SEEING RED

Johnny: “In time you’ll see that this is the best thing, Loretta.”

Loretta: “In time you’ll drop dead, and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress!”

– Loretta Castorini to Johnny Cammareri after he breaks off their engagement.

From Moonstruck, by John Patrick Shanley,

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

–Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

“Rose, where did you get that Red?”

–Chip Wareing, Fifth Grade, PS 61, New York City

Red has been roiling around in my head the past few weeks, and it’s no wonder.  We’ve just got through February: heart-month, love-month, Saint Valentine’s month, all abstractions given visual power through association with that most vibrant of colors.

February Red  is a paradox.  It makes sense that here, “in the bleak mid-winter,” against the backdrop of gray skies, bony branches, and dun snow, we crave this color.  The eye delights in the flash of the cardinal amid the oak’s “bare ruined choirs,” the reckless poinsettia blooming long past Christmas, the red of the horizon as “sunset fadeth in the west.”  Our winter hearts are starved for red, and we consume it greedily.

Red speaks to us directly, without the agency of words.  The most incarnational of hues, it is the stuff we’re made of.  Elizabeth Bishop, in “The Fish,” after she captures her prize, imagines “the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails,” knowing they are the colors of her own.   Red, she nearly says, is the language of the flesh.

Red is Power, the nerve and the verve to speak your mind.  The soprano of the opera, the first violin of the orchestra, the Madonna of the feste, the lead in the play, the star of Broadway—red is the One who won’t be ignored, the One who insists she not be missed.

Red has a voice: “Beware anger, passion, warfare.”   As Sylvia warns (with her fiery red hair) rising from the gray ashes, “I eat men like air.” Red is the release of energy that can create or destroy, and there is a strange beauty even in its destruction.  (I think of the famous beginning of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—the powerful images of the green jungle exploding in clouds of red fury against the turquoise sky as Jim Morrison sings ominously, “This is the end.”)

Red is the explosion of life that gives the lie to death; thus, Loretta’s threat to do the deed: wear a red dress to her former boyfriend’s funeral.  What better way to say “I’m very much alive and very glad you’re dead” without ever speaking a word?

Red is Miracle, talisman and charm.  I think of the celebrated “girl in the red coat” in the film Schindler’s List—an innocent child who is the only bit of color in a world of black and white.  She is the life force the Nazis are bent on destroying, her red coat marking her as keeper of the sacred flame.  The viewer’s (red) heart aches for her survival, knowing it is bound up with our own.

Red is Desire. Thus the schoolboy’s urgent question, “Rose, where did you get that Red?” He longs for a piece of that beauty (don’t we all?) and needs to know where in the world he can find it.

The Rose, of course, stays silent—

his question hanging in the air—

speaking our desire,

staving off despair.

(Think Loretta’s red dress.)

(Think Sylvia’s red hair.)

“Ash Thursday” happened by accident, like most poems. It’s also true.

One evening in February, two years ago, I left my office at Fordham University in the Bronx earlier than usual. I had been invited to give a poetry reading down in Greenwich Village at The Cornelia Street Café, a marvelous venue on whose storied stage the likes of Alan Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and other such artists of the beautiful had performed. Even though the café is only 15 miles away from campus, it would take me over an hour to get there in rush hour traffic, and I didn’t want to risk being late.

I had looked forward to this for weeks. I would be reading, along with several other poets whom I didn’t know but whose work I admired, all of us having poems published in the new issue of Tiferet, a beautiful interfaith journal. As a Catholic writer with a continually-evolving sense of the role of the religion I was born plays in my poet’s imagination, I have long been fascinated by this intersection of faith and art. The opportunity to read my “Catholic” poems alongside those by Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist poets was a delightful prospect. I felt honored to be invited to the feast.

I made my way across campus as darkness began to fall along with a light snow. I climbed into the driver’s seat of my car, and, as is my habit, moved to adjust the rearview mirror. It was then, as I caught a glimpse of my reflection, that I saw the heavy, black cross traced in ashes in the middle of my forehead. I had forgotten—today was Ash Wednesday and, like many of my colleagues and students at the Catholic university where I worked, we had lined up at noon Mass to mark the beginning of the season of Lent and to be marked by our mortality.

