poetry pocket: the thing is, ellen bass.

then you hold life like a face / between your palms, a plain face, / no charming smile, no violet eyes, / and you say, yes, I will take you / I will love you, again.

dear little voice,

today, i insist: stay fast, hold tight to this lucid moment, take Love’s gentle face in your palms. you most likely, at best, have only a few more Aprils left. there are only so many garlands, summers, barefoot feet, and fleeting lovers. perhaps it is some solace, then, that there are also only so many Junes, hot tears, distant achings, and puddle-d shoes.

but i am reminded, immediately, of Bass’ magnificent Dead Butterfly, in which despair and joy are not so much Life’s opposites of shadow and light, but rather the rising of two wings that beat together:

because, the thing is:

Ellen Bass; The Thing Is.

to quote little voice and Poet Galway Kinnell: “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

Bass speaks of what she does with her subtle time on Earth in this profound interview with Terrain Press:

“Of course, as much as I hope to do this, what I am actually capable of doing will depend not only on my intentions, but what the muse grants me. I am at her mercy and what I’ve learned over the years is never to refuse a poem because I have a different idea of what I should be writing. But instead to say thank you to any poem that is willing to come through me.”

-Ellen Bass, in an interview with Terrain Press.

perhaps the thing is, little voice, to simply sing thank you for whatever goes through you: poetry, or prose. they are the same wings:

Especially when I’m faced with adversity, fear, suffering, death. How do we bear it and still live fully and without diminished appreciation and awe? It’s a practice, of course. And not an easy one. First comes the decision that I want to. And then comes the practice.

I come back again and again to Lucille Clifton’s words: “I choose joy because I am capable of it, and there are those who are not.” This has been for so many of us a challenging, even a devastating year. I’ve lost two loved ones and there have been other, significant losses as well. And yes, we do have a new baby in the family who is five months old. Deep joy. And also, deep concern about the climate crisis and the world that she and the other children and grandchildren will be contending with. Which is why we can’t give up or give in to despair. We can feel it, but we can’t let it paralyze us. I also think often of Gandhi’s words: “Anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” And, while I’m on a roll quoting, Marcel Proust: “The purpose of the artist is to draw back the veil that leaves us indifferent before the universe.” So that is what I continue to try to do.

I don’t think that joy is incompatible with seriousness. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche said, “If you can hold the pain of the world in your heart but never forget the vastness of the great eastern sun, then you can make a proper cup of tea.” And I quote Rilke for the epigraph in my recent book, Like a Beggar: “But those dark, deadly, devastating ways,/how do you bear them, suffer them?/–I praise.”

-Ellen Bass, in an interview with Katonah Poetry.

Bass’ own prescription is one of attention and gratitude as teachers of living, regardless of the movement of wings:

Paying attention and gratitude are holding hands, really. So many people have talked and written about paying attention as a spiritual practice, and I feel that's absolutely true, regardless of what it is we're paying attention to. If you're truly paying attention, you can't help but feel gratitude, and I don't mean to make it sound too sweet—sometimes you're paying attention to something that's devastating, whether it's a personal loss, the perils of our Earth, or the stunning levels of greed and cruelty that we see—and there I keep coming back to the bird that Frank Gaspar talked about and the ways in which the despair and praise are like the rising of two wings that beat together. 

It's important when we talk about gratitude not to sugar it up, and to always be aware of that other wing. I found this note from Camus the other day, who of course we don't think of as the most cheerful soul, and he said, "the misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truth but only objects for love." And there it is, what else is there for us to do? When you're writing a poem, that's what you're doing, you're trying to draw on that love that's beyond love… it’s that brutal, brutal love.

-Ellen Bass, in an interview with BOMB Magazine.

praise that face and its violet, violet eyes.

praise the one in the mirror also.

love,

ars poetica.