the grass is riz

William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All (by the road to the contagious hospital)"
I
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines--
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches--
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
 
By William Carlos Williams, from Selected Poems, copyright 1985 by the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me"  
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking
 
“Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing”
Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.
It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service.
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer—warm--
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom--
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.
 
“Today, When I Could Do Nothing” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
           Thinking Feelingly begins with the first week of March. I have no idea where I actually started writing the book, but it wasn’t on March first (as convenient as it would be to start writing on what was New Year’s Day according to the old Roman calendar).
         When I started writing, it was with the intention of relearning how to analyze poetry, and new skills only emerged with practice. My first go-round for March week 1 was about William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All,” and its downward camera sweep from the inchoate sky, down through the muddy fields, and then further down to the underground roots and the life that is quickening there. I find in this poem the elemental movement Chinese medicine perceives in the spring: from water (chill, mud, wind, sky) to wood (as “one by one objects are defined” from vague “stuff” to the precise, stiff carrot leaf). I do feel this transition physically, emerging “sluggish and dazed” from winter but intuiting a kind of potential quickening somewhere deep inside. It’s kind of the perfect description of the beginning of a book, no?
            I’d love to use Williams’ neat camera sweep to describe the way I wrote the book: the dark, formless, introspective months of gestation yielding to action and disciplined doing! But y’all... creative work is never like that. Growing something new is a mess. It’s a muddy, bleary-eyed swing back and forth. Like the weather—one day we are all action, the next we are hunkered down with tea and hot pad. One day we get a glimpse of OurNextBoldMove and the next it’s mush again. The learning curve in writing these entries was steep, as I resisted the inclination to wrestle dissonance into neatness and tried instead to stay true to the limits of my own perceptive reach and my sensual reckoning with a poem’s overflow. The truth is always richer than the tidy anyway, and the actual progress of spring isn’t a clean transition from chaos to form. It’s kind of a mess.
            So I’d like to engage a different poem to start, one that speaks to the aims and intentions of starting something new, rather than clean and masterful execution. Jane Hirshfield’s poem for the New Year poses a question rather than answering it—the question this world is asking each one of us: “what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” Instead of answering this question, the speaker builds an altar to it, bringing salt and postcards and stamps. Waking without answers to the daily question, admitting the limitations of the power to turn stone to apple and war to peace, the poet instead counts “what remains.” In doing so, the poem becomes, itself, the altar it describes. We could say of the poem what its final line says of the world: “didn’t it give you the asking.”
            I’d like to borrow Hirshfield’s question as the “thought from a friend” that this New Year’s Day “unpockets”: what can we make or do to create change in the world? We don’t yet need a perfect answer, and my book sure isn’t one. I tried to remain stubbornly open to the shifting modes of inquiry in writing and in rewriting entries as I find new poems or can’t afford to anthologize old ones. As a result, many entries contain within them the movement from familiar modes of close reading to stranger, more unwieldy ones. Maybe we could just be in this queer flux between mud and emergence, without concretizing what precisely we are growing just yet.
            But enough with the self-reflexive stuff! If you’re looking to define your own springtime action, Hirshfield has an equally forgiving poem about opening our spidey senses to the hunches from the world on what needs doing. She released “Today, When I Could Do Nothing” in the middle of the disorientation of Covid lockdown. Many of us had coffee, books, time, a garden, and “silence enough to fill cisterns.” And yet we, unlike Hirshfield’s unfrightened ant, weren’t doing so hot. If we weren’t one of the brave fighters on the front line, if we could “contribute nothing beyond staying distant from [our] own kind,” we had time aplenty to scan around for the small action. Saving an ant, who may not have been saved otherwise! These lines mark the sacredness of the small action—the local, the humble, the compassion-driven effort. That truth sticks around longer than any pandemic could. What do you do when you feel powerless? Check in on your mom. Get groceries for your sick friend. Write that letter to your city official. Pet your dog. Challenge a hometown acquaintance to talk through some racist shit. Oh, and pet your dog some more.
            But/And! Some hours need to be devoted to letting the creative field lie fallow so it can birth new life. We can only generate solutions to the mess of our world by returning to the ant’s pace for a time. If we are gentle with ourselves and our pacing, merciful in defining the blossoming thing within us that could maybe help this planet of ours, we just might find an answer one of these spring mornings. The human hand that moved the ant “through swiftness and air” is contrasted to the insect’s own slow progress, from newspaper to laptop (warm!) to cushion—“moving steadily because that is what it could do.” The poem was and is an invitation to move steadily, deliberately, with attention to warmth and ink and softness. Our contribution may just be a small thing, but together small things can carry the heaviest loads.
 
PRACTICE
             Maybe you could Just.Plain.Slow.Down. Simply fetching coffee at an ant’s pace is incredibly instructive. Or if you’re drawn to the messy springtime transition from underground stirrings toward form and structure, you might embody it! Seated or in slow movement, try exploring a dividing line at the waist, where upper-body movements are isolated from the stillness of the lower body, as though it were buried underground. Attend to the specific angles in your orientation to space—to the edges and corners of the room around you, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The amygdala likes to know where it stands, so to speak, and will be helped by clear, symmetrical, determined planting of the feet, legs, and hips. 
             Perhaps, in your breathing, you might embody the elemental up/down play of spring more subtly. Picture your underground lower body gripping down on the exhale and then inhaling the stem of the spine, chest, and skull upward, as though everything above the waist were reaching up for the sun. Perhaps close by visualizing one small action from your week, tantamount to ant-saving. It’s only a beginning. You could just remain open to hunches from the world around you about what your winter hibernation might yield this spring, what might be coming into definition for you. How could you take action to give it what it needs to emerge?