Musing on Muses: International Poetry Day

International Poetry Day! 

Means more to me than International Women’s Day, maybe even more than Mother’s Day…dunno…jury’s still out on that one. 

 

Let’s begin with a poem with one of my favorite lines about writing poetry and living in poems, found in the poem But, by Gwendolyn MacEwan in her collection Afterworlds.

But

Out there in the large dark and in the long light is the breathless

Poem,

As ruthless and beautiful and amoral as the world is,

As nature is.

In the end there’s just me and the bloody Poem and the murderous

Tongues of the trees,

Their glossy green syllables licking my mind (the green

work of the wind).

Out there in the night between two trees is the Poem saying:

Do not hate me

Because I peeled the veil from your eyes and tore your world

To shreds, and brought

The darkness down upon your head.  Here is a book of tongues,

Take it.  (Dark leaves invade the air.)

Beware! Now I know a language so beautiful and lethal

My mouth bleeds when I speak it.

Now I know a language so beautiful and lethal my mouth bleeds when I speak it.  

How deeply did I feel those words the first time I read them?  How perfectly did they speak for what it is to write and live in a world filled with poetry?  So perfectly.

I bring this up because one month from today, I will be one of seven poets to present our work to a lovely and adoring audience in Bellingham at a gathering called the SpeakEasy.

  The focus this time out is on our relationships to poetry.  A series of questions have been posed to each of us to help us examine our lives in poetry.  Questions like:  What does poetry mean to you?  Why does poetry exist?  First poem, favorite poem of our own and from another poet, last poem we’ve written, why do we write poetry, why do we read poetry, and why doesn’t everyone read and write poetry?  All fantastic questions, for sure.  They prompted me this morning to think about how I need to present these answers in an interesting way. 

So I brought it to my morning pages and I hashed it out there.  What emerged was an interesting discovery about my multifaceted, polyamorous relationship with my muses…yes, what was revealed to me was that I have been blessed not with just one muse, but with many.  This revelation does explain how some of my work or my writing time feels like a dissociative identity disorder episode quite like the lad in the movie Split lives with on the daily.  Each of my muses have distinct voices, ways of being and knowing, and views of the world.  Some are ancient/Ancestral, some are young and precocious, and some are middle aged and cynical.  Some are reverent about the medium, some want to blow it up, and some do not give a fuck one way or the other.  One is a lover, dictating only love poems to me or poems of intense longing and desire.  One worships at the altar of nature, inspiring the pieces in praise of flowers, spring, and the places I love most.  One is a philosopher, musing on my place in the Universe, on spirit, and connection to all things.  One, the Ancestral voice, is deep and ancient and rooted in my DNA – filling me with love from my Ancestors…all of them…the ones from here and not from here; the ones from grassland and farmland; the ones from wheat field and battlefield.  Each Muse appeared at different times in my life, each fills me differently, teaches me in ways unique to their histories, and each blesses me in their own way.  Some “feel” “male” to me, some “feel” “female,” and some do not want to identify one way or the other. 

My first lessons were in the language of praise and gratitude.  My earliest poem, that I remember writing myself, was one for a Mother’s Day contest.  Interesting how prominently my mother plays in the firsts in my poetry life:  my first poem and my first published chap book were both for my mother.  In the case of that early poem, it was in praise of a woman who loved me, someone who was the best because I love her, and (among other things) was only interested in hand-made gifts not jewels or fur (not that those were things we could afford then anyway).  It was endearing.  I was 9 or 10, I think. 

From there, the Nature lover shows up just in time for the move, or maybe because of the move to the country.  Dad bought a farm on 40+ acres of hay land and boreal forest, beaver ponds and wild strawberry patches just outside of Edmonton.  The walks into the forest to find the beaver dams, the trek across “the back 40” to my best friend’s house in summer heat or winter blizzard, or perching on fence post piles, during the coldest February nights to watch the Northern Lights dance like Mata Hari, all encouraged this muse to teach me the love of the land.  Wandering those trails, working a garden, even at slaughter time, I was awakened to my connection to the land and to myself through her eyes…the eyes of the Great Mother.  She taught me a great deal about life and death and the changing seasons.  Maybe that is why I nearly wept when I read Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s words (from her book Braiding Sweetgrass) The land remembers you, even when you are lost. 

Feel that:  The land remembers you, even when you are lost. 

Anyone connected to anywhere will feel the pull of those words in the deepest parts of their soul.  My Nature muse, my land muse, taught me that when I was at the age when I needed most to learn that:  early adolescents…12 or 13.  I needed that land to teach me about impermanence and the fragility, dignity, and transience of life – how living energy becomes living energy once more through other species or in other forms.  My poetry from that time reveals my young heart seeing all of this through the animals I tended to and the gardens I worked, the haying I offered myself up to with my male family, and the skies filled with the language of all sorts of living things.

Not particularly sophisticated, but earnest in its desire to understand and its nod to nature, this piece illustrates the Nature muse’s pull on my creative soul:

Untitled

Our past flies behind us as our future does,

As fast as silvery snow geese with the moon on their wings.

We know not why we go, but only where.

Just as the geese; they follow only the path they know they must.

Not knowing why they must follow their migratory path that leads deeper into their destiny.

Lead only by instinct, these wonderful creatures watch their past fly by,

Just as the clouds they pass do.

We humans are similar,

We can see only as far ahead as our next cloud,

But cannot recapture the beauty of the cloud that we have just passed.

