Delight Leads to Wisdom

The day Richard Aston died, I was teaching a poetry session to reluctant teens at a YMCA summer camp. I was about to recite a poem and asked the group, "What does it mean when we say we know something by heart?" One kid said, "You remember it." Another offered, "Your heart never forgets it."

Richard was a regular participant in and a great supporter of the Northeast Pennsylvania poetry scene. I met him in the mid 90s, when I began to attend poetry events through the Mulberry Poets and Writers Association. Richard was a sage. Grey bearded and bespectacled, he was a man with a scheduled rotation of professorial clothing. In winter, he wore a thick, orange cable knit turtleneck. When he spoke, he sometimes stroked his facial hair in thought. I often saw him reuse the same paper coffee cup at events. Seeing him drive for the first time I realized how much he valued the contents of his head, because he wore a helmet as he navigated the Wilkes-Barre roads in his little fuel-efficient car. He spoke to me many times about how he conserved energy in the home he and his wife lived in, the house his father built many years ago.  He took great pride in his ancestry, having come from a long line of skilled masons and craftsmen. 

People who only did a surface scan of Richard missed his brilliance and likely categorized him as an eccentric.  Richard was a quiet mentor to many coming up in the NEPA poetry scene. His ability to stand in front of any audience, big or small, and recite his work always left me in awe. Where was he holding all of those lines -- were they knitted into that sweater? Written on the inside of the recycled coffee cup? I think the day I realized that Richard's poems were living inside of Richard was the day I learned what the power and responsibility of committing a poem to memory to share it with an audience was. 

Vision + language + electrical impulses + heartbeat married to rhythm of language + the vessel of sonorous and singular body + breath and voice = poem delivered in true spirit to an audience.

Richard was curious about nearly everything, and approached his interests with poetry and scientific inquiry. He said to me once, "Delight leads to wisdom." I wrote it on a scrap of paper that hangs over my desk as a reminder to stay curious about everything -- to turn over stones, to inquire, to find delight in little things. 

He encouraged my writing, and often nudged me to attend the poetry festival in West Chester that he attended each year. He was at many events at Paper Kite, starting with the ones we held in a pottery studio in Kingston, and the mansion on South Franklin in Wilkes-Barre, and finally in our own studio in Edwardsville. He was ever-present, and truly present at readings. He paid attention when people read their work. He listened, then stuck around to discuss what he'd heard. It is impossible to know how many people he supported in this way, but I suspect it is a very large number of people indeed.

The last time I saw Richard was in Lancaster at the Ware Center for the Performing Arts where I performed a one-woman show titled Alonely. He and his wife Marcia drove all the way from Wilkes-Barre to attend, and had plans to stay overnight. After the show I went out into the audience and Richard gifted me with one of his poetry scrolls. I spoke with him again during the pandemic. He asked me for a video of the show to study. He was still thinking about it. I was sorry I didn't have one to give to him.

I couldn't make it to his poetry reading this spring with the Word to Word reading series. I regret that I missed that opportunity to see and hear him one more time.

So on the day Richard died, I recited Valentine for Earnest Mann by Naomi Shihab Nye to a group of impatient and unruly teens gathered in the Group Exercise room at the YMCA. As I assembled the vision, language, electrical impulses, heartbeat and rhythm of language, vessel of singular and (tired and exasperated) sonorous body, breath and voice, and began, some of the kids laughed and talked as I spoke. 

"I have to stop," I said. "I can't do it. I can't recite this poem right now." I looked the chattiest kid in the eye. "Maybe if it's quiet,  I can." 

I began again. I tripped up on the words. I delivered most of the poem, and like a hobbled runner I made it all the way to the end. The kids didn't know anything was missing, but I did. 

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us

we find poems. 

I will remember that moment, my skipped beats and recovery, all the teenage recalcitrance in the room, as the one when Richard made his exit from this world and entered the next. I hope he saw my foolish humanity in trying to remember what I thought I knew by heart, and took delight in it all. 

--

Some of Richard's writing can be found in Torch Magazine. His collection of poetry, Valley Voices, was published by FootHills Publishing. 

Complaints Department

I'm the most honest when I write letters to friends. Is it a fool's errand to write here? It's a bit like picking up the phone and talking when no one is on the other end. A pretend conversation. Zero connection. Surface activity. 

I'm over summer. Yesterday I saw a Lycoris squamigera (what a name!) in front of my window and thought "Good! Summer will be over soon." I didn't think "Oh, how pretty!" I was just relieved that this pale, leafless trumpet was here to herald the start of fall. Let us harvest whatever survived the deer browsing in the field and let the leaves shrivel and drop.

