandemic; we all know them too well by now. And those of us who have been responding to poetry prompts this April (applause, applause! take a bow) have oftentimes touched on aspects of the pandemic. How could we not? Though some, at least some of the time, have turned to more positive subject matter as a counter-balance; often the beauty and soothing powers of nature.

I thought we could all use a little more of that at this point. For me, no-one does it better than Mary Oliver. I well remember coming across her book, House of Light in a library in 1993, my first discovery of her work. I was completely enraptured, indeed amazed. I have had no cause to respond any differently since. She never disappoints. She always uplifts.

She did her work well, of loving the world. And she wrote of it for us, so that we can do it too. The world has not been entirely devastated yet; even the human race has not been annihilated yet, nor succeeded in destroying everything else. There are still plums, in the right season; there are still hummingbirds somewhere, and sunflowers, and clams. If I stay alive long enough, I'll know a few more years of them, and of moths, pastures, etc.

Just for now, after this long and often frightening April, I invite you to stop, take a moment, and let the late Mary Oliver (who will live as long as there are readers) remind you how to love the world while it exists and we are here in it.

As she said memorably in another poem ('The Summer Day'):

'I do know how to pay attention ...
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?'

and (say it with me)

'Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?'

 

Photo © Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2019. (I've posted pictures of Mary herself at other times I've featured her. I thought this post called for an image of the natural world. I hope it doesn't matter that this is the Australian rather than the American outdoors.)

Material shared in 'The Living Dead' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, where applicable (older poems may be out of copyright).

Wild Fridays #8: The Living Dead

  








Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
        full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Angels

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads. 

I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance. 

Watering the Stones

Every summer I gather a few stones from
the beach and keep them in a glass bowl.
Now and again I cover them with water,
and they drink. There’s no question about
this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly,
yet the water disappears. This doesn’t
mean we ever have a conversation, or that
they have the kind of feelings we do, yet
it might mean something. Whatever the
stones are, they don’t lie in the water
and do nothing.

Some of my friends refuse to believe it
happens, even though they’ve seen it. But
a few others—I’ve seen them walking down
the beach holding a few stones, and they
look at them rather more closely now.
Once in a while, I swear, I’ve even heard
one or two of them saying “Hello.”
Which, I think, does no harm to anyone or
anything, does it?

– By Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
(These poems are not in the book pictured here; I chose it because her photo is on the cover.)

There are times for facing up to the serious problems of the world, and trying to figure out what we can do to create change. And then there are other times when we long for some moments of peace, to remember all the lovely things there are about the world and what it is that we want to preserve if we can; even, perhaps, to contemplate spiritual mysteries, believing in powers for good beyond the immediately apparent.

Finding myself in that second mood, I had a yen for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who so delights in the natural world and reveals it to us with unsurpassed beauty. I own several of her books, but I found these particular poems online (as part of an article on her work by Alex Luppens-Dale at a site called Book Riot). They all have the gentleness and wonder which I craved. 

The first is grounded in the natural world, showing us how to pay close attention to its details, to learn about its truths and mysteries. She is a master at showing us how the factual is also, simultaneously, miraculous. The fact that in this piece the wonder resides in broken, damaged things seems appropriate just now – a necessary reminder, in our troubled times, that it can be so.

And then the next two deal almost matter-of-factly with the mystical/magical in a way that I find absolutely engaging. Well, it happens that I am one for whom angels exist and stones are sentient beings – but even if not, I think I might find these poems delightfully persuasive.

Reading Mary Oliver always seems calming, somehow, at the same time as it awakens me to boundless possibilities. Entertaining the idea of dancing angels, contemplating stones that drink, or piecing together the meaning in broken shells – all these suddenly seem valid, worthy pursuits, just as important as worrying about all the serious practical matters which demand our attention.

Do we need poems like these as a temporary relief from more disturbing preoccupations, a means of restoring ourselves so as to go on trying to cope and find answers? Or are the things Oliver engages with the very things which make the state of the planet – and humanity – matter?

Material shared in 'The Living Dead' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, where applicable (older poems may be out of copyright).