Poem: Thanking Diane Wakoski for Poetry Lessons

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Persephone, by Anita Huffington, 1999

Diane Wakoski not only taught me about writing poems, she helped me excavate the pieces of my religious past. Last week thirteen of Diane's former students read tributes to her in a reading celebrating her and 35 years as Poet-in-Residence at my university upon her retirement. I wrote this poem a couple of months ago for the occasion and read it to her at Thursday's event as she sat in the front row. The title is an allusion to Diane's poem "Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons". . .

         I want to thank
my mother for working and always paying for
my piano lessons
before she paid the Bank of America loan
or bought the groceries
or had our old rattling Ford repaired. (excerpt from Wakoski's poem)

My poem is a palindrome, and in this case, at the middle the lines repeat in reverse order. (Palindromes can also repeat words or letters in reverse, as in the sentence, "Madam, I'm Adam.") If you are not familiar with the Greek myths of Persephone and Demeter (Proserpine and Ceres in Roman mythology), and of Orpheus and Eurydice, you can link to them in the names. To read about Diane Wakoski's important place in American poetry, go to the Poetry Foundation's page about her here.

Thanking Diane Wakoski for Poetry Lessons

Is it the pomegranate juice you pour
from an earthen pitcher at your table
that draws me into this world of dark fruits
my mother hid from me?

I leave her and the hymned piano lessons,
in a missionary field of corn,
and you, Poetry, appear like Charon
ferrying me across the Hudson.

Even after death she, like Demeter
and Orpheus, searches for me among sepulchers of jazz,
but I am innocent in these tombs of joy!
I crave cigarette torches in dark tunnels
where little deaths are a relief from high heavens.

Where little deaths are a relief from high heavens,
I crave cigarette torches in dark tunnels
but I am innocent in these tombs of joy,
and Orpheus searches for me among sepulchers of jazz,
even after death, like Demeter,

ferrying me across the Hudson,
and you, Poetry, appear like Charon
in a missionary field of corn.
I leave her and the hymned piano lessons.

My mother hid from me.
That draws me into this world of dark fruits
from an earthen pitcher at your table.

Is it pomegranate juice you pour?

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Demeter and her daughter Persephone

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Diane Wakoski's poetry lessons

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To read a poem is to stroll on a warm October afternoon into the artist square Place du Tertre in Montmartre in Paris, and have an artist tap you on the shoulder and ask if they can sketch your portrait. You read a couple of lines, shrug and say Sure, why not. You hear the poet scratching away with their charcoal pencil, and when you’re done reading, you either say, Yes, I recognize myself! Or you say, Who the hell is that?

Reading a poem by Diane Wakoski is like putting on a long flowing hippie dress of Bohemian cotton and walking through an orange grove in southern California or a book-lined New York City apartment where your friend is making an apple torte while you talk about a movie you just watched together. You become a woman who navigates her life through the sensualities of love, food, movies, and popular culture.

In one of her many, many books of poetry, The Butcher’s Apron, you dance through sensual visions of food and drink, sampling Viennese coffee at a train station or figs on the Adriatic Coast. It is in these poems of hers that I most recognize myself. At Diane’s real pine table, I have drunk blooming jasmine tea and eaten countless fragrant green salads with divine vinaigrette that I can never replicate, and pesto made with twenty-five cloves of garlic and basil her husband Robert grew in their front yard. I have also workshopped poems, first as a student in five of Diane’s poetry classes, then with former students around her supper table, pens in hand and minds ready to try on poems and see if they fit. It has been brilliant to study with a teacher who still maintains personal relationships with her students, inviting them into her home lined floor to ceiling with books.

The essentials for writing good poetry that Diane hammered into us students week after week are: A good poem must at the very least have lyrical language (added note after Robert's comment: lyricism in a limited and minimal sense of "the sound of the words" being important) and a trope or metaphor. (Another note: the poem itself can be the metaphor.) Then it must have absolutely NO clichés. If you write about tears as rain or love as fire, you're gonna really get the belt. Don't forget William Carlos Williams' advice: No ideas but in things. And, if you can possibly include something of your personal mythology, you might have a winner.

