…………….“…I am scorched
…………….to realize once again
…………….how many small, available things
…………….are in this world
…………….that aren’t
…………….pieces of gold
…………….or power—
…………….that nobody owns
…………….or could buy even
…………….for a hillside of money—
…………….that just float
…………….in the world…”
………—from the poem “Summer Story” by Mary Oliver,
………which is about a hummingbird and the human heart
Well, here it is Friday already, and I didn’t get that twenty-five miles of caged birds poem of mine typed up yet. Another Friday, then.
This morning the girls and I tried to read a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins—a special favorite of mine; he won the heart of this freckled girl with “Pied Beauty” long ago—but we had already had a rather long read-aloud session which had exhausted the patience of my toddler, whose wooden animals began mysteriously to leap out of his fists and hurl themselves across the room.
Hopkins never had to contend with flying zebras.
He’d have seen the beauty in them, though, if he had.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is hosted by the wonderful Carol Rasco from RIF.
OK, so every week as Poetry Friday approaches, I think: I should tell the caged birds story. But I never get around to it, because the story pretty much begs the posting of the poems the story is about. Which means I’d need to canvas my grad-school chums to see if any of them would let me share their poems-from-the- story here (if they can even find copies); and my own poem- from-the-story is about a mile long, and that’s a lot of typing.
Plus it’s always a bit agonizing to copy out a piece of your own writing, especially one from long ago—you keep finding things you’d like to tinker with, improve, polish up. At least, I do.
AND YET. It’s a great poetry story. So I’m going to tell it after all, and then maybe later I can ask some of my classmates for permission to share their poems, and maybe I’ll dig up my own poem-from-the-story for a future Poetry Friday.
So all right, one night during grad school (this was at UNC-Greensboro), a bunch of us MFA students were at a party together. Music, laughter, merriment. One of the poets—I think it was Susan Collings, or maybe it was Elizabeth Leigh Palmer? (now Hadaway)—was telling us about Moses Cone, 19th-century philanthropist, entrepreneur, and prominent citizen of Greensboro. One year, it seems, Moses gave his wife the rather remarkable present of twenty-five miles of carriage roads.
That’s what Susan (or Leigh) said, but one of the fiction writers got an intensely puzzled look on her face and said, “He gave her twenty-five miles of caged birds?”
We all laughed, but we were struck, too, by the image. Twenty-five miles of caged birds. For a moment we all fell silent, picturing it, I think, or savoring the magic of the strange phrase.
“It’s like something from a poem,” one of us said. And an idea seized us, a kind of game, a quiet joke we could play on our workshop professor, the brilliant Alan Shapiro. We would each write a poem that included the line “twenty-five miles of caged birds.” And we would all turn them in for workshop the next week, without saying anything about the exercise: we’d let Alan discover the repeated phrase as he read through the poems.
Well, we all went home and did exactly that. There were around ten of us in the workshop. Each of us wrote a poem, working the caged-birds phrase in somewhere, and turned them in for the next class’s discussion. Mine was, as I have mentioned, quite long: it was a framed story about a girl recalling a fairy tale her grandfather had once told to her mother, a variation on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale.” The girl actually hears the story from her aunt, not her mother, and that’s part of the tension of the piece. In the grandfather’s version of the tale, the Emperor, having fallen in love with the exquisite song of the nightingale in his vast garden, orders up a hundred replicas in bronze, mechanical birds who sing mechanical songs, placed
“…at intervals in the garden from sea to palace:
twenty-five miles of caged birds and belled orchids.”
The morning of our workshop I was making photocopies in the writing program office when in ran Alan Shapiro. Alan is a dignified and serious person, not prone to running in excitement, but in this moment, he was both running and excited. He had read the first three or four poems and had been so struck by them that he just had to come share the moment with someone. Our program director, Jim Clark, was there, and I don’t remember if we had filled him in on the joke or not, but I remember his eyes twinkling as Alan explained his excitement. He’d read the first poem, and an odd line, the caged birds thing, had jumped out at him as a curious turn of phrase. In that first poem, he wasn’t sure to make of it, but in the next one—I remember he said this one was by Mary Elder, who wrote beautifully spare verses full of startling images—there was the same odd phrase, used in such a way that he decided it must be a figure of speech he was somehow unfamiliar with.
He described reading the next poem, and there it was again, and by now he was wondering what was up. And then he hit my poem, the fairy tale—and he thought, Oh! This must be the origin of the idiom! “Twenty-five miles of caged birds,” this peculiar figure of speech he’d never heard before, must have originated in the Andersen tale my poem reinterpreted.