The geese have their leaders, just as people do.

If we were to fly into a storm,

Our leaders would be taking us.

The geese have no choice, but to follow.

People, on the other hand, have the freedom to back out of such situations.

The sad thing is that most humans do not choose to be the leader of their own destiny.

Instead they follow their leader, this is when everyone ends up in the slaughter house.

So be only like a snow goose when finding your destiny.

Follow the instinct you were given, and only your instinct.

For leaders will let you down, or sacrifice you to save their own necks.

But follow yourself and you will probably never regret what you have decided.

May 21/82

Clearly, I was thinking about some shit that only animals could teach me.  I watched those geese come in and go out on the change from Spring to Summer and from Fall to Winter…large flocks would stop by our ponds in the back bush for a rest on the way to their Summer and Winter homes.  It was a gift, to be sure, to be loved so deeply as to learn from these beautiful creatures in this beautiful place. 

The love/longing/desire muse has been teaching me about wooing and praise for many, many years.  While I learned from those murmurs in my head, I also found others who languished in the sweet suffering of longing like I did.  Leonard Cohen, Neruda, Baudelaire, Whitman, Shakespeare, MacEwan, and so many others taught me that this itch in my skin, this envelopment in electricity…the kiss of lightning…was ok.  The crush of unrequited love, the Jupiter-like pull of attraction…even if the target of desire was someone else’s love…all were fuel for passion’s fire and open season on the page.  All was ok on the page.  My muse never judged me.

My muse never judged me/judges me.  This is an extremely important concept to note.  Our muses NEVER judge us, so, if we are to have the most healthy, fertile relationship with them, we must NEVER lie to our muses. 

Ginsberg speaks of this in a Paris Review interview and, when I stumbled upon it in June of this past year, it opened my writing up to a whole new place. I was afraid to write about spaces in my heart and so I was censoring myself in my pages and in my poetry.  I learned this from an ex who decided to read my personal writing in my pages…without permission.  This betrayal made me afraid to write from my “realest” self.  Ginsberg’s words were a wake up call to me:  what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?...when you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or your friends.  He tells us that great writing comes from:  It’s the ability to commit to writing, to write the same way you…are!

These words are vital!  If you want to unearth the deepest parts of yourself and offer them up to any art form of your choice, you have to be completely honest with your Muses.  That gets ugly and messy from time to time but, necessary if you want to create something honest and truly representative of your experience in the moment. 

I used to torture myself over the fact that I wrote from a place of immediacy, of the “right now” and really didn’t pour too long over the work.  I edit when I type out the pieces but, really, don’t over-work pieces, believing that they are born in the form the Muses intended to deliver them.  I read about poets like Sassoon and Cohen who would work poems for years sometimes before publishing them and I felt that somehow that made me a lesser poet.  Ginsberg said:

I wasn’t really working with a classical unit, I was working with my own neural impulses and writing impulses. See, the difference is between someone sitting down to write a poem in a definite preconceived metrical pattern and filling in that pattern, and someone working with his physiological movements and arriving at a pattern, and perhaps even arriving at a pattern that might even have a name, or might even have a classical usage, but arriving at it organically rather than synthetically. Nobody’s got any objection to even iambic pentameter if it comes from a source deeper than the mind,that is to say if it comes from the breathing and the belly and the lungs. (Paris Review, Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8)

These words comforted me.  I write from the lungs and the belly in the moment the words begin to appear in my head…the whispers begin in my head.  Sometimes great poets pour over their work for years and, sometimes, they write them, fully blown, from their bellies in the moment.

*Phew*

So it’s all good if I am true to my Muses.

Those ancient voices insist on my honesty, too.  They ask me to show up and to witness to the tentative steps we take when we speak from an ancient place – a place that is usually not given place in a modern world.  I argue that those ancient voices are needed now more than ever – especially in places like school.  Children need to be honoured as learning spirits and we, in turn, must teach ourselves to hear their voices and the voices of those Nature muses. 

All of this was a long way round to honour the day, to honour the day and to hash out what poetry means to me.  I am not even sure I answered the question clearly.

Perhaps that is the whole point: there is no clear answer.  Poetry is as slippery and elusive as it is visceral and rooted.  It is both together and sometimes, often times, all at the same time.  How could it be otherwise?

I give my deepest thanks to my Muses – all of them…the ones I know and the ones I have yet to know.  My world would be dull and lifeless without them. I will keep showing up every morning to put pen to paper and wait to see which whisper tickles my ear…like this one today:

It is a beautiful day!

One to find poems hanging from tree branches

or in the thrusting shoots of tulips, daffodils and hyacinth –

the flowers I always want to capitalise because I hear the name first

and smell the flower after.

It is a day to find poems

and smell them in the warming winds,

feel them in bird calls

and hear the warmth of ripening sun rays reaching,

with great speed,

toward summer haze

and melting days.

It is a day to sneak up on poems in thickets

or on stream

where water dances over stones,

moaning promises of slippery metaphors later,

if you can manage to pull your glace away

from the undulation of the water.

Get outside today!

Leave the ipod at home,

take the pad and pen and call to them with your best supplicant's foot fall,

seduce those poems out of partially opened blossoms

and fully flowing sap.

Grab the poetry net,

and let’s go!

R.L.Elke  March 21/18

May your world be filled with poetry, whether you write it, read it or not.  Walk in the world and pluck them from the trees.  Grab your poetry net and let’s go!