blog

Love, The City of Brotherly

Jeanne Obbard

poetry mural

 

The Huffington Post has a list of 31 reasons Philadelphia is underrated. While the HuffPo definitely hits some of the highlights, I wanted to compile my own,  personal – and completely random – list.

  1. You can cross Delancey Street and say to your friends, “Hey, look. I’m ‘Crossing Delancey.’ ” [Caution: Joke only works with persons aged 38 to 68.]
  2. “La la la, just passing through, LOOK AT THAT FUCKIN AWESOME MURAL!!” happens on a regular basis.
  3. Those pretzels are completely incomprehensible to me. Which is good. Every city should be known for at least one surreally unappetizing food.
  4. Whatever facet of modern life you may be discussing, you can say, all casual-like, “Yeah, Ben Franklin invented that,” and be right 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, most likely no one will question you.
  5. What other city has an Ivy League college whose name sounds like a state school?
  6. And speaking of which, Kelly Writers House.
  7. “The Sixth Sense.” I have no idea whether that guy ever made any other movies, though.
  8. We have a world class art museum… with a statue of a Sylvester Stallone character on the front lawn.
  9. Oh here, have another world class art museum.
  10. And we liked this one so much we decided to steal it from the suburbs. Geez, Philly, now you’re just showing off.
  11. A statue of a giant clothespin  stands in the middle of the financial and governmental center of the city, which I find totally, delightfully subversive.
  12. Finally, and most importantly, Philly is one of the stand-ins for Arrow’s “Starling City.”

 

Ganesh
Statue of Ganesha in the PMA

Revision

Jeanne Obbard

awesome accordion

Process of poetry revision:

Day 1. Write draft.
Day 2. Change the word “black” to “ebony.”
Day 3. Add comma.
Day 4. “Ebony” is too pretentious. Change the word “ebony” to “obsidian.”
Day 5. Change the word “obsidian” to “black.”
Day 6. Remove comma.

Repeat until insane.

When in doubt, add another obligation

Jeanne Obbard

Exciting news this week as I embark on Coursera’s online poetry class, taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania.

Because, you know, when you find yourself totally overwhelmed by life, the logical response is to totally overwhelm yourself a little more. WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD ANOTHER OBLIGATION. Yep. I’m insane.

This week, we revisit the spiritual mother and father of American poetry:

Emily_D

walt_whitman

I chose this photo of Whitman on purpose. I think the most common photos of him, in distinguished three-quarters view, with the dramatic white beard – signifying Literary Fixture, Unerring Sage – have the effect of obscuring what Whitman was like in his writing. He was boundlessly energetic, innovative, and as  I write this, younger than I am now: “I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health begin” is how he launches “Song of Myself.”

So there you have them. The one discursive, effusive, earnest; the other concise, elliptical, and wry . Talk about flipping the gender expectations. Dickinson and Whitman both embraced their own nature with intense self-scrutiny; they both bent their circumstances to fit their lives rather than the other way around. That’s an example to all of us, not just poets.

Related articles

Beginner’s mind

Jeanne Obbard

Overheard at the “faces” fountain:

Girl (about four years old): “What are they?”

Nana: “Faces. What happened to them?”

Girl: “They’re old.”

face in water

Natalie Goldberg talks in Writing Down the Bones about “beginner’s mind.” What is beginner’s mind exactly? That brief conversation I overheard was an unfiltered moment that, like poetry, held a lot of condensed meaning. What happened to the faces? The girl’s assessment was, “They’re old.” Old happened to them. Not old like Nana, as she clarified a moment later, but a different kind of old that she reacted to viscerally. I have many times sat by the faces fountain and thought about their peacefulness, their aura of kindness-in-death. There is something soothing about them, and also something final. I think that both the four-year-old and I were reacting to that quality. Her interpretation was rather more concise though.

arc

It reminded me of when a co-worker of mine said, “My kid says the weirdest things. He calls Center City ‘the New City.’ ” I thought, well, yeah, it is the new city. Layers of shiny skyscrapers hide the older brick and stone buildings like City Hall. “The New City” sounds hopeful and superficial both, spangled with lights and the reflections of all those mirrors. My co-worker’s son was conveying his impression very concisely. He wasn’t asking, “Does anyone else call it ‘the New City?’ ” He wasn’t filtering or censoring. He was saying what he saw. It can be very instructive to listen to the ways that children assess the world, because theirs is the “beginner’s mind” that all artists need.

house

We must unlearn the way we see things as adults. We must peel back the layers of assumption and cynicism. We must hold off on the moment of judgment. Judgment closes things down, it shuts down perception. We make judgments and assumptions as a kind of shortcut, to cope with the complexity of life, but the downside is that we then see only what we expect to see.

shadows

To get at those “first thoughts” we must become enthusiastic, vulnerable, open to our senses and to our reactions. This can be disconcerting. We may potentially be embarrassed. We may be thought eccentric or labeled “weird.” But as we practice this quality of attention, we find we can hold our senses open for longer. That “first thought” leads to another first thought. Something original sneaks though the cliches we’ve learned to apply to everything. Opening up our perception is how we begin to create original art.

clouds

Adrienne Rich, political poetry, and a confession

Jeanne Obbard

shadow

A debate on the qualities of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and an even bigger debate on the nature of political poetry.

Ange Mlinko’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems is here.

And Carol Muske-Duke’s spirited defense of Rich is here.

I don’t totally disagree with Mlinko’s assessment of Rich’s poetry: it is cool, careful, intellectual. But it also cares intensely about women’s experience of the world. I was lucky to read Rich in college, and while I didn’t fall in love with her writing, I took away something perhaps more valuable: a sense of respect for women’s intellects. Rich was serious: she took her thoughts seriously and she opened up the possibility that I could take my thoughts seriously as well. I can’t overstate how important this was for me as a twenty-something-year-old woman.