As you can imagine, this tickled me no end, especially since the miles of mechanical birds were my own twist; in Andersen’s story there is the single artificial bird brought into the palace to outshine the real nightingale.
Well, Alan went back and read the rest of the batch of poems, and it didn’t take long before he realized he’d been pranked. We all howled like crazy at his recounting of events in workshop that afternoon. Our joke had come off even better than we hoped.
But the best part, really, was hearing all the poems—all so incredibly different, carrying the peculiar words into contexts that were oceans apart from each other. As fine a story as Moses Cone’s gift of carriage roads is—how delighted his wife must have been!—it was nothing compared to the distance traveled and the worlds conjured by those caged birds.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Dori Reads, about twenty-five miles down Caged Birds Road.
A poem by Rilla, age 4 1/2.
Cup
Cup
can
drink
out
of
there
self
That is to say, “Cup can drink out of itself.” Got a bit of a zen-riddle quality, doesn’t it? Even more so, in the multicolor crayoned original.
Today is Poetry Friday. Rilla was inspired to write a poem (this was one day last week) after Rose and Beanie and I had made one of our frequent visits to The Poem Farm. Amy’s funny, fresh, thoughtful verses make you want to start playing with words yourself.
Today is also the Feast of St. Agnes—which, falling on a Friday, kind of begs a reading of Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” doesn’t it?
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup an be found at A Teaching Life.
And yet there was so much poetry in our day!
Great rabbit trails today. We read Blake’s “The Tiger” this morning because the picture in the anthology (whose name I can’t remember and it’s in the other room–the Oxford Something Something, maybe?) caught Rilla’s eye. However, the shivery language of the second half was rather drowned out by Huck’s Very Noisy Firetruck and also by Very Noisy Huck. Sorry, Tyger.
Serendipitiously, we happened upon a quote from another Blake poem later during a chapter of Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World (Early Modern Times). We’ve been exploring the Victorians, remember, as we enjoy The Strictest School in the World (Rubberbones is just sailing off the roof of the church toward the crowded village green), and today we read a little about the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the smoke-spewing factories blackening the walls of formerly charming English cottages. This grim depiction of the perils of profit-driven industrialization posed an interesting contrast to yesterday’s chapter of Landmark History, in which clever Eli Whitney devises a way to mass-produce guns in a time when foreign armies are threatening this under-armed fledgling country. The ensuing discussion carried us all the way to lunchtime. Rose and Beanie told me this is why they prefer for me to read history books aloud to them—because of our talks. Which of course you know makes me deliriously happy. Even if the firetruck noise is hard to overtop, sometimes.
(I did eventually remember we had newish play-doh and that successfully distracted the young fireman.)
(Who, by the way, turned TWO yesterday. Can you believe it? Seems like only weeks ago I was posting in disbelief about his first birthday.)
There was a bit of Wordsworth in the Bauer chapter, too. And we’ve been revisiting Robbie Burns because of his namesake, the aforementioned Rubberbones.
Meanwhile, Jane finished Othello today. (Speaking of plans ganging terribly, terribly agley.) And Wonderboy enjoyed a nice big dose of Frog and Toad. Because really, who doesn’t?
These are poems that grabbed me this week. The Wendell Berry was quoted by Anne Lamott just after the Bird by Bird passage I posted on Wednesday. The Dickinson came my way in the recent New Yorker review of C. D. Wright’s One With Others, a book which sounds well worth seeking out.
Tell All the Truth
by Emily Dickinson
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
The Wild Rose
by Wendell Berry
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart.
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Carol’s Corner.
An archive of my sporadic contributions to Poetry Friday. For the schedule of hosts, check here.
This week’s host is the amazing Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm, whose daily original poems are a source of great delight to me! (Oh my goodness—I posted this last night and now, early on the 17th, West Coast time, I have awakened to discover Amy’s Poetry Friday roundup today contains a beautiful gift for me—a poem! Most wonderful wonderful, out of all hooping. Thank you so much, Amy—what a gorgeous gift.)
(This archive is a work in progress. I’m still working backward through 2006.)
June 2006
“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney
“Portrait by a Neighbor” by Edna St. Vincent Millay—“Before she has her floor swept/ Or her dishes done,/ Any day you’ll find her/ A-sunning in the sun!”
“Patterns” by Amy Lowell (a poem I first encountered as a teen in Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins)
One for newborn Rilla: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
“Childhood” by Rilke
And while they’re not technically Poetry Friday contributions, I want to include these poems in my archive so I can find them easily: our family “Where I’m From” poems. Mine, Jane’s (age 11), and, in a special gift to me, my father’s.
