Tag: poetry

The Rhyming Full Moon of June

The June 2023 Full Moon, popularly called the Strawberry Moon, will be on tonight, June 3 at 11:42 PM EDT or June 4 at 3:42 AM UTC. Okay, it will look very full even on the 3rd no matter what time zone you’re in. This third Full Moon of spring occurs about two weeks before the Summer Solstice. It is the Full Moon in Sagittarius.

“June” and “Moon” is a simple rhyme and there is no lack of poems about the Moon, and poems in which the Moon makes an appearance in its full or other phases. In an essay on “Poetry and the Moon” by Mary Ruefle, she says:

I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry. In the West, lyric poetry begins with a woman on an island in the seventh or sixth century BC, and I say now: lyric poetry begins with a woman on an island on a moonlit night, when the moon is nearing full or just the other side of it, or on the dot… Let’s call her Sappho. One can hardly say these little songs have survived—for we have only fragments—but even this seems fitting, for what is the moment but a fragment of greater time?

Tonight I’ve watched
the moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho sees the Moon and the Pleiades which is a group of more than 800 stars located about 410 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. But they would have been known for far fewer stars that can be seen by the naked eye which we call the “Seven Sisters” (and the less poetic Messier 45). The name comes from a Greek legend. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan god Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione. During an ancient war, Atlas rebelled against Zeus, the king of the gods, who sentenced his foe to forever hold up the heavens on his shoulders. The sisters were so sad that Zeus allowed them a place in the sky in order to be close to their father.

There is a section of the poem “To the Moon” by Percy Bysshe Shelley that is often shown as its own short poem.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy

Shelley asks the Moon why it is pale and answers for the satellite.

Emily Dickinson has several lunar poems. In this one, he sees a Full Moon (maybe not exactly full since it looks that way for several days) that had looked different just a few nights ago. When do you think the Moon has phase with a “Chin of Gold”?

The Moon was but a Chin of Gold
A Night or two ago—
And now she turns Her perfect Face
Upon the World below—

If we keep reading Emily’s poem, we start to wonder if she is really writing about the Moon at all.

Her Forehead is of Amplest Blonde—
Her Cheek—a Beryl hewn—
Her Eye unto the Summer Dew
The likest I have known—

Her Lips of Amber never part—
But what must be the smile
Upon Her Friend she could confer
Were such Her Silver Will …

Carl Sandburg’s “Moonset” is an odd one and not what I would think is typical for him.

Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moon’s good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.

It’s not very surprising that Sylvia Plath sees the Moon a bit differently in “The Moon And The Yew Tree.”

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –

And to end my Moon gazing, a haiku.

The moon glows the same:
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.
_ Basho

Dreams Are Poems. Dreams Are Time Travel.

Photo by Andrey Grushnikov on Pexels.com

In Alan Lightman’s first novel, Einstein’s Dreams, he imagines what Einstein may have been dreaming about in Bern, Switzerland before he published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. I have had a fascination with Einstein ever since I was a teenager. I first came to him because he seemed connected to an earlier fascination with the possibility of time travel.

The 26-year-old Albert Einstein in the novel is in an unhappy marriage. He has a job as a patent clerk that he dislikes and that is far below his abilities. In his head are dreamscapes of theoretical realms of time. Alan Lightman describes the dreams which occur between April 14, 1905, and June 28, 1905.  Of course, all of it is pure imagination.  There is science in the imagined worlds. People’s lives are based on time being circular or flowing backward, or slowing down. The project Einstein was working on concerned electricity and magnetism, but the solution required a reconception of time. When the book opens, Einstein has finished with his new theory of time and, while he waits a few hours for a typist in his patent office, he thinks of his dreams.

To me, many of the dreams seem in their language very much like poems. That makes sense because dreams do seem poetic to me. At least, the dreams I remember and am able to record. If I take some of Einstein’s dreams and do some line breaks, they look and sound more like poems. Found poetry.
For example:

14 April 1905

Suppose
time is a circle,
the world repeats
endlessly
births, deaths, a glass falls and breaks,
all is repeated
and then again
nothing is temporary
or permanent.
Some people know
all this has happened before.
They walk the night streets
and cannot unbreak the glass,
prevent the death,
erase one unkind word.

