Snow Den

You say that you know me, like spring
knows the trees. But will you still
love me when the path becomes covered,
and the birds stop singing my name?

You must become a student of winter, carry
a dagger of ice near the heart. Only then
will you see where the snow dens are made
to wait out the blue world in darkness.

Will you remember the green buds to me
when the brambles are mounded with snow?
Will you remember the twigs we can weave
and which branches will give underfoot?

Let us shelter awhile in the low overhang
of these trees bent down by their memories.

Watch all film-poems in order

Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.

Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.

Upon Arrival

Longing dabbles in shadows
as the day doubles back,

offering honey and vinegar,
wine to the already drunk.

Memory, that bricklayer, stirs
its slush with a trowel.

Glazed squares shriek their re-
flected light. It is never enough.

Crevices hoard the darkness,
and hiss: never enough.

We rub against newsprint
until our thumbs go black.

Steam chafes against its pane of sky.
We can never go back.

Watch all film-poems in order

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.

As I travelled by tube to the Southbank Centre to attend the first event of the London Literature Festival, and my first poetry reading since moving to London two months ago, I took with me my American expectations about poetry venues: coffee shops, small community centers, the occasional well-appointed-but-out-of-the way theater or library hall. Seated facing the podium on the sixth floor of this clean, bright temple to art, I kept examining the layers of the backdrop as if it were a painting. First, a Union Jack. Then the London Eye. And on the far side of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. This was not a painting, however, but a window. The statement was clear: art, and for this evening, poetry, commands a central place in Britain. However, centrality means anything but homogeneity, as the four readers in this “Poetry of Place” event demonstrated.

Read the full article online at the Silk Road Review Blog.

The train that galloped up to the platform this morning, normally crammed with humanity, was empty but for the discarded newspapers lining the window ledges. I thought I had missed the memo about the start of the zombie apocalypse. Turns out the kids have gone back to school, and the tourists have gone home. So I spent some time on my morning commute thinking about the similarities between poets and werewolves.

Culture, like poetry, is so often about what gets transmitted between the lines. It is not, I decided, the bankers and CEOs who normally sit across from me on the train who hold the most cultural power. What we learn on our mothers’ laps goes deep, to a visceral level. What gets passed down, mother to child through generations, forms the culture of a people. Mothers, therefore, are also “unacknowledged legislators” creating and replicating the very “operating system” of a society–its culture.

Moving from California to London certainly feels like I have switched operating systems. Apart from the obvious fumbling as I seek to find where they’ve moved the new buttons and menus, this shake-up gives me the opportunity to discover what is universal among computers–er–people. Contrast is one powerful way to heighten perception and uncover commonality in the quest for what is essentially human.

I have also discovered, however, that poets are not entirely human. A good poet, like a good poem, is always a bit unpredictable. And one thing all societies dislike, and strive to minimise, is unpredictability. (Which may be part of why Plato excluded both the undead and poets from his ideal Republic.) Outsiders, however, often make the best anthropologists.

The so-called “Martian poetry” of the 70s and 80s appropriates self-reflexive techniques to obtain an outside-in objectivity on our world. Confessional poetry of the same era takes an inside-out subjective approach. But a third approach, to art and to life, involves a participant-observer model, where one is in, but not entirely of, the surrounding culture, keenly and perpetually aware of one’s otherness. The perceptiveness that results from such mild but incurable alienation is precisely what put the “Howl” in Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem.

And so, my hairy little secret is out: I have learned to live here as a werewolf. That primal thing within me finds its voice on the lunar-white page. This feeds a hunger nothing else in life can satiate, and helps me get through each clean-shaven day in The City, knowing, soon enough, the moon will rise full over London, and in me, once more.

I wrote this poem long before I dreamed I’d end up here. My relocation gives the title a new shade of meaning for me, as I seek to blend in with strange surroundings. Sometimes I am unsure myself just whose side I really am on.

Many thanks again to George Wallace for publishing this poem. Click here to read the clipping.

“[W]reathes of smoke / Sent up in silence, from among the trees.”

My family and I left for a much-needed holiday on the Welsh border as London exploded in riots. We decided weeks ago that we wanted to “escape” the city, but little did we know all that we would be escaping. Since that time, we have been following reports of neighbourhoods very near our own North London home erupting in looting and violence.

Meanwhile, we have been exploring the idyllic countryside of the Wye valley. Images of London engulfed in flame have interspersed with dazzling greenery, the likes of which inspired Wordsworth to compose his famous poem set above Tintern Abbey. The Abbey itself, dismantled by decree from Henry VIII, rises skeletal in the countryside, like the fire-gutted shops, double-decker buses, and police cars photographed on London streets.

In the poem, Wordsworth declares, “I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.” Indeed, this still, sad music has been with me on our journey through the “sylvan Wye.” I am struck by the quiet of this place, in contrast to London’s constant hustle, and the lush natural forms, as compared to the barrage of advertisements, the likes of which program all of us, including would-be looters, that if only we had an iPad, we might be happy.

Here, with space and beauty, where even the grass seems content, it is hard to imagine humans piled into housing estates, crammed into tube carriages at rush hour, struggling against each other to get by. And it seems only natural that such unnatural circumstances are kindling awaiting a spark. My heart goes out to London, and all the cities in the UK experiencing unrest.

A fire is flickering in a great stone hearth in our fourteenth-century cottage. The moon is bathing the river and meadows blue, while the trees darken almost to black. It seems to me the peace we feel in such circumstances runs deep within our nature. I wish the peace of the Wye could wash over all of Britain tonight.

Photo: Wikipedia

I declared my intention, over and over in my head, to “hit the ground running” upon my arrival in London. After three weeks of pounding the pavement with a heavy laptop on my back during my daily commute, I developed plantar fasciitis, an injury to the connective tissue at the arch of the foot. After a range of treatments, including stretches and shoe inserts, tonight was the first night I could walk home from the tube at a normal pace without pain.

It has been nearly three months since they stamped my resettlement visa at Heathrow Airport. Since that time, I have been putting one foot in front of the other, journeying toward what I hope might one day feel like “normal” life again. Each step has been an act of faith, and often what I thought looked level turned out to be uneven ground. So often, whatever I assumed, culturally or logistically, has been perfectly wrong.

My parents are over to visit, giving me fresh eyes on my new circumstances. Having them here brings a much-needed sense of continuity back to me. Still, the journey ahead is one I must ultimately take on my own–toward an understanding of what brought me here, and how to stand tall on foreign soil, sure-footed in this strange new land.

Photo by James Brunskill

I am pleased to have two poems appear in the inaugural issue of Aperçus Quarterly. The poetry section features fine poems by colleagues and mentors such as Boyd W. Benson, Cameron Scott, Marvin Bell, and Peter Sears. The collection is  a manageable size, and each poem is worth a read. The images beneath each poem are also striking, evocative, and well-chosen to compliment the written piece.

I wrote the poem “White Pigeons” while still in Ojai. There is a coop nearby my parents’ house. Re-reading the poem from my office in Soho makes me homesick for a place that now seems so far away as to almost have been imagined. It is, for me, a pleasant kind of haunting. Enjoy the poems.

Each chapter of John Rember’s MFA in a Box can be read in the time it takes to travel between Finchley Central and Leicester Square station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. I know because I read it this way. At least, I read full chapters on the days I could claim a seat. Other days, I read what little I could at the distance of two inches from my nose, using the book as a v-shaped shield against the armpits of businessmen’s suit jackets as they made their way into the The City to plan the next financial collapse.

A recent transplant to London from a rural town in California, I was following the “when in Rome” adage–immersing myself in written ideas to transcend the fact of my animal body crammed in with the warmth and smell of my fellow humans in a speeding subterranean metal box. Each article in the tabloids unfurled all around me had been engineered to be read in the length of one tube stop. By a precise mix of fact and moral opining, they were also designed to provoke an “Isn’t that terrible?” reaction, before being discarded in the overflowing waste bins at the top of the stairs.

I was reading a book about why one should try to write literature. But in fact, MFA in a Box is about much more than this. It is about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, through writing, in this highly-engineered world.

I met John during my first residency in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program. It was less than a year after the death of our infant son. John gave a talk that was to become chapter eight, about The Book of Job, and Leviathan, and why one should “go deep” in the process of writing–as “conscious dust” in a cosmos that we can only pretend to control, wrapping our arms around the big human questions because we are human, and questioners, and big and deep at our core, despite our cultural contract that says we should instead keep lacquering the surface.

Here was someone I knew I could talk to, and I found in our conversations what came back to me, in John’s voice, through this book: depth and sensitivity; compassion and quick, wry humor; a willingness to embrace life’s irony, and a fierce commitment to make of one’s life good art. More than once, while reading this book, I found myself smiling–or was it wincing?–with what Rember calls the “shock of recognition.” The narrator in my mind jotted down the sudden change of expression–mine the only upturned mouth in a long row of slackened faces. For all the written attempts at journalistic provocation, I seemed to be the only one in our high-speed, newspaper-lined birdcage who really felt anything at all.

I would emerge onto Charing Cross Road, lined with as-yet-still-surviving small book shops, enter the cafe where the Italian woman at the counter looks down whenever she meets my gaze, and past the homeless man in the “God Loves You” denim jacket, smiling into the eyes of each passer-by to wish them, “Good morning!” He sells copies of The Big Issue, a current events magazine that helps people like him earn their way off the streets. I think of John and his book, comfortable with big issues, and unafraid to look me, as a writer and person, straight in the eye.

My only qualm I have with the book is its title. Rember’s unique mix of philosophy, depth psychology, and artistic vulnerability is anything but “in a box.” Nor is it much like a traditional MFA in itself. Instead, every writer who has honed their craft through an intense period of writing–be that a formal MFA program or something else–should pick up this book from the other side of those newly-won skills, to rediscover them as survival skills, both for writers individually, and perhaps for our world.

Rember’s “why to write” book is a memoir of the creative heart and mind in conflict with itself, which is to say a universal struggle that any artist will recognize. More than this, he emerges triumphant over big issues–family, violence, bearing witness, estrangement, grief. Gilgamesh, “Hansel and Gretel,” Greek mythology and Paris Hilton all figure in to his survey of literature and culture, teaching through the age-old workshop mantra of showing, rather than telling us, what good, deep writing is all about.

More than a review, this is an open thank-you note to John for giving me this life raft of a book, which is about how to live as a writer, go deep in a shallow world, and not only survive but, at least as an artist, thrive.

The direction of traffic, how doors are hinged, and even the way electrical switches turn on or off are all diametrically opposed to what I have come to expect since birth. Yet I must cross the street, open doors, and turn on lights and gadgets dozens of times per day. If I operate unconsciously for even a moment, I get a shock.  But this is only the beginning. It gets, as Alice would say, “curiouser and curiouser.”

Because London predates the advent of city planning, it has grown up organically. Instead of the long grids of streets I would use to orient myself in America, short squiggles of road intersect roundabouts at all angles of the clock face. Anyone who has studied the difference between Cartesian and polar coordinate systems, and calculated conversions between the two, can appreciate the difficulty involved. Navigating London, it feels as though my brain is performing these transpositions constantly. Coupled with the lack of filters about what to ignore, my analytical mind quickly becomes exhausted.

The American journalist James Geary described London as “a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.” I have discovered that it is a right brain. Just a few buildings away from my new office is the site where William Blake was born. He lamented the “chartering” of streets and rivers in London as analogous to Victorian repression, and held up the figure of Newton as representing materialism and science at the expense of his great loves, imagination and art.

He might be happy to see that, in modern London, so much is still subject to interpretation, imagination, fancy, and whim. In an overcrowded city that long predates the automobile, “making do” and “getting on with it” override the authority of pedestrian crossings and painted lines. Because the roads are not aligned with cardinal directions, street corners are a useless marker, and so instead short segments of continuous road are given different names as they go along. This results in a colorful panoply of street names, even when traveling (relatively) straight. One memorizes various sequences of such streets to get from point to point. With names like “Crooked Usage” and “Buttery Mews,” the results of these mnemonic gymnastics can play out with all of the delight of a memorized poem.

And so, even as my logistical circuitry is being continually overloaded, my creativity is being fed by this great-right-brain of a city. My mantra has become: not wrong, just different. Repeating this, I push (not pull) open the door each day, and set out to learn a bit more.

“… now there was a match-head in my thoughts.”

I have been in London for one week. On my previous three visits, I never stayed for more than two weeks, and often split the time with other parts of England or other countries in Europe. But this time, I am here to settle. My new job starts tomorrow.

And so, I see everything, not through the eyes of a tourist, but those of an immigrant. Instead of laughing at quaint cultural differences, I take note for future reference. When I discover that the way I have been doing things in my homeland for decades, and which I assumed to be universal, works completely differently out here, I have to figure out the new way and adapt.

Walking along the Thames last night, I felt a sense of connection to other immigrants I met. Some may have fled despotic regimes, others no doubt came to seek their fortunes. For many, English is not their first language (and I am discovering it is actually not mine either!) Few leave their families lightly. And abandoning the cumulative comfort of so many small known quantities has led me to feel like an infant here at times, re-learning fundamentals of language and behavior/behaviour.

After a week of apartment-hunting, bank account setup, and other logistics required to survive abroad, an outing in Brighton yesterday with my new colleagues let me see things as a tourist again, instead of just an immigrant. Returning to the Thames that night rekindled the “match-head” that was placed in my thoughts many years ago, when I first encountered London, and found it at once imposing and familiar, both a great city, and one I could call my own.