I Beg Your Pardon, Who are you Calling a Deaf Leopard?

 Dear Readers, Be Ye Many or Few,

 

Today will be a typing day regardless of the blurry white cloud before my eyes. Starting shots in my eyes again soon to help heal the veins behind my retinas. Still I thank God and all my angels, and lucky stars God placed in my path of my orbit that I still have vision enough. What I have is enough and I accept that but I am also open to accept healing. Somehow, healing. 

 

Now I know what my mom went through all those years when my dad and I had to be her eyes, and my cousin Sandy often too. I read to her, read her grocery list to her at the store, drove her to her appointments of all kinds and her grocery shopping, read the labels and prices to/for her, wrote out her recipes for her in large enough for her to read, and once PCs came out on the market I typed recipes for her to print in large font, and I kept her address book for her in large print or often wrote and read to her her correspondence. My mom could not read or drive anymore by the time she was about 50-52 and considered legally blind. 

 

My eyesight is still okay enough to read even if sometimes difficultly and even though it takes me longer than it used to when it us s large text. Ever since the cloudiness developed, it us now easier to read on a computer or phone screen than anywhere else if a text is dense. I used to love to read, and still will again once I get started with talking books. Or, e books since I can enlarge a computer screen yet it takes so long when enlarging the font due to it not all fitting at once then upon the screen and going left to right to left again to read well what else the lines that normally fit in the margins of a page. For this and other issues I am faced with these days, I find myself thinking about my age lately quite a bit. In the next month I have 6 more different doc appointments coming up for pain management in shoulder with severe degenerative joint issue. I joked with people the other day that when we are young we used to say, "Oh there they go again" when the older people complained about their pains or foods upsetting them, but now we have turned into those people we used to say oh no about. Haha, so the other day I had just a tad of rice with red hot chili spice in it because it is so hard to never eat spicy foods and peppers, and a day later my throat and gut feel a bit off. But how do I go without eating the hot peppers and all that?!?! Well, again, Say LA vie, all in the name of aging. But it us good to be aged, because it means I did not succumb yet to the alternative, !

 

Thus all the waxing poetic about aging. I only know I have no choice in the matter physically, but I will try to do it gracefully. As grace can be a key to art, so can graceful living be key to growing older, to handle yourself with care. 

 

I am an old classic rock-n-roller, among other things. I am glad that I was born when I was born. 

Here is a link to Def Leopard, "Rock of Ages." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sk5aeUoOjw

 

 

 Sincerely,

Mary Ann

P. S. I also have been practicing the piano an hour or two every day lately--it is hard to re-learn songs by reading the sheet music or musical score if you can barely see it. Yet I am doing it. I can't not do it. I need these songs and I need to know I. Still. Can. Play. It is not like I never played at all in the last decade or two, it is just that I seldom played other than when sitting at the piano with my granddaughter to teach her beginning things which of course by now are easy for me. Thank. God. Too. I. Can. Still. Hear. The. Music. (I always see people doing these things on Facebook with a period after each word for emphasis, and I have never wanted to try it until now. I think by now it is cliche and that I did not enjoy doing that at all, by the way. Similarly, I don't much like reading this sort of thing when other people do it. Did Nike start it with its "Just. Do. It?" I can't remember how it all began by now. I must be losing some of my memory too, haha. 

FOR POETRY MONTH: Poets Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou, and the Teen/Young Adult Novel

 

Back in Black History Month (February) I mentioned I would write about some of my favorite Black American poets such as Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. All through Black History Month of February and Women's History Month of March, I was reading the poems of these two poets, among others. Now here we are in National Poetry Month of April in the U.S.A., and the life and biographies of Giovanni and Angelou span the themes of all these most recent three months. I add the book Speak into this post because Maya Angelou is mentioned frequently as a key personality in this important novel in which a teenage girl who has experienced trauma learns and manages to find her voice--finally. 

 

Nikki Giovanni and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea

 

Giovanni emerged during the times of the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Movement to become "one of the most celebrated" poets in America. I suggest getting her later of poems called Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea from a local library and reading not only the poems but the front and back flap covers for a remarkable description of her work. It is always good to remind your students to read the front and back covers and dust jackets/flaps to get more information about the book and its author--even with children's books, then children who will grow up to be artists can at that young age learn that their talents are important too and not just the author's or writer's. I will highlight here that it says she is both political and intimate or personal. She does this with great finesse. I am sure if you read this book of poems that you will find examples of that. 

I love the first poem in the book entitled, "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea" after which the book itself is titled. The subtitle of this poem is "(We're Going to Mars)". We can see in this poem how eloquently the poet combines the world-at-large goings-on with our own personal lives and this is regardless of our skin color. In this poem, she compares the idea and goal of going to Mars with the Black American experience when first brought to the North American continent; we all hear we are going to Mars and maybe colonizing it someday and we all are alien in that sense, imagining what it might be like to be the strangers in a strange land and how will we survive the atmosphere and terrain,.

This idea of going to Mars being an alien race like an African brought here to America takes me back to the film The Green Book in which a professional pianist who happens to be black, upon his tour to the southern United States, is given a Green Book which lists the hotels in which a black person is allowed to sleep and so can sleep safely and the restaurants in which the black person can eat and stay safe. The tension that results in this film is emotionally gripping. And there is Jung's theory of opposites in the tension and then the transcendence and meeting of minds and friendships made between black and white Americans, namely a Black man and an Italian man then in the end also the Italian man's family. The Italian man was the Black man's driver (through the musician's performance tour down South. I found this quite refreshing. At one point the Italian man is chided for working for (/with--it comes to pass they work together very well) a Black man and being his friend.

The Green Book reminds me of a story my dad and mom once told me about what happened to them one year on their way to Florida for a vacation. They stopped at a restaurant and were stopped outside, refused to be let in, because my dad's skin tone was too dark. He tried to tell them that he was Italian, but he was told they didn't care, he was still too dark to be let inside, but they set up a table for my parents and their friends (my mom's cousin and his wife who was my mom's best friend). As she told that story, my mom often looked sad as she told it and sometimes gave a look of disbelief even though knowing racism and prejudice is real.

Maya Angelou: Walks in Live Performance as if with 

"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"--

She Walks in Strength!

Every book I read and every poem I read teaches a lesson. I never feel too old to learn. You can even learn old lessons in new ways as you age. I learned a great lesson in my 20s when I heard and saw Maya Angelou recite her poems live in an auditorium where I had an aisle seat at Bowling Green State University, many years ago. She was close enough to me that I could almost physically feel the power in her voice touch me and my being. She gave her poetry reading by heart--she knew all her poems by heart, from the heart and to my heart and the hearts of those in the audience who felt a resonance with her. I can still visualize her facial expressions during the reading also, full of convictions. It is worth mention that just as many men were there as women. She is a women poet but not just for women. What I learned while thinking about this over the years is that every time I think about it, including now in my twilight years as a grandmother, I still learn from her and from her strength in her voice in her poems. I have also watched some videos of interviews with her on YouTube. She is always worth hearing. And she teaches women how to speak up for themselves and honor themselves. (Much of this paragraph is borrowed from a post I already did during Women's History Month.)

Speak, by Laurie Anderson

This is a book I used to use in my Children's  Literature Class for college students who wanted to become teachers in early education through high school onto and through college. The class was also for parents and aunts and uncles or grandparents or any relatives or older siblings who wanted to share storytime with the children in their lives or who wanted to work with children perhaps as a babysitter or caregiver. My list of books extended to books for young adults.

 

Speak was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.  

In this book a high school freshman named Melinda is made to be outcast for calling the cops at a teen party after she is sexually assaulted at the party. No one understands why she had to call the cops and report the party but she was afraid to speak up and tell anyone why. The boy who assaulted her is an upperclassman at her high school so she hides a lot in a janitor's closet where she works on her art. What helps her learn to use her voice and what helps teens and young girls who read this book learn howhow to speak up and use their voice are the posters Melinda taped on the closet walls of Maya Angelou's poems, an example of a strong voice and proud voice to be even furthermore proud of. The boy assaults her again but this time Melinda fights back, breaks her silence and gets a "degree of vindication." (I quote here from the article on "Speak by Laurie Anderson" in Goodreads, retrieved from  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39280444-speak) 

 

There is so much symbolism in this book of material things standing for abstract things like strength, finding one's voice, and virtues that it makes for a great educational tet for those wanting to learn more about writing for teens and young adults. It is another great way to introduce the use of symbolism to many a student new to literature of this genre or any genre for that matter. 

 

The poet in the closet image is priceless--being a strong and popular poet as Maya Angelou makes it even more dear. 