In fact, because so many of us had been marked, and because I had been looking at those crosses all day in my classes and in my department—some of them lightly made, the suggestion of a cross, some of them crude and stark—they had become the norm, invisible to my notice after a few hours. I had not even seen my own, until this moment, and was interested to note that it was the darkest I had seen all day.

My interest, however, quickly gave way to concern. Was it really possible that I was about to walk into the Cornelia Street Café, located in one of the most militantly secular neighborhoods in the world, and read my poems to a potential roomful of Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews wearing a medieval-dagger-hilt-of-a-cross emblazoned on my forehead? My initial response to this hypothetical question was “Not on your life!” My secondary, guilt-ridden-Catholic response was, “Of course you will.  Why even ask the question?”

W.B. Yeats once famously stated that poetry does not arise out of the arguments we conduct with others but out of those we conduct within ourselves—never did this observation seem truer to me. There was no clear answer to this sudden conundrum and no obviously correct choice for me to make. The Catholic inside of me argued that one ought to wear the sign of one’s faith with pride—even though, ironically, the ashes are supposed to be a sign of humility. That, in fact, to hide that sign might be interpreted as a denial of the Faith. On the other hand, the Poet and the Citizen of the World inside of me both suggested that the symbol I loved, that I took for granted as a central truth in my own belief, has also served as a source of pain and suffering to many peoples in the world. The cross is a scandal, true, but it serves as such to the Christian in a very different way than it does to the Jew in our post-Holocaust world or to the Muslim whose ancestors endured the Crusades long past but not forgotten. My marching into an interfaith poetry reading with this potentially incendiary symbol temporarily tattooed on my face might be misconstrued as a sign of smug triumphalism as readily as it might be seen a symbol of repentance and piety.

I was deeply troubled by the choice I clearly had to make—and make soon.

Cradle-Catholic that I am, it makes sense, I suppose, that both the poem—and this essay—should take the form of a Confession. Bless me, reader, for I have sinned: I washed the cross from my forehead. Though I knew that I might justly be accused of faithlessness, cowardice, and complicity with a culture that views Catholicism with suspicion and prejudice, I chose to wipe away that outward sign of my Faith rather than trouble the hearts and minds of my Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters. After all, I reasoned (wheedled and cajoled), my poems have “Catholic” written all over them. I lay claim to that identity without reservation in the words of my poems and in my speech—I saw no need for an outward show of the symbol that is deeply branded in my heart and so plainly evident in all that I write and say.

I even had scriptural justification for my decision: the Ash Wednesday reading I had heard earlier in the day reminded me (as it always does) of the disturbing disjunction between the public parading of ourselves as observant Catholics (getting ashes being the equivalent of receiving a gold star) and Christ’s warning in Matthew 6:1 regarding the behavior of the hypocrites who parade their fasting and acts of penitence before the synagogue and the city: “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

Clearly, my mind was at ease with this decision, but my heart was not. Thus began the poem written down the day after, “Ash Thursday.”

Poetry is an argument, says Yeats. Yes. “Ash Thursday” does not attempt to reconcile the contraries. At the end of the poem, the arguments on both sides (implicit, rather than explicit) still stand, as they inevitably must.

Poetry is a way of being of two minds at the same time, Robert Frost once said (and I paraphrase). In its imaginative space, one submits to the purest fact of human existence—the knowledge of the limitations of our knowledge. Instead of exerting one’s reason (a highly overrated human attribute) to arrive at a definitive answer to unanswerable questions, poetry permits us, in Rilke’s terms, “to live the questions.”

I cannot ever know the rightness or wrongness of my actions described in my poem.  I like to think that, as the De La Salle Brothers say, I do “live Jesus in my heart, forever” and that my decision was somehow the consequence of that way of living, rather than a denial of it. But I cannot know for certain whether even this is true.

The one thing I do know is this: Ash Wednesday is a day that comes and goes, but “Ash Thursday” will be always with me.

                                               ASH THURSDAY

Ashes didn’t stay

on my forehead yesterday.

A heavy cross, a black brand,

marked me mortal Wednesday

despite my accidental hand

smearing palm on my palm,

scent of fire and scent of clay.

They clung to me all day

till I knelt at the sink

paused at the brink

and washed them away.

Last night, as I walked

to the Village café,

saints poured,

Christ-crossed,

out of Guadeloupe’s doors.

Still my sinner’s heart soars.

Poem & essay published at RELIEF magazine, June 2012.

I am a teacher of Poetry.

This means that several times a year I walk into a classroom, the seats filled with Bright Young People between the ages of 18 and 22, and try to make them fall in love with poetry. This, I admit, is a challenge. Poetry is difficult to define and defend—and past the age of 8, is difficult to learn to appreciate.

To read poetry, we need to cultivate a mode of reading that is less frantic than the hunt-and-gather method instilled in us by content-driven disciplines (not to mention daily life), to discover how to be patient with ambiguity and uncertainty, and to give ourselves permission to read for the pure pleasure of it.

As W.H. Auden once observed, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” A poem exists for its own sake, and the experience of the poem—for both the writer and the reader—is its only reason for being. It won’t earn you a grade, it won’t get you a job, it won’t even buy you a latte.

“So what’s the point?” my busy, practical, and brutally-honest students often ask.

“Exactly,” I answer.

And so the courtship begins.

The first step towards falling in love, of course, is the cultivation of friendship. And so I have to convince my students that poetry—and the poets who write them—are friends worth getting to know. My strategy here is simple: I trot out the smartest, handsomest, wittiest, most engaging poems (and poets) I know, invite them into the room with us, and let them talk.

Who could resist Shakespeare whispering, “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies.”

Who would ignore young John Keats as he ponders his own impending mortality (at age 23) when he confesses “Then I stand alone upon the shore and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

Who doesn’t laugh, albeit ruefully, along with John Gay, when he inscribes upon his own tombstone, “Life is a jest, and all things show it. / I thought so, once. And now I know it.”

Who does not grieve, with Edna St. Vincent Millay, as she regrets her bygone youth and beauty, confessing, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where and why / I have forgotten.”

Who does not yearn, with W.B. Yeats, for a return to the paradise of childhood as he dreams aloud, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.”

Who does not comprehend, along with Elizabeth Bishop, the unassuageable agony of loss, even as she bravely claims, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Who could resist Emily Dickinson’s injunction, “Tell all the Truth, but tell it Slant,” Robert Browning’s invitation, “Grow old along with me. / The best is yet to be.”

We are charmed.

Not just by the words, but by the outrageous beauty of their arrangement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once offered this homely definition of poetry as “the best words in their best order.” The poems we fall in love with contain words that are ordinary enough (love, life, lips, kiss, woods, sleep), but poetry makes them new by making them into music. Poetry is newspaper talk turned Jazz, corner-bar kvetch-and-gossip gone Bach, daily domestic dispute ascending into opera. Poetry sings—so much so that John Keats thought poetry a genre that occupied a space between music and visual art, partaking of both yet belonging to neither.

In my (hypothetical) classroom, after my students have delighted in the discovery of these poems—shouts of Where have you been all my life? all-but-audible in the room—our next step is to make them our home-boys and –girls. We need to be at ease with them, to lay claim to the poems, somehow—and what better way to do that than to memorize them—to eat their words, breathe them with our own breaths, speak them with our own tongues, mimic their rhythms with the beat of our own iambic hearts.

At this point, our relationship to the poems has become sensory, physical—one might say incarnational. (And the words were made flesh and dwelt within us.) We have entered into communion with them and they have become part of us through a strange, new kind of eucharist. Thus, we have arrived at the final stage of passionate friendship, intimacy.

My students (at least the game ones) have fallen in love with poetry. I know this because they no longer ask “What’s the point?”—and they no longer worry about what Poetry is. Instead, they’ve begun to recognize it when they hear it.

I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong’s quick and clean response to an interviewer who once posed the daunting question, “What is Jazz?”: “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know!” Somehow, now, these students know.

CONFESSION

I’ve confessed that I am a teacher of Poetry. I should also confess that I am a poet, for this condition allows me a second perspective from which to see poems—as writer and reader, as giver and receiver, both.

This means that several times a week I sit down with a blank piece of paper and play at making poems. I use the word play instead of work as it conveys the paradox of poetry as the exercise of freedom in the face of constraint.

