Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

BY AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck

in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,

the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—

then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,

bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—

and when I say I am married, it means I married

all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.

Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many

slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal

for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot

on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps

in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another

whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single

one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

Source: Lucky Fish (Tupelo Press, 2011)


* * * * * * *


This sublime piece is via my flatmate and The Poetry Foundation

The reading this week went well.  There were a dozen or so readers with a diverse array of genres and topics--one colleague performed two pieces of slam poetry on discrimination and immigration, another wrote a short story about one "Jane Bond," while someone else shared a beautiful essay on oysters.  The experience was really fun and encouraging.  I read three poems - two of which were edited versions of ones I'd posted here.  The third is something I thought I'd share now...

* * * * * * *

Pondering Those Stars & Dots

Like the sting
of a fresh tattoo
perpetual
I bear 
my grief.
Yet,
while I 
feel these wounds 
in the body,
nothing
manifests
on the body.
At least
a tattoo
would create
a scar made
art.
If only I
could display
this pain
so colorfully.

Well... this will be a first...:)

Meletaó, No. 1

No wonder

we dream of flying

when hearts float incessant

on rise... fall...

But leave your head 

awhile;

allow yourself the present

weight of dust. 

We possess these

root-like

lungs

commanding bones

move and

muscles work 

incessant. 

Use them. 

Love them.

Jones

candlelit steam and dreaming 

of waking up next

to someone... 

i'm about to be raw, 

let you decide

and wondering should I be 

bracing for sanitation or

a salve? and will you still

want the brokenness 

of me? will you

walk out of my life just as 

easily as "are you dancing

with someone?" or can i

cut in. 

is this you cutting out?

To say that I was in love with you is taking things too far.  So, no, I wasn't in love with you.

But I could have been.

I had almost succeeded in erasing you, unfriended and unfollowed...  But today I slipped on the tee I wore on the last day - not the last day I almost loved you - but the last one I had permission to.  And in the days and days and daze that followed, my greatest tragedy was intangibility, not even having the satisfaction of calling you my ex.  Because that would have justified my pain and excused me from the fake smiles I gave you.
















[probably to be continued...]

Haikus: Epiphany

I know this summer I haven't posted as much as usual.  Due to my job and thesis research, I didn't have as much time for personal writing as I wanted to.  I did find myself jotting down phrases on the go and eventually got the idea to work on a collection of haikus.  I had a lot of fun with this project and it was really fascinating how once I embraced the form, it seems like I started thinking 5-7-5.  I'm not sure if this project is over, but it's time I share these snippets from the past few months.

So, without further adieu, summer 2015 according to Haikus: Epiphany.

* * * * *

Cascadia:

Disillusioned ones

walk on. But the face of God

is a mountainside. 

Staying up the hours the carpool lane is open:

Embrace the night owl 

living within yourself and 

stop harboring guilt.

Post Alley:

I don't remember

the song playing, but I now 

have my alibi 

Flat Rate Boxes:

Can't account for the 

words, tears, everything, but...

"You want your stuff back?" 

Park West:

See the pale half-moon, 

fire-red sun share the sky

and feel my pulse calm. 

Breakfast conversations:

"Girls go to work, too?"

As mothers and execs, but

yes, darling girl, yes.

12805:
Strangers footprints mark
once most-familiar floors,
when home is not home.

Soho, 1.30am:

"What the hell is that?"

Your wedding ring... Brokenness 

I can't help you bear. 

Anticipation:

Oxford isn't a place, 

but an ancient creature made

of heart-beating stones. 

Original Starbucks:

Spain. England. Belgium. 

"No, that wasn't the last one." 

Stroking away fears...

Welcome:

Fresh-faced pixies, once

I was like you, before I 

felt always behind. 

Cœur de la vallée:

Wood smoke.  Unbroke.  Our

star-gazing conversations

ease anxiety. 

Highway 101:

Ever think about

Seattle and recall that

corridor we shared? 

An Erasure from Compline, Book of Common Prayer:

Glory to Father, Son 

Holy Spirit, as it was, 

is, will be. Amen.

