When You Are Old

I'm trying to get back to normal posting (finally), but I might still throw in an occasional poem since I didn't end up posting many during April. Here's another favorite--Amanda introduced me to this poem, and I will forever be glad for it.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

–William Butler Yeats

NPM cont.

Sorry, everyone, it's been the paper-writing week from hell (and it's nowhere near over yet).

But in the meantime, another poem: Creationism: Five Theories, by Jon Ogden. This is probably my favorite poem we published in Inscape during my three years on staff (but certainly not the only good one--the site is definitely worth browsing through). It's a great poem in its own right, but it's also attached to some wonderful memories of staff meetings and late-night InDesign sessions and last-minute press runs, of projects like Gallery 110 and Light Cleaveth Unto Light, of being surrounded by friends who are writers and artists and who share the beautiful things they create.

Housing Shortage

I did not disappear again, actually. I know you're all shocked. I was, however, in New Orleans for the weekend, and the promise of a new city to explore is one of the few things that can compete with my internet addiction. Here's another poem I read for class last week.

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

–Naomi Replansky

Chartres

I just read this for my class tomorrow. It caught my eye because I love the cathedral in Chartres (I remember fixating on the picture of it in my AP European History textbook, and visiting it in person several years later was an unexpectedly powerful experience), although it turns out I like the poem anyway.


The bulk of it
In air

Is what they wanted. Compassion
Above the doors, the doorways

Mary the woman and the others
The lesser

Are dreams on the structure. But that a stone
Supports another

That the stones
Stand where the masons locked them

Above the farmland
Above the will

Because a hundred generations
Back of them and to another people

The world cried out above the mountain

–George Oppen

Musée des Beaux Arts

Most of you have probably read this poem, but it's a favorite of mine. Not only am I a fan of ekphrastic poetry and fascinated by the story of Icarus, but there's something so painfully and beautifully true about this notion of heartache and failure taking place in the background of a world that necessarily carries on as usual. It reminds me to pay closer attention, to notice others' heartaches, and at the same time to keep my own in perspective.


About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

–W. H. Auden

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

–Eavan Boland

This poem is from Boland's In a Time of Violence (1994), where she writes lovely things about grief and womanhood and Ireland and history, and which you should probably think about reading.

I'm back.

We're already a few days into April, but I'm going to steal an idea from other bloggers and celebrate National Poetry Month by pretending to be more of an authority on the subject than I am and posting a poem each day (or every few days, as will likely end up being the case). Because although writing about poetry terrifies me (leave me to my prose-based scholarship, thank you very much), I love reading it. Also, I figured this might be a good way to ease back into blogging, which I've severely neglected, right?

There's a good chance e. e. cummings will show up again later, but this is my favorite of his. If you care to go looking, there's a predictably great choral setting by Eric Whitacre, although I'm rather attached to the Gwyneth Walker one we sang in Women's Chorus.

P.S. Totally loving this year's NPM poster.

~

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Complicite: A Disappearing Number

Michigan's University Musical Society scored a killer engagement of A Disappearing Number, a play conceived and performed by British experimental theater company Complicite, and I was able to see it last night. I can't urge you all to go (unless you'll be in the vicinity of the Barbican Theatre in London next month), but wow--keep an eye on this company. (Incidentally, an earlier Complicite production entitled The Street of Crocodiles was inspired by the life and works of Bruno Schulz, also the source for the film Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay. In even cooler news, the company is currently working on its first original screenplay--a collaborative effort with Jonathan Safran Foer.)

The play, drawn in part from G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, interweaves two stories: that of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-made Indian mathematician who travels to Cambridge in 1914 to study and collaborate with Hardy, and that of a modern-day mathematician, Ruth, and her husband, Al, as he attempts to understand the beauty she finds in math. It brings well-crafted dialogue and innovative staging together with music, projection, and film to create an experience that is all at once mesmerizing, funny, and profound. The cumulative effect is a powerful sense of the perfection and beauty of the mathematical world but also the continuity and infiniteness of life. As Ruth explains, "There are no gaps between the numbers, like there are no gaps in time or space; they are continuous. And if time is continuous, then we are linked to the past and future. And if space is continuous we are linked to the absent." Near the end of the play, in a particularly poignant moment, one character tells Al that although his aunt has died, he is still always talking to her. Al, terrified and overwhelmed by the concept of infinity stretching forever in opposite directions, bitterly remarks, "On the other side of infinity." The other corrects him: "On the same line."