Play suggests the challenge of discovering ways to subvert the rules of the game, even as we observe them—to figure out how to use limitations to our advantage.

Work, on the other hand, connotes duty, dullness, and drudgery—none of which has anything to do with poetry. (The final—fabulous—lines of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” describe and enact the dynamic of poetry-as-serious-play better than any I know. They also serve as his epitaph: “Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.”)

Though I’m sure there are writers who make poems in solitude and silence, I don’t. In fact, I’m talking most of the time. I do this, partly, so I can hear what the poems are saying and whether or not they sing. I also do this to remind myself that when I write I am with someone.

W. H. Auden once said that poetry is a way of “breaking bread with the dead,” and he’s right. All of the poems I’ve ever fallen in love with—and all of the poets who wrote them, dead and alive—are in the room with me as I write. They are informing the language I choose to use, the music of my lines, and the timbre of my voice, even as they stretch the limits of my vision. They are the Company I keep, and in return for their long and good companionship, I offer them my own poems.

Finally, speaking, singing, and listening to my own poems serves to remind me of the constant, yet invisible, presence of The Reader, whoever he or she may be. Just as surely as there are readers who fall in love with poetry, there are poets writing poems with the specific purpose of wooing them. I know this because I am one of them.

Robert Frost once said of the process of writing poetry, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” He might also have added, “No love in the writer, no love in the reader.” Within this dynamic, poetry becomes a gesture, a set of signs and symbols expressing the shared humanity of reader and writer—concepts expressed through the material substances of book and ink, paper and pen—and so aspires to the condition of sacrament.

Any effort to define Poetry (with a capital “P”) in an exhaustive way is doomed to fall short, and this brief essay is no exception to that mighty rule. One reason for this inevitable incompleteness is that Poetry (like Love) is an abstraction, whereas true poetry (like true love) is found in the flesh-and-breath experience of it. Given this, it somehow seems fitting that I must finally resort to poetry to elucidate Poetry, and close this meditation with a poem I wrote some years ago when asked to define what Poetry meant to me.

POET’S HERESY

“I feel that the Godhead is broken up like bread at the supper,
and we are the pieces.” –Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, Nov 17, 1851

I’m a Sicilan woman
and my poems say mangia!

I want to feed you
bread and wine, fruit and feast,

blessed and broken words
to chew, chew, chew.

I want you to eat them
purely for pleasure,

to put your lips around p,
crack k’s with your crowns,
roll l’ s across your taste-budded tongue,

to swallow sweet & easy
the meal of your life.

For it is what your body craves,
your heart sorely wants,
what your gut loves.

It is lies & truth, death & life,
sweet/sour, adazzle/dim,

what you have always
and have never known.

It is itself and you besides,
every thing & no thing at all.

It stuffs you full and leaves you
heavy, hungry, starved for more.

It makes you glad.
It troubles your sleep.

It is my body & my blood.
Here. Take. Eat.

Poem from Saint Sinatra & Other Poems.
This essay was first published at TWEETSPEAK POETRY (http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2011/09/12/what-is-poetry-falling-in-love-1/ and http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2011/09/21/what-is-poetry-falling-in-love-2/)

                                                 Emmanuel

Today, December 21st, is the Winter Solstice.  Today we in the Eastern Hemisphere are farther from the sun than we shall ever be.  Today, “the darkest day of the year,” light is scarce and slant.  The winter solstice has long been charged with terror and mystery, as we human beings get an inkling of what it might be like to be estranged from our Star.  We value the light we have today all the more more for its rarity..  The poem below celebrates that light even as it  honors the dark place wherein we find ourselves.

For Shadowment: Villanelle for the Solstice

Here, here in the crook of the year,
the crux and fix and flux of the year
light falls long across and dear.

Here in the ruck and dreck of the year
We glean and gather grace and gear,
here, here in the crook of the year.

Here is the neckbone of the year,
its knuckle sharp, its blade sheer,
where light falls long across and dear.

Hear the matins of the year,
the chant of praise and marrow fear,
here, here in the crook of the year.

Cheer the vespers of the year,
the prayers that rise from tongue to ear
as light falls long across and dear.