 

It is a perfect book for class discussion using these tools as prompts; however, sadly enough this book is sometimes banned in schools below the college level when it could actually be beneficial for high school students. If a high school allows sex education class, it should in my opinion allow this book in the curriculum. 

To end on a happier note, again, the posters of the poet in the closet is dearly priceless, or at least worth their weight in gold or diamonds for the soles of every girl's shoes. The irony and image is that this high school who was so quiet she was unable to barely speak at all so greatly admired Maya Angelou's voice. It serves as a beacon to her.

 

 

WHAT A WONDROUS MARVEL THE PHENOMENAL WORLD IS WITH POET MICHAEL MCCLURE!

(Image of poem retrieved from https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-20-at-9.46.14-AM.png&imgrefurl=https://paulenelson.com/2019/10/20/happy-87th-michael-mcclure/&docid=u-UEBxTXjdgn7M&tbnid=SX4t5o76wPIrkM&vet=1&w=356&h=667&hl=en-US&source=sh/x/im   and I have no claims to any copyright on this poem or Piper's Creek who posted it)

You see, he roars! The rebel lion roars in all CAPS!

Note his form. While e. e. ceased necessity of capital letters and other matters of formal punctuation, grammar, and form, thus breaking new ground in poetry on the page, Michael McClure often has fun being bombastic as he capitalizes words and phrases that would not normally be capitalized. Like e.e. cummings, he also plays around with the positions of the lines on the page and the words that would normally in prior times be all in rows of lines. But the shouting! The exclamations! It is there that McClure most emphasizes his sheer wonderment, delight, or surprise in this world! (It becomes thus in some ways too then like one's dream world in which there are many surprises and twists and turns of play or drama from out of one's psyche or dreaming mind!)*

Inside one of McClure's poems, it becomes an exclamatory phenomenal world! HOW MARVELOUS IS THAT???!!!! It is rather child-like, happy it's Saturday! Thus is it nice to study poetry and techniques lest we think this is a rude poem yelling at us in childish fashion rather than recognizing its intent in form in its technique played out in which he displays how content dictates form-- or as I prefer to say, how form takes dictation from content. Thus the poem itself becomes a SYMBOL of archetypal play (!) within the play of language (!) This discussion of it also points out the difference between being child-like and being child-ish, in poetry as in all things. Not all play is child's play, either, even when it is child-like. He is kind of aa Dr. Suess for poetry and adults. 

This post concerns the play of language. 

*

Snyder so visibly plays with the language also, in a different way. By Snyder I refer to Gary Snyder of course. 

Here in the following paragraph is a link to one of Snyder's poems which I think expresses the idea of word play by using it to reflect upon the goings-on in the natural world and what it has in common with poetry--or how it is mirroed in poetry. I particularly like the wordplay that reflects the wind playing in the second stanza about the "Air Poets" and how they work/write: The Air Poets/ Play out the swiftest gales/ And sometimes loll in the eddies./. Poem after poem,/ Curling back on the same thrust.// [...] Here is the whole poem:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/as4poets.html

*Which we see also in Snyder's twists and turns in the lolling eddies.

I envision McClure's poems to be shouted out at the opposite mountain walls across a wide stream. Some of the echoes loll in the eddies as they twist around in the wind, turning back upon themselves. 

Published on

4/13/22 5:54 PM

Upodated on:

 3/14/2023 7:05 PM

FOR APRIL 2022 POETRY MONTH: Anna Świrszczyńska, the Polish Sylvia Plath--and Plath

 

 

Anna Świrszczyńska (aka Anna Swir) (1909–1984) was a Polish poet whose poems are about her experiences during World War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. (Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II)  I read about her way back in the 80s when I was researching Polish poets and also found that sometimes she was referred to as the Polish Sylvia Plath, or Polish Plath. I did then read Anna's poetry in the years that Sylvia's poetry was still fresh in my mind, and I did see the resemblance. 

Both had the WWII experience,  both had the horrors and bleakness of the war, both wrote of women's concerns and women's liberation in a time when people sought liberation from the war and Nazi Germany. Finding another Plath, I was absolutely fascinated.

