This morning, I was reading Kevin Brockmeir's short story, The Year of Silence in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and I found these lines interesting.

The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

Aah...so, methinks my verbosity & prolificity at my blog, on facebook, and lately on Twitter, is perhaps merely a sign of discontentment? The year of my discontentment. (It's been more than a season; else I'd have put the title as "the winter of our discontent" ;))

And unlike the silence of the story, this one is not "plain and rich and deep."

The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured.

And so it goes.... to paraphrase from another line from the story: "In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves." (The line in the story is exactly the same except it uses "proceeded")

Update: Just finished the story. Lovely! The last paragraph of the story reads:

Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behidn, like the imprints of vanished shells in the curst of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation.

Some day, hopefully all this discontent also recedes "further into the past" and "fades slowly into antiquation"!

--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - last line of The Great Gatsby nu F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest American novel ever written!

As those following my music blog posts may know, I am a big fan of music from Mali. And it seems two Malian singers - Rokia Traore (see my blog post for some videos) and the blind husband-wife pair Amadou-Mariam (youtube video) have won major awards at the inaugural Songlines World Music Awards (which I ran into on Twitter). 

More details here. Seems ..

The Songlines Music Awards were established to continue the tradition of the now-defunct BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music, recognizing outstanding talent in world music.

Also, note the "newcomer" award winner -- an Indian musician, who I had not heard of before today.

Best Artist - Rokia Traoré   

Best Group - Amadou & Mariam  

Cross-cultural Collaboration - Jah Wobble & The Chinese Dub Orchestra 

Newcomer - Kiran Ahluwalia

To listen to Kiran's songs, go to her website. It starts streaming few of her songs, in full. On Twitter, she mentions recent collaborations for fusion with Italian aria and Hip-Hop. Interesting!!

Impressive project. Emphasis mine.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.   The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.  "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.  People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.  Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained. 

More at the link above. Also this kinda related study from the Scripps Research Institute. Variety, thy name is life!

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands—an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches, similar to the finches that Charles Darwin famously described in The Origin of the Species 150 years ago. As described in an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

Uber-cool! Again, More at the link above.

--

“In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.” - William Saraoyan

In researching a poet every day for my tweets on Twitter in celebration of National Poetry Month, I read some of Langston Hughes' poetry over the last two days. In comparison to those poems, the struggles of the African American people have manifest itself in such a different voice through the poems of Amiri Baraka, (formerly known as Leroi Jones). The rhetoric (of the 1960s civil rights movement) of anger, political rebellion, and angst over the African American identity is captured well in his poetry.

I ran into Amiri Baraka's poetry when I started reading poet Adrienne Rich's book A Human Eye, day before yesterday night. It is a collection of essays on Art in Society (1997-2008) and includes a wonderful essay (originally published in the Boston Review) about the poetry of  Amiri Baraka. Writing about Baraka's poems in The Dead Lecturer (out of print; most of the poems can be read in this collection), she writes:

It is the book of an artist contending first of all with himself, his sense of emotional dead ends, the limits of poetic community, the contradictions of his assimilation by that community, his embrace and rejection of it: searching what possible listening, what possible love or solidarity might exist out beyond those contradictions. It is the book of a young artist doing what some few manage or dare to do: question the foundations of the neighborhood in which he or she has come of age and received affirmation.

To further expand on that, here are some words from Baraka himself from the preface to the Baraka Reader:

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation. Whether it is politics, music, literature, or the origins of language, there is always a historical and time/place/condition reference that will always try to explain why I was saying both how and for what.

To quote from the Adrienne Rich essay again:

And it is a book, not an assemblage of occasional poems: a soul-journey borne in conflictual music, faultless phrasing. Music, phrasing of human flesh longing for touch, mind fiercely working to decipher its predicament. Titles of poems are set sometimes in bold, sometimes italics, implying structures within the larger structure. Drawing both on black music and the technical innovations of American Modernism, Jones moves deeper into a new poetics, what the poet June Jordan would name “the intimate face of universal struggle.”