16 April 1905

Time flows like a stream here
and when some rivulet
turns away and connects backstream,
it carries the people back.
Do you see them?
They are the fearful ones.
They know that any change they make
now,
in the past,
will change the future.

Okay, let’s move from dreams and poem and on to that fact that I have wanted to build a time machine ever since I saw the movie version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I probably read the Classics Illustrated comics version before I read the novel. I had boxes of discarded electronics and machines in my basement that I had culled on garbage collection days. I loved playing with the gears, knobs, and circuit boards. I learned some things along the way, got some nasty shocks, and burned myself on my soldering iron, but I never did get a working time machine. Many years later, watching the movie E.T., I watched that alien build his communicator using kids’ toys in that same ridiculously easy way I had hoped would work.

I have read that Wells wrote his novel partially in response to Charles Darwin publishing his theory of evolution which was the big scientific news of the time. His novel can be seen as a story about evolution, as he tells how we will evolve in the future. It’s not a pretty, but a cautionary, tale.

Can we go back in time? Einstein was not much fun for time travel enthusiasts.  Though we might imagine going back in time and righting wrongs (small ones of our own or large historical ones), he pretty much concluded that if we were to travel back, we would be who we were and do what we had done again. It’s an infinite loop. It doesn’t make for a good story or film. (So much for Back to the Future.) We couldn’t go back before our birth because we didn’t exist.

Simplified, Einstein said that by traveling at the speed of light, you would force time to slow down, then to stop, and finally to go backward. Of course, even if we could go faster than the speed of light, none of us could survive the speedy journey. (Though Superman did in a film in order to save Lois Lane.) Special relativity states that your mass would become infinite in the process. Some proponents of time travel point out that Einstein’s equations for general relativity do allow some forms of time travel, but then we are into science that is not for this post.

If you do want to still pursue some time travel, check into the ten-dimensional hyperspace theory, wormholes, and dimensional windows.

Time travel is a risky business. Personally, I am not a fan of blasting into some other time and finding myself binding into some substance in the space which I or the machine now occupies.

Einstein also warned of paradoxes. Meeting your parents before you are born is a popular one.  (See the first Back to the Future film) But then, that couldn’t happen because you didn’t exist then. Of course, you could go back to when you were 15 and get killed in an accident. Then what? Paradox.

4th May 1905

Time passes
but little happens.
Year to year,
month to month,
day to day,
the passage of events
are the same.
If you have no ambitions
you are unaware of your suffering,
the ambitious ones
know and suffer
but very slowly.

8th May 1905

The world will end
on the 26th of September 1907.
Everyone knows it.
Schools close the year before.
Businesses close the month before.
People are surprisingly unafraid.
They think over their coffee that
now there is nothing to really fear.
On September 25th
there is laughter on the streets,
neighbors who never spoke
greet each other as friends.
We are all equal in the world of one day.
One minute before the end
everyone in Berne gathers together.
No one moves or speaks.
It is like leaping off a mountain.
They hold hands as the end approaches.
They are weightless,
cool air rushes by,
the whiteness
of snow fills their vision.

Read On:
The Time Machine
Einstein’s Dreams
Watch:
Back to the Future – The Complete Trilogy
The Time Machine

Solitude

“By my intimacy with nature, I find myself withdrawn from man.
My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening,
compels me to solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau

I came upon a collection of poems titled “Poems about Loneliness and Solitude.” My first thought was that they shouldn’t be combined – or confused.

Poets aren’t the only people who sometimes crave solitude. I find the solitude of isolation to be a good thing occasionally and I pursue it. Loneliness is not something I pursue, but sometimes it finds me.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Definitions

the state of being alone,
solitary,
by oneself;
a deserted place,
aloneness but not loneliness
which is a feeling of depression
from being alone
without companions.
a place or time devoid
of human activity.
And then there is
that obsolete meaning:
A desire to be alone;
a disposition to solitude.
Not obsolete to me.