A beautiful white hair just fell out of my scalp. Lots of the brown ones are letting go too. I'm thinning out. Shedding.

Lycoris squamigera.

A couple of 20-somethings re-enacted a video game on the stage yesterday when I was helping their friend find something in the shop. They narrated what they saw and collected in the game when they play it online. There was no imagination. They never asked if they could be on the stage, just assumed it was ok to move chairs around while saying, "This is where you pick up the battle axe."

Lycoris squamigera. They are known as the "surprise lily" for showing up unannounced, foliage-free.

Diminution and Amplification

A few years ago I bought a t-shirt at a zine fest. On the front was the message "I will not make myself smaller." The shirt was a light green color, and had an image of a plant on it. The bold message spoke to me. "Hell yeah!" I thought to myself, "I won't make myself smaller!"  I wore it once and then donated it to a thrift shop. The message was dishonest on me, a woman who juggles her wallet, pocketbook, and several loose bags to make a quick getaway and not be in anyone's path at the grocery checkout. I am almost always making myself smaller, so I won't be a bother. My body is large. I'm tall and towering and stalk-like. My feet are a size ten, to hold up the height so I won't topple in a stiff wind. I am worried I am blocking you with these words. Let me grab them real quick and dash off over here, ok? So sorry.

Oops. I lied! There are more words, because there's Pointy Mary, Rita Poem, Chintz Davenport, Tom Mato. Pointy gets what she wants from you. Fill out this form, in triplicate. Pointy wanted to wear that t-shirt with the message on it, but it wasn't red, it was green, which is a very unflattering color on her. Rita will tell a man who has just spent fifteen minutes talking down to everyone at the table that he has just wasted everyone's time with his shit wits. Chintzy adores the spotlight, and takes it wherever she finds it. She orders Manhattans and wears bright red lipstick. Tom is male and can report on anything from poison ivy to dead mice and people will listen and comment.

When I am complimented for something -- an act of kindness, a performance, a poem, a meal, those accolades go to the audacious parts of me. Last week I received a glowing email from a stranger, and the day before yesterday I was told after a performance, "We're so glad you could make it this year! You're our favorite." I don't know what to do with these compliments, so I imagine them as trophies I hand over to all these larger, and somehow more deserving, parts of me. Jennifer is happy to stay out of your way, in her closet with a notebook and pen. When Chintzy, Rita, Tom, or Pointy take the stage, Jennifer stays in the wings. 

I'm not sure how to explain this, with all these points-of-view. Who is writing this? All of me. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.

I like Manhattans because they taste like the smell of an old dresser. Call me Jenny or Jennifer or Jenn while I sip one, but you're going to have to order for yourself because I don't want to muscle my way through the crowd at the bar. I got here early to avoid it. There's no way I will get the attention of the bartender. How dare I interrupt? They look busier than an octopus hanging laundry. 

An Experiment

Yesterday I sat at my desk in the afternoon after clearing this room of extraneous books, and I hand wrote three pages. It felt good to just be slow, to observe, and not feel pulled by any thoughts of "I should read that book by the person I'm only vaguely acquainted with, and then post my review of it as a dazzling reel." Not that I've ever done that, but the thoughts exist, and they are as intrusive as ticks.

Now I have a laundry basket full of books that will go to a little free library. There's the book about how and why we laugh, one all about how and why we read, several rhyming dictionaries I keep telling myself I'll deploy in a workshop someday (never happened in 23 years of teaching), some young adult literature that was great winter reading, some poetry, novels I hung onto with aspirations to read but never did, a quirky gift book, and books I purchased for some reason I no longer recall. Oh, and a two volume set of Shakespeare quotations I think I've referred to exactly twice. They are a lovely reference for a true scholar. I hope they find them.

No one will ever read what I wrote yesterday, or know what I saw, because it's all in my handwriting. The three pages are the equivalent of one of those puzzle boxes. Beautiful to look at, but difficult to solve. I can't explain how freeing it felt to write like this again. No expectations whatsoever. No pressure. No feeling of simultaneously writing and editing for the purpose of fitting into some social media limitation. And I recognize now that my clearing of books was a letting go of the words of others so some of my own might rise to the surface. I've been surrounding myself with walls of books, building a fortress to hide in. I cut out a few windows yesterday.

With that said, here's a list I made this morning of some of the good things about my writing, which is for the consumption of others, because I felt the need to type it, and be accountable for something other than one sad, metaphorical, perimenopausal, self-referential sentence. See Jennifer Hill: (The Fog Blog). 