But intimacy is never simple, least of all in poems like these where “inept tenderness” (“A Poem for Neutrals”) searches for an ever-escaping mutuality. 

And identity is never simple either. In contrast to Hughes' poems, which incorporated into poetry the aesthetics of the blues as the experience of a race, Amari writes in his poem, Notes For a Speech:

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land.

..

My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.

Like Adrienne Rich writes about his poem, An Agony. As Now., which deals with existential anguish but in a "surround of social hatred":

Here is self-wrestling of a politicized human being, an artist/intellectual, writing among the white majority avant-garde at a moment when African revolutions and black American militance seemed to be converging in the electric field of possible liberations. Experiencing the American color line—that deceptively, murderously, ever-shifting, ever-intransigent construct—as neither “theme” nor abstraction, but as disfiguring all life, and in a time when “revolution” was still a political, not a merchandising term, Jones’s poems both compress and stretch the boundaries of the case. “

Also this poem, which is included in Rich's essay:

  / the society
                           the image, of
                           common utopia.
                               / The perversity
                               of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter
     their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others,
     saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less
     than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The
     black. The thoroughly
ignorant.

               Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

Like Rich writes:

The poem’s structure spirals like a staircase, where “the society / the image, of / common utopia” turns sharply into “The perversity / of separation, isolation,” this turn signified by a full-stop and capital letter. And, since the poet is located between worlds, there is a necessary ambiguity to the pronouns, the “they” and the “our.” 

There is much more to read and enjoy, not only in Baraka's poetry but also in Rich's essay. I leave you to go read it in its entirety.

Related Reading: Essay in Dissent magazine on Amari Baraka's life and poetry.

Tripping on some interview excerpts at the Paris Review archives, I ran into an interview with the "confessional" poet, Anne Sexton, from the Summer of 1971. They are talking about Sylvia Plath, whose life and suicide has been much discussed in the decades since her death in 1965. (Unfortunately, the Paris Review interview, is among the few that are not part of the wonderful archive online.)

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it.

Anne wrote about Sylvia's death:

Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

Sadly, Anne Sexton herself was to commit suicide three years later.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton's most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Also see this fourteen-minute video (2 parts) where we see Anne Sexton at home reading, talking about poetry and about her family.

I myself will die without baptism,

a third daughter they didn't bother.

My death will come on my name day.

What's wrong with the name day?

It's only an angel of the Sun.

Woman,

weaving a web over your own,

a thin and tangled poison.

Scorpio,

bad spider ?

die!

Also, you can read some of her poems here and here and read more about Anne Sexton's life and career. Or better still read about her life, in her own words (some great pics too at the link.)

--
“That ragged Christ, that sufferer, performed the greatest act of confession, and I mean with his body. I try to do that with words” - Anne Sexton

Found via kottke.org

Love and hate are the same thing

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."

That's Marshall McLuhan. (via submitted for your perusal)

In my previous post, I wrote about a Paris Review interview with the current US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. In the same interview, she is asked about her partner of 30 years, Carol and how the two are coping with Carol's cancer.

Here are some excerpts which I found particularly moving.

KR: When I first met Carol, I was so glad to find somebody I could really talk to. There were people who I could drop a stone down and hear it go plunk really fast. But I could drop a stone down Carol and never hear it hit the bottom.


I: How are you two coping with Carol's illnes?
KR: I was just down at the store this morning, and a man was talking on his cell phone and he was saying, It wasn't just a camping trip; it was a survival class. And I was thinking how funny that was, because I'm having a survival class at my house. You don't have to go out and get it. It will come to you. We're all having a suvival class; you just have to wait.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, Carol lost her battle with cancer and passed away  in January this year. RIP, Carol Adair. Peace and strength to Kay Ryan as she deals with the loss.