In the meantime, before I had encountered Świrszczyńska, I did try to sound like Plath as so many young female poets tried. Many young female poets want to emulate Plath or at least try thrir hand at her type of poetry, and I wanted not to emulate Plath per say but to emulate her poetry. I must be clear and emphasize that I meant to master her poetic style, not to emulate her mental illness. Plath was known for her immaculate slant rhyme and line breaks, together producing a sort of sea-wave-crashing-upon-rock rocking rhythm, repetitively unsettling to the point of then eventually unnerving; and, all the while, her words yet flowed strongly and unceasingly as naturally as the waters of the sea-storm, unabashed by any feelings of discomfiting the audience. The impact struck me as brilliant insofar as craft. I felt persuaded or compelled to try the same. I too sought that discomfiture--not always, but often, to various degrees in various poems and short stories. Such was as follows: 

     bleakness:

1. the quality or state of being bare and inhospitable.

   "the bleakness of that destroyed landscape"

   • the quality or state of cold and miserable weather.

     "the bleakness of winter"
   • the quality or state of being hopeless, discouraging, or unlikely to have a favorable outcome.

     "this story is marked by unrelenting bleakness"

 (Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=bleakness)

A professor one day spoke of poems being of warm fire and/or cold fire. It was in that moment that I suddenly realized what I had been doing and rather liked the idea of being near warm fire much more than cold fire. I decided to pitch (get rid of) my Plath-like sales pitch (and wrote a poem about that later) and seek the warmth I once knew and generated in many of the poems of my high school and earlier college days like in my first couple workshops before encountering Plath. However, we do all ger sarcastic or bleak or moody or or or whatever sometimes. But I don't want to live there. 

Plath and Anne Seton and Adrienne Rich were friends. The three would meet for lunch or coffee and discuss suicide notes. Two out of three ended up following through and committing suicide--how bleak is that?!?! Pulitzer prize-winning Anne Sexton committed suicide at age 45. She was a confessional poet and one of the best-known writers in America in her time. From what I heard of Plath in my youth, she killed herself by sticking her head in an oven when she found out that her husband Ted Hughes had had an affair. And oh the poems of Ted Hughes, how I loved them, so I was so disappointed upon hearing this. No one is ever worth killing yourself over. Not in my (poetry) book! All three of these poets were feminists and felt oppressed.I think of how J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter wrote while on welfare in a laundry closet with kids at home. I wish I could beat those odds, but even if I can't, I cannot see killing myself, especially over another person. So in these three female poets, as in many poets, there is a strong lesson for today's girls and teenagers who feel bullied or stuck in a relationship that feels unfair to them. I just hope that teen girls and young adult women and poets do not want to identify with this.

Regarding that period of my life, many people would ask me if the things I wrote of in poems and in short stories actually ever happened. They happened, but not completely, and not always to me. Sometimes I would take a word of a phrase I heard and run with it into a poem, such as from a conversation I overheard at a bar or an image I saw while walking down the street and imagining the image. Sometimes one moment of a story would happen and then I would run with that into a short story and embellish it until the cows came home.

In defiant spirit of life's struggles, and yes, sounding a lot like cold-fire Plath, Anna Świrszczyńska wrote,

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

From, The Sea and the Man, Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

I hope to do another write-up on Plath, but the days and time for National Poetry Month blogs are running out fast with there being other work I have to do.  

I write this blog mostly for my granddaughter to read some day.

I am keeping a sort of journal online. 

If anyone else happens to read it, great. If not, so be it.

I need to blog less to get some other writing projects done. I always think that blogging will just be a quick warm-up before I go type my other articles, but it does not always work out that way. I think I will definitely stop posting this blog on my FB page so much.  

"Diving Into the Wreck" for Poetry Month ( A Poem by Adrienne Rich)

 

 

(Photo by M. Bencivengo, at Vermilion Lighthouse and Maritime Museum at Lake Erie)

 

One of my favorite old-time all-time poets and one of my favorite poems. However, I do not quite resonate with lines of seeing the thing itself and not the story or the myth of the thing itself, because I love mythology and folklore and for me it is the metaphor that leads to really seeing the thing itself. With the symbolic life, the mind reads and speaks in metaphors. Yet, I love this poem; as much as she says it is not the story or the myth but the thing itself, I think she is telling a story nonetheless and mentions the myth of the mermaid in taking a dive. She cannot seem to help but be a poet of story and the metaphor of myth even as she is looking for the actual "thing itself." I love the imagery in this poem and its description of going down into the deep. It also reminds me of depth psych, as I once posted on my old depth psych website.

 

But then there is how in the modern era the word myth is often used to mean anything/whatever is false in a popular cultural sense, like "Oh, that's not true: that's just a myth." And in that sense person could be looking for the truth to something in looking for "the thing itself." Perhaps this is also timely in a time when, in the news or on the streets, so many people are talking about people ignoring or denying the science of things.

