may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
Lucille Clifton 1936-2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation
Bridge Crossings---Conversations in Poetry
A series of four Sunday afternoons, Feb. 7, May 16, Sept 26 and Nov. 7, 2010, 3:30pm to 5:30 pm. C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco.
We hope to offer you an enjoyable afternoon through the poems and conversations of two poets who will address a common theme. Accompanying music and visual images will also be featured. The impetus for these conversations arises from the notion that poetry is a “crossing” over varying psychic territories that touch our lives, our practices, and our humanity with both a feeling of recognition and surprise.
PROGRAM
February 7, 2010, “Soul’s Tongue: A Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation.” Poets Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Forrest Hamer will read and converse; Cellist Chris Evan will provide musical accompaniment.
The poet and the analyst share the medium of language; both engage in the work of translation—from image, affect and memory into words.
• Does soul speak to each in the same tongue?
• If the poet is also an analyst, does one discipline support the other? Or are they conflicting practices?
A Freudian and a Jungian, both analysts, both poets, will read from their work and reflect on these questions.
FORREST HAMER is a widely published poet. He is the winner of the Beatrice Hawley award for his collection “Call and Response” and the Northern California Book Award for his collection “Middle Ear.” His most recent book of poems is called “Rift.” Poems of his have been published in “The Best American Poetry.” Forrest Hamer also works as an analyst and comes from the Psychoanalytic tradition.
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY has published her work in many literary magazines. Her poetry collections are “red clay is talking” and “crimes of the dreamer.” Her memoir on creativity, “The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way,” was recently published. Naomi also works as an analyst and comes from the Jungian tradition.
CHRIS EVANS has performed classical music in the Bay Area and France. She has played in the orchestras at San Francisco State, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley. Lately she has become interested in improvisation and composition.
Refreshments will be served. $20.00 Donations requested.
Directions and parking information is attached.
A series of four Sunday afternoons, Feb. 7, May 16, Sept 26 and Nov. 7, 2010, 3:30pm to 5:30 pm. C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco.
We hope to offer you an enjoyable afternoon through the poems and conversations of two poets who will address a common theme. Accompanying music and visual images will also be featured. The impetus for these conversations arises from the notion that poetry is a “crossing” over varying psychic territories that touch our lives, our practices, and our humanity with both a feeling of recognition and surprise.
PROGRAM
February 7, 2010, “Soul’s Tongue: A Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation.” Poets Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Forrest Hamer will read and converse; Cellist Chris Evan will provide musical accompaniment.
The poet and the analyst share the medium of language; both engage in the work of translation—from image, affect and memory into words.
• Does soul speak to each in the same tongue?
• If the poet is also an analyst, does one discipline support the other? Or are they conflicting practices?
A Freudian and a Jungian, both analysts, both poets, will read from their work and reflect on these questions.
FORREST HAMER is a widely published poet. He is the winner of the Beatrice Hawley award for his collection “Call and Response” and the Northern California Book Award for his collection “Middle Ear.” His most recent book of poems is called “Rift.” Poems of his have been published in “The Best American Poetry.” Forrest Hamer also works as an analyst and comes from the Psychoanalytic tradition.
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY has published her work in many literary magazines. Her poetry collections are “red clay is talking” and “crimes of the dreamer.” Her memoir on creativity, “The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way,” was recently published. Naomi also works as an analyst and comes from the Jungian tradition.
CHRIS EVANS has performed classical music in the Bay Area and France. She has played in the orchestras at San Francisco State, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley. Lately she has become interested in improvisation and composition.
Refreshments will be served. $20.00 Donations requested.
Directions and parking information is attached.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Within the Realm of Possibility
Nightfall
Cassiano Ricardo (trans. Barbara Howes)
Friends, I sang as a bird sings
at daybreak. In full agreement
with one single world.
But how could one live in a world
where things had a single name?
Then, I made up words.
And words perched, warbling, on the head
of objects.
Reality, thus, came to have
as many heads as words.
And when I tried to express sadness and joy
words settled upon me, obedient
to my slightest lyrical gesture.
Now I must be mute.
I am sincere only when I am silent.