Westview:

That moment when they

cry, "I can't believe..." and it's

like vindication. 

Centennial Celebrations!

This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot publishing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"!  This poem is my absolute favorite (ok, tied with the thematically similar "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats).  I've mentioned Prufrock on the blog before and even wrote a really fun, final paper on it this Winter.  It's so bizarre and beautiful and tragic and a perfect statement on the time.  

Here, from 0:00-0:24, Tom Hiddleston recites the haunting introduction [I seriously need his recitation of the whole poem!].  And here are just a few of my other favorite lines:

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea...

Do I dare
Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

[I have this Obvious State print up in my kitchen]

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The childlike cadence used to convey the heavy, mythic philosophical themes is just marvelously profound to me!!  "Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."  If you want to (re-)revel in some mystery, I'd suggest reading through T. S. Eliot's first poetic masterpiece. 

Set
     backs


Dear Spring,
For a season of new life, why so many set
backs?  Why the confusion and self-doubt? 
To be honest, why all the tears?

Mentally, I know these are not life-ending, but
they are life-altering--
so many decisions; so many do-I-dares1.
My composure is wearing thin,
my strength is waning, in their place
only well-worn seams struggling with the tension
of holding this self together.

Primavera.  "Springtime."
Prima vera.  "First real."
I think broken apart, like myself, 
those words offer a better answer
to my initial question.  
Why all the set
backs?  
Because of all the realities.
Ones I'm experiencing for the first time. 
Realities I thought would skip me.  Set
backs I had hoped to avoid. 

Yet a wise philosopher2 conjectures, "Pain is 
what you experience when you bump into reality."
For some aspects of life, this is the "first
real" of a Spring where to become whole,
one must be broken; to move forward, one must be set
back.


1 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
2 Definitions by Dallas Willard

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost 

Haiku for a rainy day...

I may have grown up 

but I still play hopscotch, all

alone with puddles. 

November 1st

You are one of my heroes
This day and every day
but especially today.

Today, may you feel even a measure
of the sun's warmth on your face.
May you taste the beautiful things of life--
tea, laughter, wine, color, chocolate,
dresses with pockets, stories,
and a host of other wonders.

May you catch a glimpse of Meaning
walking through the garden of your life,
softly touching the flowers, yes, but also
the soil, the roots with Her bare feet.

Today,
you are loved.
And yesterday,
you are loved.
And tomorrow,
and tomorrow's tomorrow,
you are infinitely loved.

Mystery brought you forth, and She
sends Meaning to see you through.
And in all, They revel
in the intrinsic goodness that is you.
And in every tomorrow
you are loved.

Metamorphosis Pt. 6

Black smudges of sharpie & newsprint

Cover my busy fingers. 

And when the 11-on-the-dot sprinklers activate, 

I find another familiar I will depart. 

Giggling half-naked children in the yard, 

a dozen in-jokes with family, and 

the easy laughter of friends' shared absurdity 

all echo in the day's remembrances. 

The new costs so much. 

The New York Times accosts me with humanity's desperation. 

I use its news to keep things from cracking. 

And all the while smudges, sprinklers, 

a series of beats, and messages from a boy. 

Stars & void. Transfiguration. 

Daily clamor. 

Objects in motion. 

Vision without sight. 

Shared space,

But no shared hearts. 

And yet. 

A piece of God

Hidden within

Each being.

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part III]

"Little Gidding"

 

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic…

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant.

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

For last year's words belong to last year's language 
And next year's words await another voice.

[via]

 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

[via]

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part II]

"The Dry Salvages"

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled...

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part I]

"Burnt Norton"

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind 
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious in not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden...
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness...

"East Coker"

...Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter...
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion...