P.S. Loved this line that Kay Ryan says later in another context about living an ordinary life. "I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind." Even if its just a 1 line post, I think that almost deserves its own post!

Loved these lines about poetry by Kay Ryan, who was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008, in an interview in Paris Review.

Interviewer: Do you feel that part of the laureate job is to convince the reading public that poetry is useful?

KR: It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this tal of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.

And so it goes. My daily poetry tweets over on twitter are anything but useful but now I know they serve a purpose - they are a balm which help me make room within myself. 

From later in the interview, this lovely excerpt:

I: Why do you think writing attracted you?

KR: It's a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it's hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinkng is creating the language. If I don't write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

I: How do you find the subject in a poem

KR: I don't know if I'm interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can't just slam it from the other side. You can't say, That's not right. This is right. You start fluffing it. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.

I love reading interviews with writers and poets! Love the way they think. Love the way they phrase answers. Delectable bits abound! (I flitted between "Poetry has its balms" to "poetry a great accelerator of the mind" to "know two things at once" for this post title!) 

Go pick up the Winter 2008 Paris Review issue and read the interview. Or, if you cannot get your hands on that issue, go to the Paris Review Interview Archive Index and enjoy interviews with the masters of the past. (Past interviews are archived for free as pdf files. (Thank you, Paris Review, for sharing these gems for free.)

Am tweeting about Wallace Stevens today and in addition to his wonderful poetry, I am finding so many great quotes by this esteemed Modernist poet. Here is one that I liked:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time;   nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

The passage is from Stevens' essay "Two or three ideas" (from Opus Posthumous; NYT Review). Though written in prose, it is supposed to be "a great hymn to absence and to the heroically human self."

Read this in the the write-up for the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemparary Poetry (vol 2)*

Dylan Thomas...

.. liked to speak of his poems as narratives, as in his reply to a questionnaire in 1934: "Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, moment from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labor put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light."

Emphasis mine, to highlight the beautiful words that capture the essence of poetry.

Later in the write-up, this quote from Dylan Thomas:

"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess -- let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time . . . The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the center; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions . . . Out of the inevitable conflict of images . . . I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem."

Lovely!

* This two volume set is precious. I'm reading a library copy (for the second time in my life - had read it 3-4 years back once). Some day I need to buy it - $37.50 for the 2 volume set is not that expensive, given how much treasure is in here!

Over on Twitter, I have been tweeting a poet-of-the-day [1] and wondered yesterday if I had had enough. Perhaps only half a month of celebration (April 1-15) is enough, I dithered. But then I realized that I had focused mainly on US poets. A few (Simic, Ondaatje, Levertov) may have been from other countries originally but they all write/wrote in English. There is so much wonderful poetry that is not written in English ...maybe it is time to celebrate them!

So, for April 16th and 17th (tweeting both together today as, caught in my waffling about whether to continue the series or not, I did not tweet about a poet yesterday), my poets are two poets who have astounded me with their poetry, even in translation. So much so, they have made me want to learn Spanish some day, to be able to enjoy their poetry in its original form. For If their poetry can be so beautiful in translation, imagine how it must be in the original! No... not Lorca (who I am yet to read) but the poets that have me in thrall are Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. I remember finding their poetry in the mid-to-late 1990s and they simply blew me away; especially Neruda. The music in his language, even in translation, is simply astounding. I remember it was a bi-lingual edition and just for the fun of it, I read the Spanish version aloud (not understanding it, of course). What lilt! What music in those words!

Some thoughts now on reading poetry in translation. In my mind, my experience with reading Neruda and Paz is unusual when it comes to reading poetry in translation. I think that in terms of what is lost in translation, it gets progressively worse as one goes from movies to music to books to poems. Over the years, I have read quite a few novels in translation and have wondered how much of the feel of the book was lost in translation. There is no doubt that a bad translator can ruin a book. But how much of the original is lost even when a good translator re-writes a piece? I believe Milan Kundera (one of my favorite authors - read completely in translation) has also battled with translators over this issue and has also written about the perils involved in translation in his non-fiction book, Art of the Novel. (Also read this article about the approach to translation.)

When it comes to movies, I have enjoyed lot of foreign language movies (French, Italian, Chinese, etc.) through sub-titles. Although some of the nuances may be lost through the dialogue, one fares well with movies because a lot of the movie is still retained through the visual aesthetic and in some cases, the music. (Case in point, the music in one of my favorite movies - In the Mood for Love.) Coincidentally, just earlier this week I read some other interesting arguments made comparing movies vs. the written word but that will have to be the topic of another post. (The arguments were put forth by the author Mary Gaitskill in the Introduction to Best New American Voices 2009, which she is the editor of.)

Music, of course, is the universal language... for example, even when I cannot understand the words to the songs, the music from Malian singers that I have been listening to a lot the last few years has given me hours of joy. (Actually, photography, as an art, is also a medium that requires no language and hence does not have to deal with any such barriers.)

Anyways.. I'm off now to find some Neruda and Paz poems to share on Twitter. "Follow" me there.. if you care.
-

[1] After reading at Robert Lee Brewer's blog that some people were celebrating National Poetry Month by writing a poem a day, I decided to start this series of tweets for the month since I have been on Twitter a lot lately and while I do not have the talent or the discipline to write a poem every day, I figured I could put a few tweets every day about a poet of my choice. Its tougher than you think -- when something becomes a daily chore, the fun goes about it!

Poets featured during the first half of the month are:

1. Wannabe poet once upon a time, myself... featuring my "poemkus" (haikus, really...but I use that word to not annoy the purists.)
2. Mark Strand
3. Tess Gallagher
4. Donald Hall
5. Mary Oliver
6. W. S. Merwin
7. Denise Levertov
8. Mark Strand (again! Oops.. Noticing now that this is a repeat!)
9.  -- missed it! -- 
   
10. Philip Levine
11. Michael Ondaatje
12. John Ashbery
    
13. Charles Simic
    
14. John Burroughs (more famous as a naturalist, conservationist, and writer than as a poet but loved couple lines of his poem, Waiting)
    
15. Mark Doty
    

Hmm.. in addition to repeating Mark Strand, I did not realize I missed a day there! I was pretty sure I tweeted one poet every day. #FAIL, as they say in internet lingo! Looks like just about a week into the month, I stumbled! Oh well...

Picked up a book by Willa Cather called Obscure Destinies at the library yesterday. Randomly opened it and came upon this paragraph that starts the short piece, Two Friends.

I loved it and decided to share it here.

Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage. The sea- gulls, that seem so much creatures of the free wind and waves, that are as homeless as the sea (able to rest upon the tides and ride the storm, needing nothing but water and sky), at certain seasons even they go back to something they have known before; to remote islands and lonely ledges that are their breeding-grounds. The restlessness of youth has such retreats, even though it may be ashamed of them.

Not sure if one is ashamed to go back to such retreats but so it goes...

--
"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."-Robert Louis Stevenson

Just ran into this in reading an old essay by the poet, Mark Doty, my poet of the day. (Like I mentioned earlier, I am putting up a few tweets every day on Twitter about a chosen poet for each day this month to celebrate National Poetry Month.)

"We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true…and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly."- Auden

That's from Auden's book of prose, The Dyer's Hand. You can read a 1963 review of the book by poet, John Berryman. (Thanks to the New York Review of Books for putting up these old issues online. We would never be able to read these old gems otherwise!)

You can find a good collection of quotes from Auden's poetry via Wikiquotes.

Also, it seems, Auden was a big fan of Tolkien and his Lord of the Ring books! See his NYT Reviews of the first and third books. (Donald Barr wrote the review for the second book.)

Time for some jazz vocals this Sunday evening... Billie Holiday delights today! (Am tempted to link to my other two favorite jazz vocalists too - Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone - but links to their songs some other day.)






