February/March Poet: Adrienne Rich

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who lived in troubled regions.

Adrienne Rich

February/March Poet: Adrienne Rich

From Atlas of a Difficult World by Adrienne Rich

X
Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat
Winter sun in the rosetrees.
An old Mexican with a white moustache prunes them back
           spraying
the cut branches with dormant oil.     The old paper-bag-brown
           adobe walls
stretch apart from the rebuilt mission, in their own time.     It is
           lonely here
in the curve of the road winding through vast brown fields
          machine-engraved in furrows
of relentless precision.     In the small chapel
La Nuestra Senora de la Soledad dwells in her shallow arch
painted on either side with columns.     She is in black lace crisp
           as cinders
from head to foot.     Alone, solitary, homesick
in her lonely retreat.     Outside black olives fall and smash
littering and staining the beaten path.     The gravestones of the
           padres
are weights pressing down on the Indian artisans.     It is the sixth
           day of another war

February/March Poet: Adrienne Rich

For the Dead

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

By Adrienne Rich

February/March Poet: Adrienne Rich

I've done a poor job with my poet of the month idea! Well actually I haven't done a lot of posting lately. I'm going to try and catch up a little and post a few poems over the next week by Adrienne Rich. She was February/March poet and I think I've only posted one poem. . .

At age 22, Adrienne Rich was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World. She's been called one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. In 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts, saying "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration."

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

Adrienne Rich

A few thoughts for a lazy Saturday morning

Jennifer Louden writes some great women's comfort books about doing retreats and other ways of taking care of yourself. I read a couple of her books years ago and recently came across The Women's Retreat Book again. I visited her website and signed up for an email series about self-trust inspiration. Yesterday's email was about making promises to yourself, being clear about them and noticing when you've followed through. I make promises to myself all the time. Sometimes I follow through and sometimes I don't but I realized I never give myself credit when I do.

One of the promises I've made recently is to not do things or be around people who make me feel bad and erode my commitment to what I want. It ain't easy though. I have the following excerpt from Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich posted in a couple of places in my apartment. It reminds me of what I want and that it isn't going to be easy.

But there come times –perhaps this is one of them—
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.

I was looking for the complete text of Transcendental Etude to link to but didn't find it. I did find this video which I really liked and wanted to share though!

Poetry Day

I'm still not feeling great so no adventures but here's a poem for today!

Living in Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
envoy from some village in the moldings...
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

Adrienne Rich

Bead Journal Project

I've been participating in the Bead Journal Project for the last year. This is a year long commitment to making a beaded project each month. It's been a lot of fun and I feel very proud of myself for finishing (I tend to procrastinate a lot!). My 12 projects now have a home in the Bead Journal Member's Gallery! Take a look and if you're inspired to start beading, sign-up for the 2010 project which begins in January.

My projects were all based on poems and each one I finished was my favorite at the time. Looking back, I think that my Venus figure is the one I like best:



It's based on a portion of the poem Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich:

But there come times –perhaps this is one of them—

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

when we have to pull back from the incantations,

rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,

and disenthrall ourselves, bestow

ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed

of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static

crowding the wires. We cut the wires,

find ourselves in free-fall, as if

our true home were the undimensional

solitudes, the rift

in the Great Nebula.

No one who survives to speak

new language, has avoided this:

the cutting-away of an old force that held her

rooted to an old ground

the pitch of utter loneliness

where she herself and all creation

seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry

to which no echo comes or can ever come.

I like it best for a lot of reasons. I've been trying to lose weight (with varying degrees of success) for quite a while and one thing the Venus figure symbolizes for me is how important it is to accept myself right now and be happy with myself. It's also important to work to change, to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly. It's hard work though and often that pitch of utter loneliness gets to me. That's when I feel like everything I've done so far to change is pointless and all I'm doing is making another mistake. But I'm not and I'm going to keep working on change and things will work out!