Photo: Jeswin Thomas


Reading Updike on a Rainy Friday Night

I was dusting bookshelves today and as I went past my row of books by John Updike I had to pull a few off and look into them.

I really liked Updike’s stories and novels. My wife and I used to read the books together every summer for a number of years. I also admired Updike’s three pages per day writing requirement. He really worked at his writing.  It paid off. He had a 50+ year career and has 67 books listed on his Wikipedia bibliography that includes 21 novels, 18 short-story collections, 12 books of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction. Many of my favorite pieces of his fiction are found among his 186 short stories.

I wasn’t reading Updike in 1960. That was the year he was 28 (I was 7) and he published his second novel, Rabbit, Run.  The New York Times called the book a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion.” I would read it during the summer 0f 1968 after I had read a book of his stories, Pigeon Feathers, and then his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

The stories especially appealed to me, since I saw myself as a budding short story writer and was reading Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other story writers too. I would go on to read almost all the stories and novels in chronological order of their publication. I wanted to write little, perfect stories like his “A&P.” I was a high school boy and immediately identified with Updike’s boy working at the checkout counter in an A&P supermarket when three young pretty girls walk in wearing nothing but bathing suits. That little plot unfolds quickly and tragically.

In my freshman year of college as an English major, I was assigned to read his newest novel, Rabbit Redux.  a sequel to the first Rabbit book.

I gave her my copy of the sexy Couples novel when we were dating, and we both read Marry Me when it came out and we were a few years from being married ourselves.  Updike chronicles many marriages and many uncouplings, some based on his own life story.

Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for two of the four Rabbit novels. There is also “Rabbit Remembered” a long story (or novella) that came later. Those tales chronicle Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex- high-school basketball star who first deserts his wife and son and then explores sexuality, marriage, parenting and also the time he is passing through in America.

I heard an interview he did at the time of his fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which chronicles the end of Harry’s life. It is a sad book about grandpa Harry in his Florida condo, still dealing with his son, Nelson, and his wife, Janice, and an 1989 America that is a post-Reagan time of debt, AIDS, and President Bush 41. It won him another Pulitzer Prize. What interests me in the interview and book is his own thoughts about death. (He died of lung cancer in January 2009.)

I found a video that has John’s son, David Updike, interviewed about being the child of a writer. David was (is?) a teacher and also a writer and I have enjoyed reading his work. I have his children’s books and his books of stories and they are very good. It certainly must have been more negative than positive to be the son of John Updike if you wanted to be a writer. I like in this video David’s decision that he would give up writing a piece of fiction if it meant hurting someone he cared about. I don’t think his father held that belief.

John Updike received much praise in his lifetime for his writing. He also was pretty strongly disliked by some of his fellow writers and by feminists. He was, like too many famous men I admire, not a very good husband or father. But I think even some of those who are not fans concede that his prose is beautiful, often poetic.

I came to John Updike’s poetry much later than the books and stories. I love reading poetry, and I like some of his poems, but I feel like his prose had more poetry in it than many of the poems. I have used a few of his poems on my poetry blog

I took this passage from Updike’s wonderful story “Pigeon Feathers” and broke the sentences into more “poetic” line breaks using his punctuation most of the time. This “found poem” is about what it means to be dead as seen by teenage David as he walks at night across his farm home to the outhouse and imagines a grave. As I said, his prose is so often poetic, that it is easy to hear the sentences as lines in a poem.

A long hole in the ground,
no wider than your body,
down which you are drawn
while the white faces above recede.

You try to reach them
but your arms are pinned.
Shovels pour dirt into your face.
There you will be forever,
in an upright position,
blind and silent,
and in time no one will remember you,
and you will never be called by any angel.

As strata of rock shift,
your fingers elongate,
and your teeth are distended sideways
in a great underground grimace
indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.