Professor Wakoski is teaching for three more weeks as Distinguished Poet in Residence in my English department, then she retires. One evening of her last week of class a bunch of former students will stand under her office window outside our building and serenade her with her own poems. Below is one of the three I’ll be reading, from The Butcher’s Apron.

The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful biography of Diane here.

Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives

by Diane Wakoski

for Walter’s Aunt Libby’s

diligence in making olives

As some women love jewels
and drape themselves with ropes of pearls, and stud their ears
with diamonds, band themselves with heavy gold,
have emeralds on their fingers or
opals on white bosoms,
I love the still life
of grapes whose skins frost over with the sugar forming inside,
hard apples, and delicate pears;
cheeses,
from the sharp fontina, to icy bleu,
the aromatic chèvres, boursault, boursin, a litany of
thick breads, dark wines,
pasta with garlic,
soups full of potato and onion;
and butter and cream,
like the skins of beautiful women, are on my sideboard.

These words are to say thank you
to
Walter’s Aunt Libby
for her wonderful olives;
oily green knobs in lemon
that I add to the feast when they get here from Lebanon
where men are fighting, as her sisters have been fighting
for years, over whose house the company stays in
and whose recipes for kibbee or dolmas or houmas
are passed along.

I often wonder,
had I been born beautiful,
a Venus on the California seashore,
if I’d have learned to eat and drink so well?
For, with hummingbirds outside my kitchen window
to remind of small elegance,
and mourning doves in the pines & cedar, speaking with grace,
and the beautiful bodies
of lean blond surfers,
dancing on terraces,
surely had I a beautiful face or elegant body,
surely I would not have found such pleasure
in food?
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
than like a sapphire?
But with mockers flying in and out of orange groves,
and brown pelicans dipping into the Pacific,
looking at camellias and fuchsia,
and abundance of rose, and the brilliant purple ice plant
which lined the cliffs to the beach,
life was a “Still Life” for me.
And a feast.
I wish I’d known then
the paintings of Rubens or David,
where beauty was not only
thin, tan, California girls,
but included all abundance.

As some women love jewels,
I love the jewels of life.
And were you,
the man I love
to cover me (naked) with diamonds,
I would accept them too.

Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter’s Aunt Libby’s wonderful olives from Lebanon.

Thank you, Aunt Libby,
from a failed beach girl,
out of the West.

from Waiting for the King of Spain
and Emerald Ice

Diane's "Sapphos" when we all read at a reading in 2009

—Courtney, Sarah, Carrie, MJ, Diane, me, Heather—
I am old enough to be mother to everyone but Diane.

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What is faith?

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It's there, hiding, across the Red Cedar River,
under trees, behind the couple walking

Professor Ellison looked even older than he was. He was tall, like Ichabod Crane, lanky, bony, with disheveled gray hair, goatee, and always with enthusiastic drool at the corners of his mouth as he talked fast, but his spirit and enthusiasm were as youthful as any of the college students he taught freshman composition.

His office was next to mine all the way at the end of the long corridor in Wonders Hall. His department had moved him to our wing from his secluded corner of an old building, because they were afraid he might die and no one would find him for days.

But they couldn’t have known him as I came to know him. Seven years in the 1990s I worked as an administrative assistant (secretary) next door to Professor Ellison. His bountiful and energetic joy radiated to all of us who encountered him while he came in for his brief office hours twice a week. What a relief from the stony, dour insolence of some professors. Some students and colleagues found him merely laughable when he rode his old English bicycle with a makeshift basket to campus and to class from his office, wiry gray hair splayed from under his helmet, and even more so on the days he strapped on roller blades. Even I didn’t know whether to laugh in glee, weep in poignancy, or cheer Whoopeee! when I saw him teeter-walk like a toddler plodding, not gliding, on those roller blades down the carpeted hall after dousing his hair under the stream of water from the drinking fountain and mopping it from his head with his sleeves. “Hellooo, Ruuuth!” he crooned as he cautiously leaned on, felt and stepped his hands along the wall, supporting himself all the way to me at our end of the hall as if I were his female trapeze artist partner waiting for him, urging him on, while drool or drinking fountain water ran down his cheeks and chin. His eyes flickered and twinkled like blinking lights at the county fair on those wild and spider-leggy rides. His smile never disappeared, a foul word never dropped from his lips.

