Thank you to my mother, who insisted we have rituals. Easter dresses, white shoes (mandated after Easter, you know), hats, church, Easter eggs. Thank you to my father for the ritual of poems and songs. Thank you to both of them for our long walks, me being pulled in the little red wagon, or sitting on my father’s shoulders.
This morning I’m hearing the racheting honks of returning geese. Smaller birds have started passionately talking to each other. Bushes and trees have at last formed their tight little buds here in the north. It happens to be Easter as I write this. And Passover, for my daughter and her family.
A celebration of the return of spring, a religious service, a poem—all ritual, all set deliberate boundaries around the action. Ritual is designed to increase consciousness. “Look, I’m going out for a walk now.” “Look, I’m bowing my head. I’m saying Amen.” “Look, I’m putting on my dressy clothes.” “Look, I’m making this poem.” The common denominator is “Look.” Awareness.
The thing about ritual—it builds up energy from the deliberate slowing or stopping of time. If you fast for a few days, you know what it is to eat. If you quit talking, you know what it is to talk. If you end a line before the naturally occurring margin, you see the line, itself.
As you may know, this is National Poetry Month. My friend David Baker reminds us that It is also National Sports Eye Injury Month and National Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month. As he says, “Perspective, my friends.” Happily, I am writing poems after a nail-biting hiatus, which is ridiculous, as Jerry always reminds me. I think I will never write poems again. Every time. It may be necessary to approach the work from a position of poverty. Maybe you have to empty yourself, spiritually.
My poetry workshop group met to Zoom into David’s symposium on nature poems. There are so many kinds of nature poems, but lately I’ve been interested in poems prompted by walking, often through nature. Poems whose impetus comes from a walk. I do a lot of that. Walking, that is. I have my routes, my rituals, radiating out in all directions. I’m avoiding the woods behind us until the soggy ground firms up a bit. You can find me headed toward the historic barns, or along the paved bike trail through the marshy areas, or looping in the opposite direction around the hospital.
I’m not exactly out looking for a subject. Well, when something interests me, like a very old copper beech tree, or a milkweed pod, or the mechanical guts of the hospital out back, I store it up. I bring it home. I have four of these Walk poems so far.
National Poetry Month. Poems go on all the time, but it doesn’t hurt to put a fence around one month, a ritual to pay special attention. I won’t bother to talk up the value of poems. Just as well talk up the value of walks, or breathing.
I’ve left behind the Easter rituals, the eggs, the hat, the church. When I say behind, I mean I see them in my rearview mirror as lovely and meaningful markers of time. Markers of time the way a walk marks time, one step, the next step. But time seems to spread out differently for me in these years so that it somehow encompasses the whole field.
I think I’ve finished my “Diary” of moving into a senior living place. Interestingly, a friend just sent me an article about the screenwriter Paul Schrader, who is happily living in a high-end Assisted Living facility, while juggling dozens of film projects. His wife, who has Alzheimer’s, is in a different wing. He doesn’t need to be there, but he finds the luxury living and the proximity to his wife a boon to his work and his life. This is, in a less dire situation, what my diary is about. I’ll keep you posted on its fate in the Darwinian world of publishing.
Mike at Brilliant Books in Traverse City has curated a list of 30 poets to read. It’s a smart place to look if you think of yourself as a beginner, or not. Here’s the link:
The P.S. . . .
A new poem from me in Image Journal:
https://imagejournal.org/article/you-thought-you-could-make-things-be-a-certain-way/