Clear your mind as night draws near.
Stead your heart and shed no tear.
Here, here in the crook of the year
where light falls long across and dear

(pub. in Christian Century, Dec 12, 2012)

It has been said that poetry is the un-sayable said. But this isn’t true. There are occasions in human experience when even poetry, the most potent form of language we humans have, cannot invent the words necessary to convey the unspeakable truth.

We have witnessed such an occasion in recent days. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14th stunned us, once again, with an inexplicable act of violence and evil. In the immediate hours afterwards, the most common response I heard in the news and on social media was a paralyzed silence.

“No words,” wrote one of my most eloquent and voluble Facebook friends.

But people wanted to say something, to offer some expression of the terrible loss of life, the terrible violation of the sacrosanct holy land of childhood, the terrible knowledge that evil can pierce us to the quick and leave us wounded, naked, and lost. We wanted to console ourselves, to insist that goodness & love triumphs over malignity & hatred. In the absence of words, people began circulating images—beautiful, powerful images of grief-stricken Madonnas, of weeping Christs, innumerable incarnations of the fragile human form contracted and contorted, tongue-tied in an agony of grief.

A Story

When our son turned five, we decided to give him a pair of hamsters. On his birthday—a cold and snowy day in early January—I picked him up from morning kindergarten, drove slowly home, and led him by the hand into our warm house. Waiting inside were balloons, cake, and a multi-level miniature plastic playground with two hamsters inside. My husband and I stood by, anticipating his response of surprise, wonder, and delight. Instead, our five-year-old child peered inside the cage, burst into hot tears, and began wailing inconsolably, “I want to BE one!”

We were mystified—both in that inexplicable moment and for years afterward.

One day, while I was reading the letters of poet John Keats, I received some small insight into this mystery. The young Keats would invest himself so entirely in the books he was reading (and in the lives he was living) he would become one with the creatures and emotions he encountered. Reading Spenser, he would hunker over and extend his arms in imitation of the “sea-shouldering whales” the master poet wrote of—watching the birds outside his window, he would imagine himself scratching and pecking in the gravel alongside them.

This “negative capability” Keats so prized — the impulse to negate The Self and become The Other, to inhabit a state of being perceived outside oneself—had overwhelmed our small son when he first set eyes on his hamsters, amazing little beings he had never seen before. Pierced by their beauty, his capacity to become them was outstripped by his desire, his five impassioned, puzzling words proclaiming the power and lamenting the limits of his imagination.

Why Haiku?

“It’s like being alive twice.”

This is what Basho, the 17th century haiku master, once said about lyric poetry. He left behind his life as a samurai warrior in order to become a poet, setting aside his sword to take up his pen, abandoning the pursuit of death to pursue life.

In the cicada’s cry
There’s no sign that can foretell
How soon it must die.

To know a state is to know its opposite, and haiku invites poet and reader to experience both in the same instant of time with an intensity telegraphed by its brevity. And so the poem, like the sound of the cicada (most evanescent of creatures), celebrates life and heralds death. Here is the in-between space, the negatively capable niche, where Basho takes up residence and writes from.

Haiku forbids excess. The poet has 17 syllables (or fewer) in which to say, not the un-sayable, but what can be said. There is no room for explanation, only impression. Haiku gives the fleet glimpse instead of exposition, a quick picture in place of a thousand words.

Won’t you come and see
loneliness? Just one leaf
from the kiri tree.

The sparseness of haiku suits its subject—the finding of plenty in the midst of dearth, of presence in the empty fact of absence, of affirmation amid the cry of lamentation.

For a lovely bowl
Let us arrange these flowers
Since there is no rice.

And what are “these flowers” that substitute for food if not words—bright blooms we cannot eat, that won’t sate our human hunger, yet feed the ear and eye? And what are haiku but small bowls of roses offered on the altar of our mortality, momentary flashes of Being that enlarge and amplify our own?

Lightning—
Heron’s cry
Stabs the darkness.

And so Basho wields his pen, a scalpel instead of a sword—his wounding delicate, surgical, survivable. Pierced by beauty, alive once and alive twice, we become more fully ourselves…heron and leaf, hamster and human, grieving mother and grieved-for child.

Posted at TWEETSPEAK POETRY, http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2012/12/19/haiku-pierced-by-beauty/