It just so happened that it was in those days that I began taking classes to finish my BA via the generous educational assistance offered at my university to secretaries and other union members. I got to take fourteen credits a year for free. I began with two American Lit classes, reading Hawthorne, Irving, Cooper. On I waded deep across the Atlantic into Brit Lit and Conrad, Joyce and Woolf. Finally I came to poetry writing and five classes with Diane Wakoski. I worked on poems on my lunch hour and off and on through the workday tweaking a word here and there, surrounded by inspirational poems from Bishop, Blake, Williams and Bukowski I’d printed and taped on the wall in front of my desk and on the file cabinet. It was a time in my life journey of great spiritual searching and angst, which got written into my poems, a time of losing faith, and hoping to find it again. The writing was the door I went through, the room where I could light altar candles in front of old statues of the past, and whisper chilled prayers for my nearly hollow soul.

Professor Ellison was ceaselessly interested in my class work. We were very fond of each other, plus I was a nontraditional (older) student, unlike his first year freshmen he taught writing, and he eagerly asked first thing every morning about the critical analysis papers I was writing for English classes. He taught me to stop writing I think . . . and just write my thoughts directly. What I write is obviously what I think! As I moved into poetry writing, he was my main reader besides Don, and what a help he was. He didn’t know my story as Don did, and so he was the objective reader every writer needs, to tell you if they “get it” just from your words on the page.

One day, I sat at my desk doing something or other, and Prof. Ellison poked his head in the door with his bright, moist cheer, “Ruth! Have you seen the aconite?!”

“The wha?”

“Aconite, winter aconite! It’s blooming over by the river!”

After his pleasant dismay that I had never heard of nor witnessed this precious secret, Professor Ellison educated me about the tiny yellow flower that grows on vines close to the ground under a tree over by the Red Cedar River, in the Beal garden created and named for the famous botanist Professor William J. Beal. It first pokes its yellow blooms up through snow in February. I promised him I would check it out.

This photo was taken

two years ago in February,

when rain had melted the snow

I did, and there it was, a yellow and green surprise alive in the snow, first sign of spring. It inspired a poem, a little haiku, which I turned in for class, and happily Professor Wakoski thought it was successful. For me, this haiku and its title “Faith,” symbolizes an important turning point in my life, from leaving the religious faith of my past that had darkened into a long winter of confining and frustrating emptiness. As I learned to write, with the generous contributions of three professors, something eternal began to sprout.

Yesterday I walked over from my office (in the English department where I graduated) to the river to find aconite again, and there it was, the same small answer, like my poem.

Faith

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed.

These photos were taken yesterday.

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The walk . . . and Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver

                      . . . for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

- from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

Ever since my poetry teacher told me that she thought Four Quartets was the best, most important poem in the English language, I've intended to read it. One day I found it on the free book table in the big old dark hall outside my office at the university. It was strange, I thought, finding a discarded copy of the best poem in the English language. What English professor would cast it off that way? Oh well, my luck. Maybe they had an extra copy. The tiny black paperback volume sat for years on a small stack of books next to my telephone. Every morning when I listened to voice messages, I looked at the cover. It sat there, like my dad's tiny wooden screwdriver, photographs of my family, and a white piece of the refurbished Pont-neuf. The poem-book was something treasured, not for any personal reason yet, except that someone I thought highly of treasured it. At last, one lunch hour I picked it up and began to read, getting as far as the third page. I stopped reading because of the quote, above, on the second page, and another on the third. These were enough, I thought, for a while. This, my friends, is why I rarely finish books.

Then George posted about the poem Four Quartets, and because I like George and how he walks the world, I found my small black book, which had shifted from the desk next to my work phone to the dresser stack of books at home. I read it through (!). I went back and commented on George's post that I too was hooked. The poem would be a life-long friend.

