O Poem, Hopeful Body

After Visiting Hours
Leon Weinmann

All unnecessary weight is eliminated….Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and seasonally replaced in some birds.
--All the Birds of North America, p. 63


At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this heartless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.


After a long break, it seemed appropriate to return with a poem that speaks and embodies hope, hope also being the implicit character of the efforts we make to make sense of suffering.

On Delicate Unraveling

In the Tannour Oven
Brian Turner

Stitched into the gutted belly of the calf:
a fat young lamb, dressed and cleaned,
its organs removed from the cave of bone.
And within the lamb: a stuffed goose.
And in the goose’s belly: a mortar round.
And within the mortar round: a stuffed hen.
And in the hen’s belly: a grenade.
And within the grenade: a stuffed thrush.
In the thrush: a .50 caliber bullet.
In the .50 caliber bullet: seasoned
with murri, oil, and thyme—a wedding ring.

Ah, love—when you undo the stitches,
take your time. I have love letters
stuffed inside of me, these tiny bodies
made heavy by their own labored breathing.

from Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010)


I'm interested here in the complex intimacy portrayed between this speaker and his beloved, an intimacy that grapples with the violences occasioned by experiences in war. Another intimacy is the one implied between the poet and the reader or listener, the poet warning and assuring the reader about what struggles to be contained between them also. And in the context of this blog, the relationship between a helper and someone coming to be helped is finally brought to mind, especially when the latter lives with what has almost been unbearable. What a triumph loving can sometimes be!

blessing the boats

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

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.

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.

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.

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.