Monday, 21 July 2025

Swimming After Thoughts


Ana Teresa Fernandez




Swimming After Thoughts 

In Memoriam: Robert Penn Warren
 

Across the blackened pond and back again,
he's swimming in an ether all his own;

lap after lap, he finds the groove
no champion of motion would approve,

since time and distance hardly cross his mind
except as something someone else might find

of interest. He swims and turns, making
his way through frogspawn, lily pads, and shaking

reeds, a slow and lofty lolling stroke
that cunningly preserves what's left to stoke

his engines further, like a steamwheel plunging
through its loop of light. He knows that lunging

only breaks the arc of his full reach.
He pulls the long, slow oar of speech,

addressing camber-backed and copper fish;
the minnows darken like ungathered wishes,

flash and fade - ideas in a haze of hopes
ungathered into syntax, sounding tropes.

The waterbugs pluck circles round his ears
while, overhead, a black hawk veers

to reappraise his slithering neck and frogs
take sides on what or who he is: a log

or lanky, milk-white beast. He goes on swimming,
trolling in the green-dark glistening

silence and subtending mud where things
begin, where thoughts amass in broken rings

and surface, break to light, the brokered sound
of lost beginnings - fished for, found.
 

Jay Parini 
 
 
 "Swimming is a wonderful way of writing. Your body is totally occupied, there's nothing else and your mind goes blank." 
 
Robert Penn Warren
 

"In the green-dark glistening silence..."
 
I wanted to write something in praise of this most excellent poem, but the images and rhythms and words are so beautiful that I just want to read it, and be quiet.
 


Monday, 7 July 2025

Through Morning Mist


 




Through morning mist, preceded by its moo,
The lowing cow looms slowly into view.

Issa


fr. A Net of Fireflies
translated by Harold Stewart


See?
There's a poem for everything.









Thursday, 19 June 2025

Question VII

 

 

 

Albrecht Durer



VII.
 

What is it that upsets the volcanoes
that spit fire, cold and rage?

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus
able to discover Spain?

How many questions does a cat have?

Do tears not yet spilled
wait in small lakes?

Or are they invisible rivers
that run toward sadness?
 

Pablo Neruda
 
 
These questions! - when I first came across these, something broke in my brain. It wasn't until I read these poems that I understood what poetry does, or what the possibilities truly were. In all my years of reading poems, I hadn't seen it. And I don't even know if I can put into words what I am beginning to learn.

At first, the questions seemed child-like and beautiful, but not particularly poetic or deep. Where is the rhythm, the wordplay, for instance? Where is the development of metaphor? But my curiosity was piqued. I read more.

I wrote about this before -( LXXII), and I still hold to those thoughts, but since  then they have grown. Something else is happening in the words - something more than mere childlike wondering. For instance, in that question, "How many questions does a cat have?" 
 
That's not naive wondering, it's questioning whether I have been wrong about the world I live in. We are very "scientific" about the things around us. We have tested things on certain levels, and have come to conclusions. But what if we got it wrong? What if we made a specific answer cover too large an area? Or too small?

What if we have skewed our vision of reality so much that we have lost the path and are now traveling down some self-invented by-way leading only into more distortion?


Neruda's question poems cracked open a treasure box for me. When I look at the cat, I see what I have been told is there, and forget that I have agency in seeing, that I need to take up my eyes and use them in a fresh way. 
 

Science is too small explain a cat.


What I am learning is that poetry is thinking and seeing, or something that is both - seeking? (I just noticed that when I patch those two words together, "seeking" is what get.) Seeking the fuller truth of things. Seeking the possibilities. Cracking out of smallthink.

Does a cat ask questions?
Obviously.

Now what we need is a poet to hear them. 
 
 


 
 

Tuesday, 10 June 2025

Nerves

 

Martin Lewis

                                                 

Nerves


You have noticed the curious increased exasperation

Of human nerves these late years? Not only in Europe,

Where reasons exist, but universal; a rope or a net

Is being hauled in, a tension screwed higher;

Few minds now are quite sane; nearly every person 

Seems to be listening for a crash, listening...

And wishing for it, with a kind of enraged

Sensibility.

                   Or is it that we really feel

A gathering in the air of something that hates

Humanity, and in that storm-light see

Ourselves with too much pity and the others too clearly?


Well, this is February, nineteen-three-nine.

We count the months now, we shall count the days.

It seems time that we find something outside our

Own nerves to lean on.


Robinson Jeffers

 

I read this with amazement. The date this poem was written!! 

It could be describing today.

 

 

 

Sunday, 25 May 2025

On a Boat

Barry Moser





On a Boat, Awake at Night

Faint wind rustles reeds and cattails;
I open the hatch, expecting rain -- moon floods the lake.
Boatmen and water birds dream the same dream;
a big fish splashes off like a frightened fox.
It's late -- men and creatures forget each other
while my shadow and I amuse ourselves alone.
Dark tides creep over the flats -- I pity the cold mud-worms;
the setting moon, caught in a willow, lights a dangling spider.
Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;
how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?
Cocks crow, bells ring, a hundred birds scatter;
drums pound from the bow, shout answers shout.

Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) (translated by Burton Watson)
 
 
 
This scene, described in such specific detail, comes alive. I am there, seeing and hearing these things, thinking these thoughts. 
 
It's magic. 
 
And then I look at the dates! Really? 
 
1037-1101? 
 
It could be this minute! 
 
What is the name for this? Time travel + mind meld + the ability to repeat this experience every time we want?
 
If you know of a word for it, tell me please!
 





Monday, 5 May 2025

The Waggon-Maker

 

Carl Larsson

The Waggon-Maker


I have made tales in verse, but this man made

Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;

The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,

His was the magic that the wood obeyed.


Each deft device that country wisdom bade,

Or farmers' practice needed, he preserved.

He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved

Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.


No weakness, no offense in any part,

It stood the strain in mired fields and roads

In all a century's struggle for its bread;

Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,

Beautiful always as a work of art,

Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.


John Masefield


A perfect poem. How every word fits snug in its place!  - I feel an intertwining of the writer and his subject. In his appreciation of the carpenter's craft, there is an equal echo in his own. 

The way he writes, "I have made tales in verse, but this man made..." and then describes the wisdom of the woodworker and blacksmith, how they use a knowledge passed down to them through time, and with this create something useful and beautiful to last a hundred years.

That sense of Time! And wisdom passed down! And that "only by eye" and instinct! This is an artist recognizing another's artistry.

It gives me chills. 


There is something gorgeous in the meeting of arts.

A recognition of the highest purposes? Beauty and Truth, or Beauty and Usefulness?

Together, they are a powerhouse, an explosion, a celebration.


I walk away from the poem wishing I had a part in that Beauty-work.





Sunday, 27 April 2025

The Thrush's Nest

Bruno Liljefors



The Thrush's Nest

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

John Clare
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin


John Clare, bird enthusiast, bird poet.

"I drank the sound with joy."

And that's the impression I get - that Clare was a man who needed nature to bring him

out of himself, to lift him up. The birds fed his soul.  

 

I can relate.