This experimental list can also be read with the title, Self-Portrait at 54. Is there anything that isn't self-referential in some way? We are all drawing our own likenesses into our copies of the old master portrait.

Good Things About My Writing

Full of images

Spins a sense of whimsy, playfulness

Poetry rich

Elevates the daily

Mostly honest

Introspective and extroverted

Strives to be universal

Fills a lot of notebooks no one has seen

Has been published, performed, shared

Is both memorable and forgettable

(I even forget some of it and I wrote it.)

Unfinished, fragmented

Part dream, part real

Symbolic

Direct

Values paying attention, sensing, feeling

Verb driven, loves movement

Feminist

Spiritual without being didactic

Is not the news

Thinks of others

Plays with structure, word sounds and shapes

Listens and gathers

Speaks up after listening and gathering

Finds contrasts/similarities in the collected, turns them over

Appreciates and honors brevity

Appreciates and honors saying/showing more when it is called for even when it is a struggle

Leans into discomfort, jumps into the icy pool

Adores the parenthetical, the footnote, the secret, the hidden seeking to be discovered

Often cheers or connects with people

Believes in the power of language and emotion and the language of emotion

Has been around for many years and is gaining some wisdom

Is no longer trying so hard to be seen, just wants to be better at seeing 

The Fog Blog

Greetings from the inside of an echoic drainpipe. 

All Walking Is Falling

Laurie Anderson says all walking is falling. All day long we put one foot in front of the other, fall a little, and then catch ourselves. We take it for granted that we'll just stay upright as much as we'd like.

My early morning thoughts as I walked down the hallway were about the slice of carrot cake I had the night before -- the dessert treat of the week -- a three layer, carroty, raisiny, pecans instead of walnuts! marvel that I savored while streaming the second act of Complicite's production of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. 

I decided not to turn on the lights in the stairwell. "Ten out of ten I would eat that cake again," I thought. Then cats with puffed alarm tails swirled around me as I rubbed my knee from my seat on the floor.

My last thought before missing the last three stairs wasn't an erudite one about the meaning of boundaries, or our connection to nature, or human cruelty, or anything from the play the night before like the image of a woman opening the door to the forest -- how beautifully lit she was as she exited her story! 

My last thought before falling was a sexy one about a cake slice. Was that some zucchini in there? 

Disconnected

Disconnected has the word connect living inside of it. An anti-kangaroo word. This morning the sun splashed mercurochrome across the trunks of trees, highlighting the flourish of green.

Connect 

or lash

light

our

That's the poem.

Pocketwock

He was a good duck, if a little avoidant and non-comital. In fact, it was perphaps his side-eyed consideration of situations that kept Pocky earth side for so long. He was part of the "Original Gang" of eight ducklings that arrived here by post in February of 2020. Two of those ducklings died early on; one of a respiratory condition, and the other trampled by siblings. All of that original crew were named after our childhood words for objects and ideas. "Pocketwock" was Helen's toddler way of saying "pocket watch." I sometimes called him Pocket, because he seemed like a true pal, the way a pocket is always there for you, to hold what your hands must let go. Pocky was all brown, a chocolate runner duck, and his partner, "Cawcoff," named for Helen's toddler word for "washcloth," was one of the most vocal ducks of the bunch. 

I've learned that spring is a terrible season for ducks on a farm. While the weather warms, and trees bud, the foxes have their kits, and they need to be fed. They are fed at the ongoing Duck Parade Buffet, which happens at dusk on the apron of the pond. Foxes are bold. I've shaken my staff at their glowing eyes and they do not startle. I have some respect for them and their abilities. Their determination. Everyone wants to live. I just wish they were vegetarian.

Bisti (Bistigetti -- my father's childhood way of saying "spaghetti"), is the last of the Original Gang. Last night he wouldn't go into the run. He kept vigil just outside it, looking for Pocky, who never showed. He knew the pattern was upset, and that his last sibling was gone.

Now they are a dozen ducks, the last one a memory of my father, and the rest named after favorite foods, performers, and childhood tv shows: Bisti, Pip, Marceau, Tati, Great Zuccino, Moderate Zuccino, Mr. Rogers, Hatchy Milatchy, Kewpie, Yuzu, Tadpole, Pickle. 

I like to think of Pocky, Cawcoff, Sardine, Tot, Tomato, Potato, EB, Mushroom, Clo, Binder, Moonlight, and The Lizard of Oz, as all having packed up their bindlesticks to go seek fortune in New York City, the farm life no longer big enough a pocket to hold all their dreams.