August 2006
Jane’s pick: “I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill” by Keats
September 2006
“The Author to Her Book”—Anne Bradstreet
“Ho Ro, My Nut-brown Maiden” (scroll way down)
“Moving” by Randall Jarrell—“Never again will Orion / Fall on my speller through the star /Taped on the broken window by my cot…”
January 2007
Rigs o’ Rye—a Scots ballad I quoted in Little House in the Highlands, a story-poem I dearly love. “This lad he was a gallant bold, / a brave young lad nineteen years old;/He’s made the hills and valleys roar,/ and the bonnie lassie, she’s gone with him…”
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—a Keats poem we encountered in Swallows and Amazons
February 2007
On the Sonnet—Yes, it’s Keats again
“Oh happy living things!”—Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
March 2007
“So the world woos”—one of my favorite poems: “Letters from a Father” by Mona van Duyn
April 2007
“A Green Cornfield”—Christina Rossetti
March 2007
Sisters—an original poem courtesy of wee Rilla
April 2007
Good Friday, 1613—“Riding Westward” by John Donne
“Thou little tricksy Puck”—my girls’ favorite poem, because it’s about their brother: Thomas Hood’s “A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months”
June 2007
“Forests at the bottom of the sea”—Whitman’s “The World Below the Brine”
“That has made thee mine forever”—Bonnie Mary o’ Argyle
July 2007
“What is the grass?”—Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“For my heart’s a boat in tow”—Loch Tay Boat Song, my favorite Scottish ballad
August 2007
“I wonder if the gardener knows”—Rachel Field’s “The Little Rose Tree”
September 2007
“The music in my heart I bore”—Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” and selections from his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of their tour in Scotland, which served as research for my Martha books
October 2007
“Let fall one by one”—Heaney’s “Clearances,” chosen on the heels of a “Tolland Man” quote from the previous day’s Helixes post
August 2008
“The water is wide”—another Scots ballad
October 2008
“Understanding”—the poem by Sara Teasdale; the prayer by St. Francis of Assisi
“We must love one another or die”—Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
April 2009
“Fortify your inner life”—some Seamus Heaney
May 2009
“Oh for a bee’s experience”—during the height of my honeybee obsession, a bee trail and some Emily Dickinson
August 2009
“The Triangle Factory Fire”—a Robert Pinsky poem
And not part of Poetry Friday, but related to the post above:
September 2009
“The Fairy Tales of Science”—a rambly post inspired by Ransome’s Winter Holiday, with only a snippet of “Locksley Hall”
November 2009:
“Like little mice”—“Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, plus bonus picture of Johnny Depp
January 2010
“We are not really at home”—from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “The First Elegy”
October 2010:
Poetry Friday, we meet again—a reposting of my poem, “Lena, Waiting for the Mail”
November 2010:
“Spend all you have for loveliness”—one by Sara Teasdale; one by me
Sestina—an original poem written in 1993
The Huck Edition—an original poem, “Olympian Heights,” courtesy of my 22-month-old son
Just a morsel today. I’ve been working on an archive page for my Poetry Friday posts (because I find WordPress’s archives obnoxiously unwieldy), and I came across this entry from March of 2007. I had to laugh, because it turns out last week wasn’t the first time one of my bairns made a contribution to Poetry Friday. I’d forgotten that Rilla had a turn when she was eleven months old.
Sisters, by Rilla
They scoop me up and say I’m delicious;
They grant practically all of my wishes
(Except when I wish to gnaw on a Lego).
Mostly I wish to go where they go.Jane is the one who totes me like mother
And won’t let me pull out the hair of my brother.
Rose guards me from anything ’ticingly teeny.
The one who twirls me around is Beanie.
I’m not sure whether the ache I get from this photo is because that baby has grown so big, or because that rug has grown so dingy. Ah, the cruel march of time. And feet.
This week’s Poetry Friday host is Jone at Check It Out.
Today’s Poetry Friday contribution is brought to you by my 22-month-old. Visit Random Noodling for this week’s roundup.
Four blocks. Five. Six. Seven.
Look, universe, and marvel: Heaven
Is closer now.
Nothing’s not in reach.
Eight, and if the crash
Comes, all the better.
Hold construction for a moment!
Mom’s phone, her full mug—
The fit is perfect, the splash
Spectacular.
Not to seem smug
But I’m confident
She’ll be pleased
Or lively, at least:
Her fire-red wail
Loud as my fine red truck
They flew to fridge-top
Last night at dinner.
Now I see: I’m Hercules;
That truck’s my next labor,
Since I’ve conquered the blocks.
………………………….Amazon box.
…………stepstool—
Chair—