My Wobbly Bicycle, 18

Yesterday morning we were in a snow-globe of lake-effect fluff, drifting all over. It was beautiful. To me these days, most things are, well, a revelation, meaning that being alive is—shall I say just great? That sounds so Panglossian. I mean it’s all okay, snow or sun, no joke.  It’s April 3. Melting snow is soaking some moisture down where it needs to be, after our dry, dry summer last year. The tart cherries should be good this year. And our two good friends, Myrna and Joan, from Traverse City got married in D.C. yesterday after 20 years living as a committed gay couple with no legal protections or civil recognition. A great day for them—ages 72 and 80. My daughter Kelly lives in D.C. and attended (she's in the photo), to represent us.  And I finished my 25 sessions of daily radiation yesterday. I imagine I feel better already, not having those rays daily directed straight at my digestive system. I’ve felt pretty punk most of the time, and increasingly tired. I’m taking long afternoon naps and going to bed early. Next is three weeks (3 sessions)  of “internal” radiation, to target the scar tissue around the hysterectomy surgery. Then three rounds,  three weeks apart, of chemo again.Will I be “cured?” The radiation oncologist carefully says we “hope to keep the cancer away.” This is accurate. It was always accurate even when we didn’t know it, that what we do moment-by-moment is collapse and resurrect, collapse and resurrect. We hope the balance hangs in our favor a good long while. The mind is good at ignoring, mostly, our end. But at some cost, it seems to me now. There is a “dearest freshness deep down things,” as the poet Hopkins puts it, that’s only touched when our feet are (metaphorically, at least) unshod, when they can feel the soil we come from and return to.My step-daughter Amy visited this last week. She teaches at Lane College in Eugene, Oregon, and gave up most of her spring break to be here for me and for her dad. I was too tired to do much more than take a jaunt to the local museum and go out to eat once, but it was great to have her here. She built me a little Buddha stand.Sometime I’ll write exclusively about my deep affection for both Christianity and Buddhism, how each has mattered to me. I’m steeped in both cultures. I’ve loved the images, the rituals, the glorious language of the Christian church. After my years on the cushion, those images, etc., haven’t gone away. Who would want them to? They become, shall I say, “seen through” in their provisionality. In the same way, I suspect, that St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, and the Buddha, saw through to simply what is, was, and always will be. It’s just the plain shining, gritty truth of things, with or without my or anyone else’s smart-ass input.I just read a fine interview of Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry Magazine by my old friend Jeanne Murray Walker in Image Magazine. Wiman says, “Silence is the necessary soil for poetry, and the blight that eats into our surest words. Silence is the only sound God ever makes, and it is the often crushing condition of his absence. Every once in a while you encounter a work of art that silence has truly and permanently entered, like fallen autumn leaves that, riddled with holes, are on their way to being entirely light.”Corollary Issue: Why I Have this Cancer: Thank heaven for the researchers and curers. That’s not what I mean. I mean metaphysically why. I think of Job, who refused to ask. And I think of this, from John Donne’s Sermon CXXX:It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable,why; it exasperates God, ruins us.

Quotes I've Saved #4: Clive James on Poetry

There is a “clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any.”  (from his essay in Poetry magazine).The second half of his “division” recalls to my mind, of course, the legions of students I’ve taught who start by knowing nothing of craft, nothing about the stream they’re swimming in, students who disdain studying meter and form because it doesn’t “fit” their ethos. How many of us have assigned exercises in meter to develop some healthy humility in our students? In the past, I’ve told students that anyone who wants to have any control of the language must be able to manipulate it enough to get a smooth meter, at least as an exercise.Clive James says:  “We tend to assume that the poet needed to be able to write the rhymed stanzas of “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and then sit on the knowledge,” but he goes on to say that “the idea that form can be perfectly free has had so great a victory, everywhere in the English speaking world, that the belief in its hidden technical support no longer holds up. Or rather, and more simply, the idea of technique has changed. It is no longer pinned to form.”Okay, I have to think about that. He says, it appears, there are so many successful poems that are “informal” that we have to question whether it’s necessary to have young poets master meter and regular stanzas. In other words, we’ve moved so far from that organized way of thinking about form in relation to technique that we may just need to drop it.Thoughts:One: Clive and I agree that there must be technique in order to “drop it.”Two: There is an underlying regularity, a fractal quality, in our universe, I think. It may not match the regularity in other universes, and it may shift as we look at it, á la Heisenberg, but all evidence points to its existence.Three:  All our writing, all our lives, I think, play with and against that regularity.Four:  Granted, technique spans a wider field—line endings, voice, etc. Denise Levertov made all those arguments back in the 70s for organic form, the function of the line, inner voice, i.e., how to talk about the game when the net is removed. What is a line? What does it mean when a line is interrupted by a break? What are the forces that stop our eye? The ones that push us forward?Five:  I’m not sure I entirely agree that technique can no longer be “pinned to form.”  Technique, it seems to me, comes from hearing. Hearing the sounds we make on the page. Knowing what we want them to do and WHY. It seems useful and, indeed, maybe even necessary, to know how to make words make particular sounds, nay, even rhythms, together, as training in listening, if nothing else.Six:  I am old, Father William (If you don’t know the allusion, you’ve missed a vital part of your training). But ask any young composer of music if he/she hasn’t needed to adhere to the stanza, the musical phrase, the subtle notations for how long to hold a note, and so on, no matter how insanely wild the sounds. Jazz players with no formal training? There are only a few very good ones, and they hear it. They’ve listened so long and so hard that they hear it.Seven: I always get nervous when I make declarations. One of you is going to flatten me with your intelligent and learned remarks. I await my fate.