About the quote, " . . . for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at . . . ," it's been working in my psyche all this time since first cracking the book open years ago. I was thinking about beauty in our culture, of the cost of it, the extent to which we will go to be looked at and admired. What hadn't occurred to me was that Eliot's little black poem-book had the look of flowers that are looked at, for me anyway. I didn't open it, read it and pull the words into my own flesh and blood, and maybe I wasn't ready. The quote on the third page that also paused me? "Garlic and sapphires in the mud". Catchy, a good title for a blog, I thought. But that line has also haunted my mind. It is the opener of a stanza that is like a free-standing poem in the bigger poem, an opaque passage, with too many words I don't understand. I don't know what Eliot meant by it. But today, after all this time and after reading the poem through now, these two lines together mean something like this to me: The stuff of life is what we walk through, what gets us dirty, what we wear out from frequent use, the things we treasure because we know them so well and soften up with our oily fingers. As Nanao Sakaki said, "Keep your feet muddy."

OK. So then, what? Help me get this from my head to real life. What are sapphires and garlic doing in the mud, and what does it mean to keep your feet muddy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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That's where the post was going to end, and I was going to wait a couple of days to post it. After all, I don't post every day! Yikes. Lately it just seems there has been so much wanting to come out. But since writing the above, and then reading LoriKim's beautiful response (What about thorns?) at her blog A Year's Risings with Mary Oliver to a poem by Mary Oliver about roses, and because today is Mary Oliver's birthday, and because she is . . . is in the world, in me, expressing what floods from my heart every moment, I must post this today.
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The Fish

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ENG 229 Intro to Poetry Writing. It's the early 1990s. Ruth is a non-traditional college student in her late thirties in a class with 20-year-olds who are educating her on current music before the professor arrives. 10,000 Maniacs and these new friends are helping her see that these are the days. On the first day of class they had filled out a survey about their personal mythologies, a term Prof. Wakoski took from Carl Jung and focused on in her poetry and teaching. Ruth revealed she was a Baptist preacher's kid wrestling with the hook, line and sinker of the faith of her parents. A few weeks into class, Prof. Wakoski reads The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop. Before this class Ruth has never heard or read much poetry outside of the cultural icons such as Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Thomas' villanelle Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Immediately upon hearing The Fish, Ruth is hooked. Wakoski finishes the poem and asks:

Did Bishop intend her poem to be about Christ? In her bottomless, observant description, she gave us material to interpret it that way if we want -- the fish, a symbol of Christ, and the five wounds (Jesus' were two in his hands/wrists, two in the feet, and then the lance in his side). Maybe there's more. But it doesn't matter to me, because her language and imagery are so achingly beautiful (ugly fish, yet beautiful too), that the poem, just about a fish, is plenty. My favorite word in this poem: isinglass.

The Fish

by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

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I named our elegant barn cat Bishop after Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop the barn cat understands the silent graces, and teaches them to me. (But I think she would not have let the fish go. And that is another kind of grace.)

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Thirteen ways

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The Jungfrau in Switzerland is one of dozens of primary peaks of the Bernese Alps,

where I am standing in 1975 during my college study trip mentioned in the last post.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

~ from the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" written in thirteen haiku-ish stanzas and published in 1917, was one of the first poems Diane Wakoski taught in my poetry class (in East Lansing, not Lauterbrunnen, alas). Thirteen Ways is an imagistic poem, a Modern (as in, the period) way of writing poems with clear, sharp language, unlike the focus on lyricism of the previous so-called Romantic period. Another famous Modern imagistic poem is Ezra Pound's short two-lines "In a Station of the Metro," written four years earlier after Pound was touched by a visual moment coming out of a Paris metro train:

    

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

It's so zen. William Carlos Williams, another Modernist, suggested that when writing good poems there are no ideas but in things. In other words, paint images with things instead of descriptions. Show, don't tell.

Back to Thirteen Ways. Marvel-ous as our eyes are, we can't see twenty snowy mountains all at once. Our eyes have to scan gradually. We can't see the eye of the blackbird either, in a scene like that. Our brains are censoring what we perceive every second. I suppose most often our eye catches what is moving, like that blackbird's eye, if the moving thing is big enough to be perceived. But we can imagine the scene painted by Stevens in that stanza. It's one of the thirteen ways he paid attention to a blackbird. I've posted the whole poem below. I hear you sigh, either out of bliss, or out of poetry fatigue. Is it long? you ask. See, about the different ways?