The lady CAN sing the blues! Delightful!

Found a beautiful poem this morning - The Next Time by Mark Strand, from his Pulitzer Prize winning book of poems, Blizzard Of One. You should go read the poem in its entirety but here are a few excerpts I really loved.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

Waking up from long dreams and short conversations with my dad, I find myself this morning in the throes of existential angst! Plus having seen The Motorcycle Diaries last night and having gone to bed wishing I could make my April Fool's bluff* a reality, these lines comes like a subliminal message!

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
To flock towards?

...

Life should be more

Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good ....

* My April 1st bluff was to put the following status update on Facebook.

...  has decided to quit this stupid job-search, live off my savings, ride time out till the economy recovers, and take a long 3 month trip to South America.

And so it goes....

It could have been another story, the one that was meant
Instead of the one that happened. Living like this,
...

           ... What else would there be
This late in the day for us but desire to make amends
And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears.

Actually, leave you with another short poem by Mark Strand, reproduced here in its entirety. This one really vibed with the aforementioned existential angst I am feeling.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Keeping things whole - the essence and struggle of life, no? Or as Che put it in the movie yesterday:

"You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell."

Update: Just saw this article in Time magazine. Despite it being said to be medicine for the soul" and a healer of body and mind, somehow I have a feeling that this won't be part of my South America experience, if and when I get there! For some, the travel itself provides the high! Though strangely, this does sound alluring, no? :)

The agony is part of the allure. "You get these near-death experiences. And once you see life from the perspective of death, you become a bit more philosophical and have a better sense of what's important and what's not."

Hmm..

Finding a message in a bottle has happened many times previously... but the last line of this report made me ponder about life.

1913 message in a bottle found


The pencil-written note was dated March 30, 1913, and signed by Emmett Presnell of Rockford, Wash. It asked the finder of the bottle to write him back. The newspaper noted that Presnell died at age 85, on May 13, 1978. 

Ok..its nothing significant - just one of those moods this Monday, I suppose.

Just found this wonderful poem by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott here.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The beginning made me smile - greeting myself, would I smile?(I think it depends which me it was - the 20-something year old or the 30-something year old).

I'm celebrating National Poetry Month by tweeting every day with a few links about a random poet of my choice. I kind of got carried away and tweeted more than normal today and thought I'd cut-n-paste the content here to have them all in one place.

The poet I chose today is Donald Hall, who was the poet laureate of the US couple of years back. And I started with these lines, which resonate with me -- given my family's recent experience with death.

“Dying is simple,” she said.
“What's worst is… the separation.” 

In 8 simple words, Hall has captured here the entire essence of loss and all the feelings that my mother has been experiencing in the 14 months! The lines are from the poem Last Days by Donald Hall. I suggest you read the poem in its entirety (can be read here) and come tell me if you don't tear up! The poem was one of many heart-breaking poems in his 1998 book of poems, Without, in which Hall commemorated the loss of his wife, Jane Kenyon. I remember tearing up repeatedly reading the book in 2002-2003.

“Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony.” - from Without

Seemingly, the same sense of loss and helplessness against the fragility of life percolates through his 2002 book of poems, The Painted Bed, which I have not yet read. I just read a few poems from the book (through Google books) and it promises to wrench my heart and leave me teary again!

"Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything." - from Affirmation, The Painted Bed.

It seems, this wonderful couplet by the Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, serves as an epigraph in The Painted Bed.

"All poetry is about the death of the beloved."

Although I had picked up a book of Kenyon's collected poems last year, I have not read much of her poetry. Seems she also could pack a punch, as evidenced from these lines from her poem: It Might Have Been Otherwise.

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

I will leave you with these beautiful lines..

Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations
Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains
As distant as the curving of the earth,
Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air. 

which is from an older poem by Donald Hall, which is included in the recent collection of 50 years of poetry by Hall -  White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006.