Tiny moments of joy, amusement, and recognition. That is what art can do when it speaks to you – at least it’s what it does for me. I am thinking of the poems I started to read this morning, but for me, it also applies to music, other writing, and visual arts as well. There are entire swaths of artistic endeavors for which I lack appreciation (dance being one of them) – I haven’t had the proper introduction. There are times when a lyric or a line in a book or poem will make me laugh or get teary eyed. Those moments, when I’m paying attention, not only make me pause, but make me wonder how I might move through the world with more of this type of attention. Many years ago, when I was on one of my Kurt Vonnegut kicks (I go through phases) I came across this nugget:
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Today is the last day of April. I was up early (Nick the cat on my arm pawing and purring). After breakfast I researched a few more journals. If I get nothing else done, I will submit some poems today. A few journals consider anything posted online to be published, and I’m a rules follower, so I’ll have to hold off on posting some new ones or write some only with the intent of submitting to those journals.
With my second cup of coffee in hand, I made my way out to the balcony. Robert Hass, my notebook, and Czeslaw Milosz joined me. The morning sky, uninterrupted, a clear sheet of glassy blue. I started to read.
An odd thing has been happening lately. Shortly after I write something, a poem or a fragment, I read something eerily similar. The other day I had written the poem Schedules (since re-titled “Evening Shift”). It’s not a terribly original thought – the lives of two people who have their own creative pursuits and are on different creative schedules. When I’m “daydreaming” or writing I walk between the past I’ve had, the past I thought I would have, and the futures I might envision. This morning, one of the poems I read “Old Movie with the Sound Turned Off” had the lines: “All the dead actors were pretty in their day. Why / Am I watching this movie? you may ask. Well, my beloved, / Down the hall, is probably laboring over a poem / And is not to be disturbed….. ” And ok, like I said, common enough, and perhaps I was influenced by knowing that Hass is married to another writer (and these last few years, I’ve been attracted to artist types and occasionally dreamed of how that might look). I paused. I actually chuckled over the coincidence between his line and a little of what I was trying to get at in my poem, and continued on. There are far better lines in the poem. Two poems later, “Consciousness” begins: “First image is blue sky, nothing in it, and not / understood as sky, a field of blue.” Not fifteen minutes before reading this, I had looked up and thought about how the sky was so empty and wrote my daily observation: “The morning sky, uninterrupted, a clear sheet of glassy blue.” Again – these aren’t earth shaking coincidences. There are only so many ways to describe an empty sky and there are lots of days when the sky is empty and poets looking up trying to capture it in words… but the uncanny feeling of being connected (along with the morning chill) drove me inside to make this observation, this post. It’s as if there’s a synergy telling me that how I’m spending my time (in this moment) is the way I should be spending my time.
Because I’ve been meaning to post some lines from Hass, but haven’t done so – I’m going to close with this one. What I like about his writing is that he includes just the right amount of detail and he surprises with his descriptions. In many of his poems, I find lines that make me pause – make me think “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Also from “Old Movie….” and not entirely true to the line as it appears on the page (I omit the word White in the first line):
…Some quality in the film stock that they used
Made everything so shiny that the films could not
Not make the whole world look like lingerie, like
Phosphorescent milk with winking shadows in it.
With that, I’ll close and get back to “work.”