 

Here is the link to Rich reading the poem:

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c03sWpt62vw

 

 

 

 

What I Would Normally Be Writing in my Private Journal but am Blogging About Here

 

Dear Diary, 

On March 31, I filmed my first episode for my new YouTube Channel on music, but the lighting was terrible and I couldn't get it to post on YouTube anyway. I posted it on FB and wish I hadn't. I will be recording it all over again with better lighting. 

 Then when I was ready to post it to YouTube the screen on my phone froze overnight. So much for being on time before April Fool's Day for my first You Tube music episode.

The next day I recorded myself reading a story for April Fools Day on, yes, April 1. But my phone cam  timed out every 10 minutes. It was okay at first because reading the story only took 10 minutes, but then when I wanted to talk about the story (and did) it timed out at another ten minutes which I tried to then turn into "Part II." So then I was going to tape "Part III." But one of the "Parts"--whether it was part I or Part II I did not bother to check did not save in my phone. So I deleted all of it to redo another time. 

The story was Bastianelo, a folktale from Italy. I wrote a paper on it once at school and it is one of my favorites. I did a library presentation on this tale just a couple weeks ago and the library's equipment would not forward the Power Point I devised along with the voice recording so it did not go on the library's You Tube channel like usual when I do these events which is why I wanted to add Bastianelo to my You Tube channel. 

So then I began to feel akin to Jung the Psychologist's friend Pauli the Physicist. I will include a link about " The Paulo Effect" below: 

A teacher of mine once exclaimed to me when I said I had computer problems, " You always have computer problems!" and it was (is) true--I do always have computer problems. When most people have tech problems when Mercury is in Retrograde (and laugh or moan and groan about it), things are harder on me when Mercury is Direct (Normal) than when it is Retrograde because I was born Mercury Retrograde. So when Mercury is in Retrograde things go more with my natural way. Once I found out I have the exact same birthday as Neil Gaiman (the same day of the month and year) I did not mind being born Mercury Retro (Rx). I feel akin to his writings, also, along with Pauli's The Pauli Effect. 

The body is a machine in some ways and in some ways my body machination works "backwards." I was born with limited shoulder rotation and now in my older age I feel like I have overextended my shoulders all my life, even though I was in ballet until I was about 16 and then in karate all through my 20s and had no idea back then that my bodily "clock" was somehow backwards. However, backwards is not quite the right word. It is more of a looking back, a life lived in retrospect. Everything I see on any given day almost always brings back the whole flood of memories of similar associative things. It is a bit like living as a Sensory Type in Jung's Typology, though I do not test as such and test as intuitive instead. 

It would be interesting for someone to do a study on Mercury Retrograde in accordance with Jung's theories of Intuitive "vs." Sensory and also a study of the types of people who stop clocks and make computers or lab equipment crash. 

Please know that nothing say is intended to be in stone even when it sounds like it, and that I say some of this perhaps tongue-in-cheek even if it is true. Things in my opinion can always be two things at once, and I am not even a Gemini!

But I sure have digressed here. 

Getting back, I have all kinds of plans for April for this blog. I hope I fulfill my plans. On the other hand, I have so many other projects in the mixing board that I would surprise myself if I do. Starting the You Tube channel was perhaps the wrong time since I am supposed to be publishing some books I have have in progress throughout the rest of Spring and the Summer. I could have, for instance, spent the last hour typing one of my book manuscripts, but I am so nervous about typesetting that I have put doing it for about a year now. I let days then weeks then months then a year go by. I hope this is the last time I ever say it,m but the pandemic had some things to do with putting things off. Yeah, I had Covid when it first appeared on the scene as some family members were working in medical fields and I was always at the nursing home to see my mom where I guess some outbreaks happened, etc. Remember back when we were all so paranoid when we were told to disinfect our grocery wrappings/packaging when we got home? That kept me busy like the rest of you. Then I was tired for a very very long time after even getting over Covid. I guess you can call it long Covid. I still feel exhausted about every couple days. I have a couple good days and then I have to rest a couple days. That's the new story of my life, P.C.., Post Covid. 

But I digressed for sure again.

And that is all. Plans. I will have to add the follow-through soon, maybe next week, as I am off chasing Mercury into the otherworldly sunset that travels away from earth to the sun instead of the other way around. But that is another story, alas!

For Real,

Mary Ann