The Outgoing Tide

A few days ago Linda Pastan died. I discovered her collection of poetry Aspects of Eve, on the shelves of the 800s in the Kutztown University Library in the early 1990s. I sat on the floor and read it all, memorizing "Mini Blues," which I carry inside of me like a bell that sounds in the outcast moments of my life. When I felt lost or sad, or not knowing what I was doing at college (I was a fine art major taking creative writing classes and was in a constant state of beloved melancholy), I returned to that spot on the floor of the library and grounded myself with her poems. The book was always there for me the way poetry is, the way we expect it to be. It was there in the same way we assume the poets we love will be alive and writing, keeping up their rituals, carrying their notebooks everywhere, giving readings.

In the past few months I began re-reading Linda's poems, first with the collection Carnival Evening. I read a few poems each morning, the same way you might allow yourself a few chocolates from a fancy sampler. Every poem was delicious, activating, oxygenating.

I found her email, and sent her a letter of thanks. It was time. I wasn't sure how old she was, but did it matter? We owe our mentors, especially the ones who don't know they have helped guide us. We owe them our sincere and specific gratitude. She replied:

Thanks so much for your generous email!  Sometimes I forget that there are actual people out there, reading my poems!

Her reply came within a day. I was surprised and delighted by it. It made me feel better about poets,  and the poetry world, which I have distanced myself from in the past few years. I have been reading, and writing, but quietly. Hermetically.

I purchased copies of her older books, and her newest book, Almost an Elegy. I shared poems with my friend Maggie, who then shared a video of Linda giving a reading a few months ago. Her reading is elegant and natural, with an intention to the order of the poems, and she talks at the end about submitting work to magazines in a way that gave me some hope. I still have the reading open in the tabs on my browser. It's been up for weeks, there for me when I need to hear her words in her voice. A gift.

When reading "Away," from her newest collection, I recognized a symbolic connection to her poem "Mini Blues," from Aspects of Eve. It felt like the joy in discovering a tadpole, or a fossil of a shell, from my childhood spent exploring in the woods. Here was an evolutionary connection, a whisper sent through a very long telephone line. She was a master of metaphor, and of condensing and paring down to the essentials to expose feeling:

Mini Blues

Like a dinghy

I always lag

behind, awash

in somebody else's wake.

Or I answer 

the low call

of the foghorn,

only to find 

that what it meant

was keep away.

- Linda Pastan, from Aspects of Eve

Away

In the small craft

that is my body, I am

ready to take off

from the shore,

waving goodbye

to the faces

I've loved,

not sad exactly

but anxious

to catch

the outgoing

tide.

- Linda Pastan, from Almost an Elegy

Bloom's Taxonomy

The students will describe flowers they have seen.

The seed catalogs arrive daily, illustrations of zucchini and melon, photos of giant peonies. Hope. I throw them in the trash, then remember my preschool art class — maybe they can collage a garden, paste cutouts of roses on top of canceled roses. Their vision is the sky that lives in the ocean, one I wish I had, or remember having once, which is why I return, although this job won’t pay for even an hour of planning. The time clock app I punch on my phone allows the instructor to check in just fifteen minutes before class begins — the corporate idea of enough time to conceive a project, set up tables and chairs, gather supplies customized for students, and create a welcoming atmosphere for anxious toddlers.

The students will discuss animals in the ocean.

This week the class huddled around me as we read a book about the sea, and cut paper fish to glue onto flat, blue oceans.

The students will imagine and draw how their flowers will bloom.

I ordered too many seeds from the catalogs last year, romanced by glossy photos. A whole garden I purchased withered, some seeds, as they waited in the house, were gobbled by mice, the tomatoes we planted starved by drought.

The students will observe how to plant a seed.

Out of the 600 sunflowers I planted in concentric circles, a dramatic vision, six made an entrance, all separate from each other as if they were angry from an underground argument. The others were perhaps too old to sprout, or eaten by crows who watched as I planted on a rainy day in April. My fingers went white and numb.

The students will select their seed and plant it.

This year, I’ll plant sturdy, reliable zinnias. It takes two months for the carnival of colors to spin in wheels of ecstasy. A whole field becomes a tribute to Peter Max, the sixties and seventies, childhood birthday parties, sprinkles on ice cream, a glitter covered crown for bees and butterflies.

The students will predict how long it will take their seeds to bloom.

A few weeks from now my preschool students will press real seeds into dirt filled cups to take them home, watch and tend, or neglect. A real lesson. I will dream about it, analyze, prepare, produce the supplies, cancel the plan, decide to cultivate it, then mark each cup with a name. Who owns a daisy?

The students will cope with whatever does not grow.

The students will hope.