So, only when I am silent
do they settle upon me—words—
a flock of birds in a tree
at nightfall.
Though language always exists in tension with what is unspeakable, poetry and psychoanalysis concern themselves essentially with what thrives within this tension, centrally the possibly-spoken. Within this realm, meanings press toward and against language, the essential (soul, unconscious, spirit-nature, etc.) a trickster which regards speaking with appropriate wariness.
Cassiano Ricardo (trans. Barbara Howes)
Friends, I sang as a bird sings
at daybreak. In full agreement
with one single world.
But how could one live in a world
where things had a single name?
Then, I made up words.
And words perched, warbling, on the head
of objects.
Reality, thus, came to have
as many heads as words.
And when I tried to express sadness and joy
words settled upon me, obedient
to my slightest lyrical gesture.
Now I must be mute.
I am sincere only when I am silent.
So, only when I am silent
do they settle upon me—words—
a flock of birds in a tree
at nightfall.
Though language always exists in tension with what is unspeakable, poetry and psychoanalysis concern themselves essentially with what thrives within this tension, centrally the possibly-spoken. Within this realm, meanings press toward and against language, the essential (soul, unconscious, spirit-nature, etc.) a trickster which regards speaking with appropriate wariness.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Lost
Goodbye, then, to the third-year candidates who took my seminar on psychoanalytic writing at SFCP this spring. It was a pleasure working with you.
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Found
Both poetry and psychoanalysis exist as locations for discovery. We may wonder: is there ever discovery without uncovering; uncovering without discovering something new? Consider the elements of both in the following poems:
Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
Unbidden
Rae Armantrout
The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
has left something
undone.
.
Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?
Today’s edges
are so sharp
they might cut
anything that moved.
.
The way a lost
word
will come back
unbidden.
You’re not interested
in it now,
only
in knowing
where it’s been.
Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
Unbidden
Rae Armantrout
The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
has left something
undone.
.
Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?
Today’s edges
are so sharp
they might cut
anything that moved.
.
The way a lost
word
will come back
unbidden.
You’re not interested
in it now,
only
in knowing
where it’s been.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Rhythm and Blues
I’ve always been awed (no, at first, I was a little afraid) by the capacity of blues music to contain a complex of intense affects in such a way that the listener is worried and then rendered better able to bear the difficulties of being alive and aware. The music reminds me that any effective insight into (or, sight in) human experience registers finally at the level of emotion. You’ve got to feel it way down to the depths of your soul.
Here’s a wonderful poem by the poet Jericho Brown (whom I had the honor of teaching in a summer poetry workshop some years ago), from his first book, Please:
Track 1: Lush Life
The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice. You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue. A lover’s tongue might call you bitch,
A term of endearment where you come from, a kind
Of compliment preceded by the word sing
in certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue
You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,
With a shot of Patron at the end of each phrase
From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can’t
Remember your father’s leather belt without shaking
Your head. That’s what satisfies her, the woman
With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.
Here’s a wonderful poem by the poet Jericho Brown (whom I had the honor of teaching in a summer poetry workshop some years ago), from his first book, Please:
Track 1: Lush Life
The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice. You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue. A lover’s tongue might call you bitch,
A term of endearment where you come from, a kind
Of compliment preceded by the word sing
in certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue
You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,
With a shot of Patron at the end of each phrase
From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can’t
Remember your father’s leather belt without shaking
Your head. That’s what satisfies her, the woman
With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Poetry & Psychoanalysis Events
Two new events in the Poetry & Psychoanalysis interview series have been scheduled.
Cole Swensen will be interviewed by Alice Jones on Saturday, March 21 from 2.30-4; and C. Dale Young will be interviewed by Susan Kolodny on Sunday, April 26 from 3.30-5. Both events will be held in the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis auditorium, 2340 Jackson Street, 4th floor, San Francisco, CA. 415.563.5815.
Cole Swensen will be interviewed by Alice Jones on Saturday, March 21 from 2.30-4; and C. Dale Young will be interviewed by Susan Kolodny on Sunday, April 26 from 3.30-5. Both events will be held in the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis auditorium, 2340 Jackson Street, 4th floor, San Francisco, CA. 415.563.5815.
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