honey or vinegar (with your poetry)?

Hi everyone -- 

I've been reading poetry this last week -- lots of it. Right now, poetry is coming at me from every angle. I turn the corner and there it is, sort of like when the warblers arrive in the spring -- on some sort of storm front and the next thing you know, you look out your bedroom window and see birds of all colors -- orange, black, blue, yellow, chestnut darting here and there in the trees. (I'm still waiting for this to happen in Chicago, but the warblers are just starting to come into our city -- so soon, very soon.)

But the poetry has been like those sudden, spring warblers. I did a panel discussion on social media at 57th Street Books (a lot of fun, by the way) and found two books of Wendell Berry poetry (two!), and then, was at the Bookstall (another wonderful Chicago bookstore) and found Kay Ryan's The Best of It. (Link to Writers Almanac, so you can read some poems.) And as I got started reading Wendell Berry I found a poetry collection by Mary Oliver that Phil had got me when he was at Tattered Covers out in Denver a few months ago (saying that the first poem 'Why I Rise Early' reminded him of me -- and if you know the poem, you know he could not be any sweeter).  And I'd recently read Oprah magazine's big layout on poetry... Lots and lots and lots of poetry. Everywhere poetry. I love how efficient poetry is at telling it like it is or tapping a mood, an emotion, a mystery. There it is, understood, and in exactly the right number of words. Not one wasted. 

Overall, I have been thinking about how much I admire Wendell Berry's boldness in his poetry. I swear his words give me a handhold as I walk in this world. How often in the past year have I thought, 'burning the world to live in it is wrong'! It's a line from Wendell Berry's "A Speech to the Garden Club of America" that I came across in The New Yorker last year, and it's been with me ever since. 

Anyway, I read Berry this past week, I found myself wanting to be a writer as bold as he is -- to find those long-sighted truths and to be so efficient in saying them. Yes. Please. 

But this sort of poetry is not for everybody. Admittedly, I'm the type who watches Ingmar Bergman movies when I'm sad and they make me feel better. I adore Toni Morrison's BELOVED and find it so, so hopeful. I like, I guess, being challenged in very direct ways and with all of its complexities. I don't mind a cheese grater type of story or poetry or essay -- as long as it's well-written, well-argued, and is truthful in terms of the complexity of the story it tells. But if it's poorly written? Or simplified? It's like a bad, mean joke. 

BUT lo and behold, I'm reading in Oprah magazine (the poetry issue) and along comes, this interview with Mary Oliver where she mentions Wendell Berry! And she's says this: 

I am not very hopeful about the Earth remaining as it was when I was a child. It's already greatly changed. But I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we're animals, that we need the Earth. And that can be devastating. Wendell Berry is a wonderful poet, and he talks about this coming devastation a great deal. I just happen to think you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. So I try to do more of the "Have you noticed this wonderful thing? Do you remember this?

So I've been thinking a lot about this for the last few days. Vinegar or honey? Honey or Vinegar? And is there a Vinegar-Honey? Or a Honey-Vinegar? Do you say "burning the world to live in it is wrong" which is direct and to the point. Or how about this even more direct Berry poem 'Questionnaire.' Or do you rejoice in the earth with Mary Oliver, see things absolutely fresh, to imagine you're a newly born beetle spending your first sleeping in a blossom? 

I've decided BOTH are needed. Life is complex. I need the long-sighted, ringing truths and I need the joy, the wonder of this earth,  -- because there is still plenty of it, everywhere, if we just look.  

What do you think? Honey or vinegar or both? 

Amy

wendell berry, pumpkins, drooling refrigerators, a book trailer i like & some faith stuff

Hi everyone --

 

I'm sleepy. Just finishing up today at the computer this Thursday and it's 8:35p.m. and honestly, I like to be done working by now but I didn't get up early enough and get working. Discipline is hard for me. It always has been, and by now, I'm not expecting it to get easier. (Maybe that's a measure of how it's changed for me. Writing is hard. I don't want to sit down and do it. But I do it anyway. Now if I could get myself to do this with running . . .)