Feel the mystery in each way he looks. In some of his lines I don't know what he means. What is Haddam, without looking it up? But it doesn't really matter, when he writes:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Because he's not just writing about looking at a blackbird. Bien sur. We live in days of change and mayhem and people knowing about it like we've never known before, more than the terrible decade of WWI when these poems were written. There are "thirteen" ways of looking at anything. I kind of like how that slows things down.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Terresa's sensual womanly-writerly post Random Marigolds and Yosemites reminded me of this poem this week, which led to the post. 

Read more Wallace Stevens poems here. My favorite is The Snow Man, because I have a mind of winter too.

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blue moon

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I think it's interesting that la luna is considered womanly and fertile, partly because of its alignment with the menstrual cycle, yet we talk about the moon's face as the Man in the Moon. It is the sun that rules supremely and is associated with men - Apollo, Ra, Surya - they ride a chariot of war across the sky. (There is a Norse sun goddess, Sol Sunna, who also rides such a chariot. And the Hittites had Arinna, sun & fertility goddess.)

Quickly after winter solstice and Christmas celebrations - which originated in sun worship called Saturnalia - we have a Blue Moon. My color enhanced version is just a silly literal blue moon. You can read about the origins of the term blue moon at wiki. Whether it's the thirteenth full moon of the year, or the second full moon of the month - like this December with one on the 2nd and another on the 31st - folklore says when the face is blue, he talks to those in his light.

For a long time the way people have listened to Nature is through myths. I am a terrible student of classical mythology - Roman or Greek - let alone Aztec, Ojibwe, Hindu, Arabian or Norse and all those Wagnerian Brünnhildes. First my high school Latin teacher tried to drill Zeus and Aphrodite into my head. Then my university teacher Diane (lunar goddess) Wakoski - who centers her personal story in classical myths when she writes poems - taught me what she could. I would like to know more so that when I read an allusion to mythical characters I can understand the connection without looking it up. Sometimes I think all I do is look things up, and I want to know something without looking it up. Don't get me wrong, I'm devotedly grateful to Google, wiki, imdb and pantheon.

One character I always seem to come across in my readings is Persephone, whose story is a way of imagining the origin of winter. Hades, god of the Underworld, kidnapped her because she was so beautiful. Her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest - or Earth Mother - wandered the earth looking for her, and the earth ceased to be fertile in her grief. At last Hermes went down to get Persephone back at Zeus' bidding, and he reluctantly let her go, but not before giving Persephone a pomegranate, which she ate seeds from, and it tied her to the Underworld forever for half the year, which is winter in Demeter's grief. She spends half the year with her mother, and that is summer.


Back to the moon. Diana is the moon goddess, or goddess of nature, fertility and childbirth (that menstrual cycle thing). Somehow she managed to protect those realms without getting directly involved in the messy affairs of people. In fact she was so uninvolved she was a virgin. Strange to be the protector of childbirth and fertility as a virgin, no? In myths the male gods may be the supreme rulers most of the time, but goddesses manage to mold and salvage something out of harsh circumstances the guy gods created.

Of course the moon and earth aren't female or the sun male; it's a way to think of the moon as the lesser light that is only reflecting the true source of light, the sun, in terms which have for too long been the parallel for women and men in society. I tend to be earthbound in what I can see, hear and feel and lack imagination and fantasy. We watched "Bridge to Terebithia" the other night, and I didn't much enjoy it. I don't have a desire to see "Avatar." But in spite of my distant quiet "virgin" observation of fantastical creations, it's nice to go out in the moonlight and let something other than facts speak to me. Maybe there really is something not in our heads that the moon says (he or she) when I get up in the night and see that blue light softly falling on the sofa the barn and the maples that isn't spoken in the light of day.

Poems sometimes arrive in the night. And dreams. Fears and worries too. But I don't think I've ever been afraid when the moon shone blue through the window. To me it says, Be still.

I wish you a wonderful New Year.



~Top image is the Sturgeon Moon shot August 28, 2007, processed blue in PhotoScape
~Persephone image by blackeri
~Diana image by Marinshe
~Bottom image shot when I was out in Lesley's kayak before sunrise, October 7, 2006; look closely at the .
.....horizon on the left side for geese in the water
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synchronizing: unexpected duets

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My poetry mentor Diane Wakoski taught me to write poems that bring unlike things together. At all costs, avoid clichés, such as comparing tears with rain, or love with fire. She showed that it is far more affecting when a poem like Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" connects things in surprising ways, like winter and a person's mind, as that poem does. I think good poems make you feel two things: 1) I never thought of that before, and yet 2) I always knew that, maybe I forgot it, but I've known it somewhere, sometime.

That's really the theme behind this blog: bringing things together, not that I always think about that when I post.

Two years ago when I first heard about Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin doing a musical collaboration with country/folk singer Alison Krauss I was intrigued by the pairing and wanted to buy the album, titled Raising Sand. I hadn't been excited about Led Zeppelin when they were on the radio in my teenage years, but when my son Peter learned to play guitar in the '90s, Led Zeppelin was one of his favorites, and I found myself rocking along to "That's the Way" or "Ramble On" through his discovery. So in 2007 I loved the idea of rock star Plant and country singer Krauss (that even my punk daughter listened to) singing together. I never listened to or bought the Plant-Krauss album when it came out, even though you can listen to the whole thing at their web site here - so nice. But finally about a month ago I heard it and was blown away by one of the songs: "Gone, Gone, Gone." So, as I was downloading it and putting together a mixed CD, I had the Genius Sidebar open and it was suggesting other duets, two of which I also downloaded. It would be nice to have a whole album pairing singers from different genres. Ha, I speak out of ignorance - even though rauf, Loring and João try to educate me about music. There are probably dozens of captivatingly unexpected duet albums out there, and I am going to hear about them in comments.

Pour yourself a cuppa coffee, or tea. Plug in the good speakers. Put your feet up. Relax and listen. You need some music. Rockabilly. And Blues.

"Gone, Gone, Gone" by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss is my favorite song at the moment. NOTE: Robert Plant is wonderfully "Zepellin-esque" in the studio album version in the link above, so I like it a bit better than the live version below. It's cute though, if you watch the video below closely you can see Krauss do a little Zepellin-esque thing toward the end, as if she's imitating her co-singer.





The second song Genius recommended was JJ Cale and Eric Clapton singing and playing the blues in "Ride the River." It would be a blast to ride the river in a boat with these two, I could paddle since they'd have their hands full of guitars and mics.





The third song Genius recommended was another duet with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and country singer Emmylou Harris singing as a couple who look at their life through a photo album in "This is Us." Here they are on the Letterman Show, and it's fun to watch them sing to each other, but I like the studio recording that follows a bit better here too. Emmylou sounds a wee bit flat in the live version. But what a cool voice she has.





Here's the studio version of the same song:





Had you heard these songs before? Are there other cool duets to add to an unexpected duets mixed CD?

the hard boiled egg

a;souiehr
a;osifh

It's poetry week. Every three weeks or so several of us meet with our poetry professor from college days for conversation, poetry work, and dinner, which our former professor - now mentor and friend - prepares and serves with grace. It's a pretty cool deal. Two women skype in from Boston and one from Tennessee. I'm still working on a draft of a poem for tomorrow. Meanwhile, below is one from 2005 BC ('Before Chickens' on the farm). In this case, the egg came first.

I find that some people are tormented if you ask them to read a poem. "Is it long?" they whine ask. If you're one of them, stop here, consider this a very short post, and maybe imagine what is in the drawer, above. If you're not one of them, or if you're willing not to be, read on. I think poems should open a little drawer in your head, or at least make you want to know what's in the drawer.

In the stanza about conversations, this was BB (Before Blogging). PB (Post Blogging), it's even more true, thanks to you.

The Hard Boiled Egg

As I peel my egg,

shell adheres

to the clear membrane

in chunks, like ice floes

on the surface of water.

Before I bite

the end, cool and round,

I know the felt-like yolk

will mix with the metallic white,

an aggregate flowing with

grains of pepper and salt

on the riverbed of my tongue.

Every day is a completeness

like this. Conversations

like embryos fresh

and awake for surprise.

Nakedness under a shell.

Nourishment begun

at my mother’s white table cloth

that spreads to the snow

fields around this farm peppered

with thistle crowns and bare

branches emerging from

under the mask of white

that curves around the world.

~

Ruth M., December 2005