I went because the production had received fantastic reviews and a number of awards (2008 Laurence Olivier Best New Play among them) and because I was interested in the concept (multimedia theater) and the subject matter (British-Indian relations, WWI, theoretical mathematics). Afterward, superficial points of interest forgotten, I bypassed the bus to walk the mile and a half home alone and in silence. Then I sat on my bed and read the script, playing everything out in my mind a second time. I don't know that I've ever experienced something so simultaneously mind-blowing and moving. There's no way to recreate it, but this was one of my favorite passages, Ruth's message to Al at the end of the play:

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

The lights fade and Ruth's voice counts up from 1.

first day of school, round 17

It seems like I should feel different, being a graduate student and all. But I finally had to admit to myself that I don't. I went to my first graduate class this morning, and not only was it not remotely intimidating, it felt perfectly normal. Later I wandered through groups of undergraduates toward the library, studying faces and catching bits of conversations, looking for some difference but still finding nothing. I look as young as they do; I feel the same intermingled anxiety and excitement; the only reason I'm not laughing and gossiping just as loudly as they are is that I have no one to do it with.

It's that last difference, nothing to do with any imagined magical transformation that comes with moving to a new stage of life, that makes me feel different. No familiar faces, no connections, no obligations. My anonymity in this place is liberating, but it's also lonely. I haven't wanted to settle in--my car isn't completely unpacked and I was sleeping on the floor until yesterday--because it would mean facing the permanence of this change, committing on another level to the decision I made months ago but have been ambivalent about every single day since.

But even though I miss being surrounded by good friends, having so many people to talk to, I'll adjust and get to know people and get absorbed in my work. And in the meantime, there are choir auditions and bookbinding demonstrations and an award-winning new play from a British experimental theater company and Battleship Potemkin in an extravagantly decorated old theater with live organ accompaniment.

forty-eight hours

I don't want to talk about the fact that my hair does not, in fact, handle humidity as well as I'd thought, or how long it'll be before I manage to buy and transport a bed, or how parking near campus is infinitely more painful than in Provo, or the number of one-way streets I've turned the wrong direction onto.

But I live across the street from a park and a few blocks from a jazz club and the best ice cream in the county (so I hear). I have a reliable internet connection for the first time in a year. The neighbor's cats hang out on my porch, and although I'm not sure who's responsible for the garden in the backyard, I love that it's there. On my way to school this morning I passed pumpkins growing in someone's front yard, train tracks (yes, I live on the wrong side), a house painted entirely in violent shades of purple, the treehouse I wanted to build as a kid, and blue cornflowers in the grass.

I love that I can walk across the street from Angell Hall and have 17 food options, not to mention an enormous Borders and a couple of independent bookstores, a theater that shows foreign and independent films, plenty of coffee shops, and enough other things that I notice a new one every time I walk along State or Liberty. Tonight, instead of studying for the German test I may or may not pass tomorrow, I picked up some Thai food and a slice of Zingerman's chocolate cake and visited the Ann Arbor public library for the opening reception of the Kerrytown Bookfest and the feature exhibit of stunning design bindings.

The department chair gave a self-termed homily at this morning's orientation meeting on anxiety: Everyone is anxious at the beginning of a new year, even professors, and it's okay. Learn to make the anxiety generative so you can contribute. Find your passion and pursue it. I still wonder occasionally whether I or the admissions committee made a horrible mistake somewhere along the way, but this morning my excitement overtook my apprehension for the first time in quite a while. When I step back and look at where I've landed, it's better than I could have hoped--almost perfect. I'll be okay here.