I’ve been thinking lately about the cyclical nature of things (days, seasons, birthdays, wheels, traditions (like our April haiku), the endlessly reiterative process of revision) and, also, about the inevitability of change.
For me, rotation — pivoting around an axis, always returning to the original orientation and yet, not quite the same — is the perfect image for the intersection of these ideas. And there’s an extra nice echo to it today, this last day of April, this last day of poeming together.
Keep on rolling, friends, and I’ll see you back here next spring. Same-same, but different.
Rotation
Haiku 30
Return to yourself:
what goes around comes back changed
but the center holds
Several times over the past several years, we’ve worked with the idea of writing “In the Style of…” The one I’m remembering right now is “In the Style of E.E. Cummings.” Writing like E.E. Cummings is far from easy but there is something so wildly distinct that it felt possible. It felt like we could pick up what he’d put down. Y’know?
This month, though, we’re writing “In the Style of Pablo Neruda.” Ummmm. Wow. OK, let’s see. We talked about it as a group — what were some recognizable characteristics, patterns, watchwords? What exactly was this style in which we were supposed to write? We threw some good fodder on the table — sonnets, odes, lush and considered language, the natural world, love, love and more love. And then, we went for it.
Here’s what I decided to do. I took his Book of Questions (an excerpted and illustrated version of which is here) and decided to turn the tables on Neruda and ask questions of or about him. Most everything in here has a taproot into his work or biography, and I genuinely tried to think about his ‘style,’ slippery though it may be.
Anyway, here goes…
If You Were…
After Neruda’s Book of Questions
If you were to pick your own name
like a lemon, what would it be?
When you said it aloud, would it echo?
Would it leave ripples
on the water like a stone?
If fourteen lines makes a sonnet,
is eight lines a song and six lines
a net for catching stars?
How is there room
in fourteen lines
for so much love,
for rain and fire and wheat
and live birds and shadows
of everything?
If you speak with roses and bells
for the workers and the revolutionaries,
does everybody understand?
And do you understand
everybody?
Does some suffering sit
in your hand like ore
while the rest slips
through your fingers,
while the rest is dashed
over your shoulder like salt?
Is exile a way to be lost?
Is exile a way to lose yourself?
If you were from Chile
and from Spain and from France,
where would you keep your shoes?
Who might mend your shirts?
Would you drop cumin
or saffron
or tarragon
into your soup pot?
What direction would you face
when you turned toward home?
To read everyone else’s take on Neruda, go here:
Tricia Mary Lee
Tanita
Sara
Kelly
Laura
Those of you who came of age in the 70s, like I did, may remember the grand display of commitment and righteousness around converting to the metric system. Some road signs were changed, some speedometers altered.
“Quick, teach the kids to count by 10s!” said school administrators everywhere.
“Um, ok,” said the teachers, and we all rolled our eyes and counted by tens and said easy peasy lemon squeezy.
But then, somehow, this right and simple thing became anti-American, and before math class could be dismissed we’d opted for the Imperial System for life, God Save the Queen, etc. etc.
Sigh.
Measurement
Haiku 24
The metric system
makes a perfect kind of sense
that the crown undoes