But anyway, I thought, Hey, maybe I could write something to my friends who read this blog. Hi Mom!

So if this seems sleepy and full of random thoughts . . . Well, I'm sleepy and full of random thoughts. 

First, you guys know I'm a Christian, right? This blog/letter dips into faith now and again, but I haven't done so for awhile now, so I thought I'd remind you for those of you that don't like this sort of thing. I get it. I do. 

Why do I insist? I just don't want to be fake. I mean, I could pretend it's not there, but it's not who I am. The truth is that I love God. I love Jesus. And if I were writing a real letter this would be part of it. Like everyone in this world, you got to take me or leave me. (Believe me, I'm not saying I'm a good Christian, waving my moral laurels -- I'm definitely of the fall-short variety. As you may have noticed in these letters.)

 

Oh good heavens -- ice and rain is smashing against the glass. Seriously, our first winterish/fallish weather. From Canada, I believe. 

Now it's quiet. Gust is over.

 

Where was I? Faith. Yes. Was reading a Wendell Berry essay ("Christianity and the Survival of Creation") and came across this:

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about -- a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine -- which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

Wonderful! Yes!

Other lessons I learned this week? 

• That refrigerators drool. Sometimes for a long time. Which causes water damage that you might discover while doing yoga and then grabbing your glasses to get a closer look at the ceiling. Lesson learned? To never, ever, ever, hook up a refrigerator to a water line. Refrigerators use plastic piping and plastic fittings, all of which give way over time. One day this probably will be your problem too. So make ice in trays. And just don't hook the water up to your refrigerator.  (True that the guy fixing our wall says his handyman company sees this kind of refrigerator/water damage "quite a lot." That's a quote.)

• That people were really, really mean to each other during this last election cycle. Wildly, I missed this. Missed it all. Isn't that crazy? Lesson learned? That those money-slinging, mud-flinging, mean campaign ads just don't know how to find me. I don't watch TV. We don't have cable. I get my news online (mostly New York Times, Tribune and Chicagoist). And I listen to WBEZ (Chicago NPR), which doesn't put that stuff on. Or (apparently) report on it much. And last week, I tried streaming a movie from Netflix with our slow AT&T DSL, and it was pretty great. Okay, so why again do people pay all that money for cable?  

• That despite missing the mudslinging, spitting and verbal gun-slinging, elections still stress me out. Lesson learned? That I have not recovered from the SATs. (Yes, I did badly. Very, very badly.) You should have seen how carefully I colored between the two lines of our election ballot, making perfect little rectangles with my marker. Must be thinking of my hanging chad days too . . . So I cannot let those mean, yelling, mud-slinging people find me ever. Must remain hidden in the vast, wide-open space of too much information -- the internet. I'm like Where's Waldo.

Photos are from my favorite Halloween pumpkin display. Isn't it wonderful?

That's it. Oh, another fun thing: Phil and I discovered that if you are a two Kindle family (registering both Kindles on the same account) you can buy one ebook and it downloads on both Kindles. Both! So now, we are reading the same book at the same time. Not one after the other, but at the same time. That's fun.We're reading Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton. It starts with a giant sea monster floating to the top of a New York lake, but otherwise seems quite normal . . . Gotta like that.

What do I think of Kindles? Well, that's another subject. I will tell you for travel nothing beats them. I used to travel with at least 3 books, now I travel with a Kindle. I'm sure an ipad or any other ereader would be similar. I like that people are reading on all those devices and frankly, I wish my books were available for them. But they aren't yet.

How are you?

Signing off, 

Amy

P.S. Below is a book trailer I actually like. Mostly I think we authors make these because everybody else makes them. But this one is fun. Made me smile. Go Charise Harper. (Note to self: Must wear cool ring on my thumb too!)

Burning the world to live in it

Wendell Berry is one of my all time favorite poets, and if you didn't see this poem, "A Speech to the Garden Club of America" in the recent New Yorker, check it out here.  

Preach it!