poetry pocket: my dead friends, marie howe

i have begun,/ when i'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question/ to ask my dead friends for their opinion/ and the answer is often immediate and clear.

dear little voice,

in her poem The Affliction, Marie Howe writes:

"we met—in our mutual gaze—in between a third place I’d not yet been."

My Dead Friends, by Marie Howe

Stanley Kunitz, when asked why he writes Poetry, answered:

“I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.”

i believe, little voice, that Kunitz and Howe were speaking of the same thing: a kind of looking-glass that when, drawn to the eye in trembling anticipation, changes nothing.

in this way, Poetry is a placebo for awe.

it is simply drawing your attention to what has always been in front of you.

as Howe says:

“Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason…”

“What I want is to try to make poetry as ubiquitous as Gap ads. I mean how can we have people bump into poetry? I mean, there’s this guy in New York. I say it’s a guy. It could be a woman. Last spring, there was somebody who was drawing on the sidewalk in blue chalk, and all it said was “happiness,” a big “happiness” with a big blue arrow this way. And I would see these around, and I thought, “This is terrific. This is really kind of wonderful. Like, ‘happiness’ is this way, that way…”

“The great poetry I love holds the mystery of on being alive. It holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable.”
- Marie Howe, in a wonderful interview with Krista Tippett

if there is a wish to be had, maybe that wish is for the looking glass.

or: to find the world in the same place we find Poetry: in whatever is simply in front of us.

you know that you have Poetry, and you know that you have the World. these are two things that cannot be disputed.

the belief that these are the same thing is either a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

Marie Howe, The Moment

there is a commonly tossed about phrase:

memento mori
(Latin for: remember you will die).

this is all very well and good. but i often find myself instead thinking of:

mono no aware.
(Japanese for: the sensitivity to ephemera)
(and, occasionally, translated as: an empathy towards all things)
(物の哀れ)

mono no aware means to notice the minor, transient documents of everyday life. it is the tear at the centre of the world. the sudden, gasping awareness of the impermanence of the most trivial and insignificant and passed-over. it is the miracle of a stone. it is the mystery of a shoelace. and it is the subtle passion that follows.

these words are the reason, little voice, that i can no longer eat olives without thinking of John Berger.

you will often hear me speak of this passage from his Confabulations:

“A week [after Sven’s funeral], I’m cooking fish on a wood fire outside and my son, Yves, brings me a glass of wine to drink and holds a bowl of olives. It’s getting dark and my eyes are sore from the smoke, so I feel for a couple with my fingers without looking, and pop one into my mouth. As I spit out the stone and try to define the flavour–sharp, bitter-black, Greek–a thought crosses my mind: From now on I taste olives for Sven too.”
- John Berger, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ from Confabulations.

As Howe writes in Nowhere:

“But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere/
and making coffee in the usual day, measuring grounds /
with the wooden spoon, I remembered, /
this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture/
after gesture,/
what else can we know of safety/
or of fruitfulness?"

there are few who know what to do with something more than those who have lost it.

they’ve already gone through the frightening door.

whatever they say— do.

love,

ars poetica

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little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you several days a week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket: