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Eleanor Stanford, “Instant Message from Salvador, Bahia”
Today was sunny and the beach at Itapuã was crowded and I thought of you. I cut my foot on the coral beneath the tide pools. On the screen, the greenish script glitters like the dolphin who flipped his body up into the sun. Suddenly appearing, then it’s gone again. I saw the whales last week, passing through. Their backs and haunches turning over, like a slow thought in the mouth of the Bay of All Saints. Here it’s dark already: austral winter. Can you see our shadows flit against the unlit background? I see your sons move in and out of the frame-- their faces older, Changed. Do the whales make their way that far north? Is it possible we move in that same dark medium, that same ponderous physical world? Eleanor Stanford, “Instant Message from Salvador, Bahia” from Bartram’s Garden. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Stanford. Published with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press. Eleanor Stanford, “The Poem I Meant to Write” It breathes among the breakfast dishes, gilled and fickle. Gurete in the kitchen wields a knife: a scythe of scales gathers on the floor. “Today is your day off,” she says. “Therefore you can help clean fish.” The lines that caught my waking in their tangled twine unreel. The poem turns a silver fin and dives for darker water. I roll my sleeves and give my hands to the rhythm of slit and gut. Talk skates the mirrored surface of the skin. Gurete laughs as words keep slipping from my grasp. The shiny bodies split themselves in heaps: what’s useful and what’s not. The thin blood spreads and darkens. In my hands, the bones unclasp. Eleanor Stanford, “The Poem I Meant to Write” from Bartram’s Garden. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Stanford. Published with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press. POETIC THEMES Even as the Chinese elemental system of nature takes us from water to wood, this week the astrological calendar plunges us from Aquarian air into the water of Pisces season. Both systems share the theme of the call in early spring to birth something new out of watery creative gestation. This week the Northern Hemisphere enters the final trimester of winter, harkening back to our own fishy prehistory in the womb where we all knew how to swim. The first poem sets us on the beach at Itapuã, with its long fishing and whaling history, during the reproductive period of the humpbacks—a great time and place to see them breach. The texts to and from her beloved are compared not to a breaching whale but to the sudden display of a dolphin who “flips his body up into the sun,” like the transient messages flashing on her green screen. The poem then follows the gradual roll of the whales by slowly rolling out a thought about her sons, moving in time toward maturity “in and out of the frame.” The ambiguity of the referenced frame is haunting, like staring into the sea: is it the frame of her own imaginings, where her shadow flits with her absent love? Or the containing frame of the cell phone, which might catch a shadow of her sons, there wandering with her on the beach at Bahia? The poem turns us slowly in the “dark medium” of its own uncertainty, until the last lines reveal the implied analogy between the swimming whales and our own movements in the “ponderous physical world.” The murkiness of this movement blends time and space, one lover North of the other, inside a temporal flow where their sons grow and change and ultimately drift away. Part of creation, of fertility, of continuance, is a kind of burdened, sorrowful release, like the pull of the womb each month as it strips itself. The tone of “The Poem I Meant to Write” couldn’t be more different. Here, writing a poem is like catching and gutting a live fish. They’re slippery things, thoughts! We dream the lines that elude us in our waking, and we have to cast the line out, tangle them up, pull them into the shore of our minds. The process isn’t pretty: it requires that roll our sleeves up, wield knives to slit the skin, blood spreading as we struggle to grasp the slipping words, splitting the bones into what’s useful and what’s not, mercilessly discarded into the “scythe of scales” on the floor. The labor involved in creating anything at all is not for the faint of heart. These two Stanford poems are characteristically and gorgeously enigmatic. We could trace many of the same elements in Mary Oliver’s three best-known fish poems: “The Fish,” “Dogfish,” and “Humpbacks.” Oliver’s Piscean view of creativity contains all the stages: bodies feed one another, tangle and slide through cracks, and rip through their watery surround to finally break through the surface. In “The Fish,” the fluidity of container and contained—the speaker is the fish, and the fish is in her—reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me! I’m Mickey!” In this poem, the pattern of old life feeding other, new life, is not only the mystery of nourishment but a mystery that nourishes—we need this cycle, like food. Science is only beginning to glimpse the scope of the co-mingling that takes place in pregnancy: microchimerism, or the two-way flow of cells between mother and fetus, reveals some wild phenomena. But we all, breeders and non-procreative adults alike, are chimeric beings, constantly absorbing and becoming the amalgam of cellular material we take in through food, breath, skin, and fluids. Science has yet to determine definitively how the body absorbs cellular information from sexual partners, but this too might be part of your intuitive experience. Note the poem’s blunt carnality, cousin to Stanford’s poem, when the fish is eviscerated and eaten. Oliver, like Stanford, acknowledges the darker side of bringing anything new into the world. The degree to which we are mingled with all the stuff we absorb is something we are only beginning to comprehend. “Dogfish” is a candid depiction of the realities of the food chain. The scene of big fish hunting little ones becomes an analogy for self-renewal, where one version of the self must die for another to be born. The poem ripples from the big shadowy dogfish and the impossibility of kindness to the waterfall metaphor for plenitude (of sunlight or life’s song). We can revive our capacity to love, but it happens slowly, like the pace of the dogfish. Oliver splits the poem neatly into three parts, with lines that issue a punctuated direct address to the reader, like a wake-up call that drags us into the struggle. We’re scooped from our comfortable witness seat and thrown in to swim with the fishes. We can’t just float around complacently waiting for something simpler. The poem’s urgent message: to really stay alive, we must meet the exigencies of our changing world. It’s a picture of movement and regeneration as high-stakes hard work. The breaching whales in “Humpbacks” are likened to the human soul, which can barely be held back from flight. Against stable-izing gravity, the whale flies straight up toward the open sky, like Stanford’s dolphin. It’s not that this poem is about birth, but its tone is transportable: the incredulous glee with which the speaker celebrates the awesome spectacle is a pretty good description of the birth scene. I’ll never forget my mom’s voice ringing out like a bell when my daughter hit the scene: “IT’S A BABY!” And that wasn’t even the first time she saw me give birth. “Humpbacks” echoes this kind of breathless wonder at nature shaking out her mane. Part of the poem’s superlative mode are the repetitions of key words leaping up off the page. Creativity can feel like this, too—the barely-held-down pull of soul against bone, always longing for flight. I think of the poem’s Biblical reference to the fifth day of creation, ending just like the others in a vision of goodness. Whatever my dog does, I find myself exclaiming, “Good dog! What a good yawn! Such a good belly.” It’s like the bottomless well of fascination and surprise that we have with sunsets, or ocean waves, or our creations: it’s a baby! (or sculpture or non-profit or whatever-is-your-thing!) PRACTICE Assuming that you’re not going to gut a fish or dash over to the pool for a swim, the next best thing for embodying these themes would be a bath. Epsom salts? Great! Fishify yourself! You are mostly water! And for the first six months of your life, you were a master of the innate primitive reflexes that enabled you to be right at home underwater, decreasing heart rate, closing the glottis, and chilling out your need to breathe. These amphibious reflexes, which humans share with seals and dolphins, can be strengthened by bathing in cool water. Warm water has its own perks though, affecting blood pressure and the autonomic nervous system, for starters. No matter how you go about it, the health benefits of bathing are huge (as many cultures, from Japan to Rome, have always known), and its effects are related to processes of renewal. The rising body temperature actually (I read somewhere) grows and repairs the cells in your body. You are, in short, rebirthing yourself. Perhaps you could create a ritual around this fact. You might begin by just living into the quiet stillness of your submerged body, occasionally moving as a fetus might, suspended in the warm amniotic fluid. Getting out of a bathtub isn’t much of a birth canal struggle, so you might embody the active motion away from the past and toward what is to be by sloughing off dead skin cells, perhaps with a loofah sponge. When you breach and rise, are you more tuned in to the dreams of your body-made-new?