Did I think Mlinko was trashing Rich? Not as much as Carol Muske-Dukes did. But Muske-Dukes gestures towards perhaps a bigger issue: what she sees as a particular style of writing poetry – “indeterminacy” or “playfulness,” manifesting as apolitical poetry.

It’s a debate that certainly resonates for me. Even as my admiration for women poets was cemented by Adrienne Rich and the anthology No More Masks, I was aware that my own poetry was hardly ever explicitly feminist in either subject or theme. As a college student, I wrote about rejected love, and depression, and family drama. My own assessment of my work was that it was all too inward, too minor. Those women poets who wrote to all women were my heroes; I felt I didn’t measure up.

Twenty years later, I think it’s time for me to stop feeling like a failure.* I mean, I’ve been a feminist for as long as I’ve had a coherent thought in my head; everything I write comes out of that viewpoint. Feminism means I get to take my thoughts seriously; but it also means I get to take my sensitivity and my ambivalence seriously.

I am thinking of two poems that found a home in a small literary magazine** this past year. Both were about the experience of being a teenage girl. Yes, I did the emotional work of writing about difficult memories. But I also did the intellectual work of making those fragments into poems – bringing to bear whatever skill I have to make them accessible, well-shaped, and true. These two kinds of work are both necessary to the creative endeavor; each is pointless without the other. And sometimes, finding ways to talk about the political turns out to be the same as finding ways to talk about the intensely personal.

*About this, anyway.

**Shameless promotion of a very nice journal.

Another way of looking at it

Jeanne Obbard
The 80s are back, and this time it's personal.
The 80s are back, and this time it’s personal.

(Actually, there’s only one way to look at neon mesh fingerless gloves. FABULOUS. Am I right?)

A little Onion humor from The Onion Book of Known Knowledge.

Poetry, literary form that would be much more effective if poets simply came out and clearly specified: (1) how they were feeling, (2) the potential sources of their emotional state, and (3) any ameliorative actions that should be taken, if necessary. By following these three guidelines rather than obscuring their point with abstract symbolism and airy metaphors, poets would not only be able to communicate their feelings more quickly and efficiently, they might also manage to feel a little better in the process; indeed the fact that poets avoid confronting their feelings directly might be the source of the problem.

For example, Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” would have been much more productive for her and her readers if she had stripped away all the imagery involving shoes and the Holocaust and simply written: “Hello, my father died when I was 8 and that has caused me a lot of psychological problems throughout my life. Also my husband, Ted Hughes, recently had an affair and we are now separated, so that has been a difficult thing for me, too.”

The Onion Encyclopedia on the father of American poetry:

Whitman, Walt (b. May 31, 1819 d. Mar. 26, 1892), 19th-century American poet whose poems evoked the great, benevolent spirit of America, a country that is and always has been incredibly tolerant and supportive of eccentric gay poets.

One more:

Suburb, levee put in place to prevent the unchecked spread of culture.

And lastly,

Quip, joke made by people who attended an Ivy League college.

– From The Onion Book of Known Knowledge, 183rd Imperial Edition (A Definitive Encyclopaedia of Existing Information in 27 Excruciating Volumes).

😀

How shall I live? A short list of favorite poems.

Jeanne Obbard

this water dropping

In honor of National Poetry Month, I wanted to share some of my favorite poems – poems that have stuck with me for years, that I never get tired of re-reading. Some folks have works of religious or spiritual guidance; I have poems. How shall I live? is the question. All these poems answer: With as much kindness and wonder as you can.

I did a little research on the ethics of posting other people’s poems to one’s amateur poetry blog. Ahem. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry states

an online resource (such as a blog or web site) may make examples of selected published poetry electronically available to the public, provided that the site also includes substantial additional cultural resources, including but not limited to critique or commentary, that contextualize or otherwise add value to the selections.

What I have to say about these poems is “I love this” and “This makes me happy” and “Smiley-face.” So in fairness, I don’t think I should reproduce them here; follow the links instead.

Mary Oliver – “Wild Geese”

Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift”.

Ted Kooser manages to be accessible and still a subtle, inventive, and original voice. And the guy just comes off as awesome in interviews. “After Years”

I’ve already talked about Tennyson’s work – “The Splendor Falls”

And a new favorite, Mark Strand’s “The Night, the Porch,” courtesy of Knopf’s Poetry Month emails.

This Octavio Paz poem was posted all over the walls of my college when Paz won the Nobel in 1990. I took one of the copies* and memorized the poem just through constantly reading it. And I can’t find it online anywhere in its intended format (aside: Internet, we need to talk about the impulse to center-align poems that shouldn’t be center-aligned. NOT OKAY.) So I’m breaking the rules because I think reading Paz is good for the soul. Thank you, Internet Diety of Obscure References (aka, Google Books).

*I hope that was kind of what you intended, anonymous Paz-sharing member of the administration.

Madrigal

Más transparente
que esa gota de agua
entre los dedos de la enredadera
mi pensamiento tiende un puente
de ti misma a ti misma
Mírate
más real que el cuerpo que habitas
fija en el centro de mi frente

Naciste para vivir en una isla.

English translation:

Madrigal

More transparent

than this water dropping

through the vine’s twined fingers

my thought stretches a bridge

from yourself to yourself

                                                    Look at you

more real than the body you inhabit

fixed at the center of my mind

You were born to live on an island

I love that Paz recognizes this quality of  soul, of being “born to live on an island.” I’ve often felt that way. But really, the whole poem is just perfect – the spare image, the haiku-like turns, the surprising conclusion. This poem is a thing I have loved for over twenty years, which is pretty incredible.

Happy National Poetry Month, all. May you find many poems to love.