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Billy Collins, “Aimless Love”
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for a bowl of broth, steam rising like smoke from a naval battle. This is the best kind of love, I thought, without recompense, without gifts, or unkind words, without suspicion, or silence on the telephone. The love of the chestnut, the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel. No lust, no slam of the door-- the love of the miniature orange tree, the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, the highway that cuts across Florida. No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor-- just a twinge every now and then for the wren who had built her nest on a low branch overhanging the water and for the dead mouse, still dressed in its light brown suit. But my heart is always standing on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. After I carried the mouse by the tail to a pile of leaves in the woods, I found myself standing at the bathroom sink gazing down affectionately at the soap, so patient and soluble, so at home in its pale green soap dish. I could feel myself falling again as I felt its turning in my wet hands and caught the scent of lavender and stone. Billy Collins, “Aimless Love” from Nine Horses: Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Dorianne Laux, “Heart” The heart shifts shape of its own accord-- from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent, the corn dog stand. Or the heart is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead wait, paging through magazines, licking their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks through a door into a maze of hallways. Behind one door a roomful of orchids, behind another, the smell of burned toast. The rooms go on and on: sewing room with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles, room full of file cabinets and torn curtains, room buzzing with a thousand black flies. Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke, a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt. Heart makes a wrong turn. Heart locked in its gate of thorns. Heart with its hands folded in its lap. Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake. It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down. Bored, it watches movies deep into the night, stands by the window counting the streetlamps squinting out one by one. Heart with its hundred mouths open. Heart with its hundred eyes closed. Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel, heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence. Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked in devoted rows, their dusty spines unreadable. Heart with its hands full. Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists, things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart. Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal. Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues. Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe. Heart with its feet up reading the scores. Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster. Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club, banging on the lid. Dorianne Laux, “Heart” from Smoke. Copyright © 2000 by Dorianne Laux. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, LTD, boaeditions.org. POETIC THEMES Let’s flip the script on our love objects this Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into a description of some kind of facile “self love.” Could anything be more sinister than the thriving “self-care” industry, with its pricey baubles and spa treatments and pleasure excursions that feed care right back into the mouth of the capitalist vortex? How instead might we use this holiday to renew our capacity for loving? These poems invite us to move away from the idea of love as aimed, directed, lusting or craving, and toward a notion of love as open receptivity. Billy Collins is the perfect poet to create some space for lightness and pleasure (surely this was an intention in placing Valentine’s Day at the heart of this gray month). “Aimless Love” takes us along on an adventure of falling in love with the world, opening our sense of what counts as lovable all around us. Collins’ humor charms us into falling for each and every object, from wren to dead mouse to clean white shirt. The change in feeling-state as we read one disarmingly sweet image after another is like being wooed, line by line, till we identify with Collins’ wonderful image of the heart as a bullseye target, waiting for Cupid’s next arrow. This focus on receiving love is what the poem actually enacts. In reading these lines we come to share his uncomplicated adoration for the highway that cuts across Florida, or the miniature orange tree. His disarming ability to render things lovable reaches a kind of perfection when the last stanza brings us to gaze affectionately along with him at a bar of soap, “so patient and soluble / so at home in its pale green soap dish.” He confesses, “I could feel myself falling again,” and we fall too. We can feel in our own hands the slippery stone, smell the wet scent of lavender. Perhaps Collins’ presumed aimlessness is a bit coyly disingenuous, as any good seduction always is: each line of the poem aims its arrow at the bullseye of the reader’s heart, transferring its sticky, sweet capacity for loving the world. Dorianne Laux takes this one step further, in a poem about falling in love with the ability to still fall in love. Learning how to dote on our heart’s capacities is fundamentally different from “self love.” It’s kind of like the far end of non-dual: we identify with what’s not us until we merge with it, achieving sufficient distance to perceive our own caring with tenderness. When the potential for love becomes the love object, the heart takes shape in natural and otherworldly form: from a sleepy bear to a curling worm to the afterworld maze of rooms and hallways for ghosts. The merging of self and other fold back in on themselves like a mobius strip, and we can fall back in love with our heart, one step removed. Laux shapeshifts the heart from a mythical form with “its hundred mouths open” and “its hundred eyes closed” to the quotidian, lazy shape we take when watching movies bored. Laux seems to suggest the endless possibilities for our capacity to love, as the pace of her poem picks up to rapid fire and our heart shapeshifts from harmonica to tinsel to cement to broken teeth and on and on. One of these objects is bound to get under our skin, and by the end of the poem we are stuffed with images, maybe feeling a lot like the “Heart / with its hands full.” Whether via Laux’s wild artillery fire or Collins’ more drawn-out Cupid arrows, the images in both poems invite us to engage our heart’s capacity to fall back in love with the world. When we do, we don’t actually need diamonds or flowers or greeting cards, because we are already replete. PRACTICE Riffing on the image of the heart as a bullseye, I’d like to adopt a psychodrama technique taught by Leticia Nieto. Nieto adapted this group exercise for individual practice to accommodate the online format of Transformative Change’s Embodied Social Justice Summit. I’m adapting it further to synch with this week’s theme of the skills required for loving. Please note: this is NOT an exercise on the skills required for drawing. If, like me, you’re no artist, just use chicken-scratches like stick figures and simple symbols. *Begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper, and at the bullseye, draw your heart. *Label it with a name that stands in for a special quality you identify in your soul of souls, or in a version of you from your past—one that is central to your capacity for loving but does not receive adequate reinforcement in your life (for example: vulnerability, courage, softness, confidence, trust, joy). *Identify the specific people or phenomena that have challenged or undermined this quality (what Nieto calls “the pulls”). Draw them outside the circle, and then draw lines connecting them to the heart at its center. It’s best to choose for these figures not vague, overarching phenomena such as patriarchal white supremacist culture, but its incarnation in the people places and things from your personal history. Like that creepy church your great-aunt dragged you to, or that vicious fourth grade math teacher. Wassup, Mrs. Avery. *“Resource the circle with auxiliaries,” in the language of psychodrama, by populating the inside of the circle with companions. (Like supportive figures from childhood; objects from nature, elements from your upbringing or ancestry; or communities you feel safe in. So much love to that Arizona hotel housekeeper who saw my 13-year-old Queer potential and introduced me to Suzanne Vega.) *Jot down a few key lines that encapsulate the demand or pressure being placed upon the heart quality by each figure outside the circle. (For example, the accusation that your laziness makes you unlovable; that if you cry, you’re weak; or that you’re worthless unless you win. I’d give my mom a line I still can’t shake, “Only boring people get bored.”) *Scan the field on this “map of pulls” to imaginatively place yourself at the center, holding the connective threads (as you would do in a live group exercise). Physically mime holding imaginary cords in your hands so that you can experience what it would feel like to let them go. To ritualize this, speak aloud the lines you have written—the pull being made—and enact the experience of actually physically setting the cord free with your hands, releasing that pull. You might become aware of which of these cords are particularly hard to let go—the more “gnarly elements” as Nieto puts it. These ties probably live deep in the body, wrapped up in personal and/or ancestral history. What is the energy or charge that arises when we dialogue with these pulls? What is the emotional quality or body sensation that comes up? Give yourself some time to breathe and integrate the experience. When I first did this exercise, the snipped cords recalled an early nightmare image of mine from some movie where an astronaut is floating alone into space after his line to the mothership was snipped. I’ve been balancing this feeling using a Kundalini yoga technique where you visualize a snakelike coil of energy at the base the spine, rising up the central axis of the body and winding around the heart center. Perhaps imagine the gnarly cords on your map instead as golden threads, and you are sucking them back into your body with each inhale, hoovering spaghetti style, reclaiming them and wrapping them around the spool of your Suzanne Vega heart, your boring-because-bored heart, your fuck-long-division heart. Give your heart some volume. Bolster it. Make it sturdy and real and thick. Maybe this process of heartbuilding will lend you new eyes for what’s lovely and enticing all around you. I think of love scenes you see in the cartoons, where somebody’s eyes shoot big hearts all over the place, usually with a sound that’s something like “A-OOOO-GA!” May you see your world this Valentine’s Day with Billy Collins aooga goggles. |
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