One Bibliophile's Calendar

A time for every book under the sun
Or rather round the sun.
Different months call for different books;
A read for every season.
January is an amalgamation -
unfinished books from the prior year,
gifted books, bettering books.
February offers more choice:
What would you like to read?
March is best for modernism.
before marking her demise on the 28th
read some Woolf, and get into Eliot
before the "cruelest month."
April showers... mean sit in and read,
dive into that series, you have the time.
"Spring" for a re-read romance and
May-be find a way to "read out of doors."
June - despite the sun and celebrations,
your series is still making you feel "bibliosocial."
Summer is a time for sci-fi or short stories
or a good Shakespeare comedy.
If, in July, you can carve out a vacation
or just a rare quiet, sun-filled day,
binge-read a new author.
August is for finishing.  Just how much
can you finish before the re-start?
Sun to fog - September is transition
New routines, new books assigned in school
or cradled on suddenly-longer commutes.
At long last: Fall, the reader's utopia.
And Fall means fantasy.
For October - books, scarves, glasses are in vogue,
the bigger the book, the better.
Fantastical wanderings lead into November,
reifying characters and locales in our mind's eye.
Gothic is also good - Jane Eyre feels right
in a stormy or cold December night.
Then the holidays come, and with them,
re-assessed goals, another push to finish,
a search for the Word to make us real.
So we keep reading, keep becoming.

Stories

teach us how to love

and swallow sadness,

find light in darkness,

 turn away from despair.

Crafting and grafting us

into a plot much bigger,

much smaller

than our own.

They remake us

like their protagonists,

from coward to courageous.

Each story that passes

through our hands,

through our minds,

is a gift

wrapped up inside words.

 "Hello, old friend

and here we are,

you and me

on the last page."

Where they end

our hearts break or smile,

crying from tragedy or delight.

But then, our next page.

While their story ends,

our journey is only mid-way,

another chapter,

a new gift.

Top:  Nurse, Young Man, Kiss-a-gram

Below:  Old Man, Journalist, Hero

"We are all stories in the end..."
- The Doctor

"The end of a matter is better than it's beginning."

- Ecclesiastes 7.8

“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?"

- GK Chesterton

"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer."
- Samwise Gamgee

  

“Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”  

- Madeleine L'Engle

"You were my new dream."

- Flynn Rider

"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die...that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living."

- The Count

[HitRECord]

"Though truth is heavier than fiction,

Gravity lifts as the projectionist rolls tape.
And it makes us brave again"

- Sleeping at Last

31 Days of Books: A Review

Whew!  You guys, I did it.  31 book reviews in 31 days.  Some days I had to double up, and some reviews were probably more thoughtful than others, but they're all up!  Thank you to everyone who showed interest and encouraged this project.  It was not easy, but I feel like I learned a lot.

I though I'd recap by mentioning a few reflections on the project:

*  The whole "31 days" concept is a really good challenge if you want to express or share something you're passionate about.  I definitely want to do another one and don't think I'll wait till next October.

*  The hardest part of each post was the "One Sentence Summary."  You will probably notice a lot of complex sentences, bending the rules of what can be included in one sentence... but I knew if I allowed myself to elaborate on the plot, the review would become 1) way too long and 2) probably give too much away.

*  While I did modify the structure a bit along the way, I realized a bit too late that I should have included a rating system (e.g. out of five stars).  I specifically chose books I liked well enough to recommend - reviewing books you don't like can be fun, but gets too easy and boring over time - but some of these are a good 3.5/5 while others are novels par excellence.  Interestingly, as I added my reviews to goodreads, more than once I adjusted my rating on there to reflect how I feel about the book in hindsight.

*  When I first started out, I composed a list of what I was going to review.  Any of the requests I got for authors or specific books happened to already be included in that list.  [You know me so well ;]  The only alteration that was made after drafting up the list was to sub out "Silas Marner" to include a poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. [If you're a big George Eliot fan, I'm sorry.  I just wasn't feeling up to her that day.]

*  By far, the most viewed review is Animal Farm, which kind of surprises me.

*  The funnest (and often easiest) part of each review was actually "One reason you maybe shouldn't read it."


I plan to continue more book reviews, and will likely use a similar structure, though I look forward on expanding certain parts of it.  I hope you enjoyed hearing a bit about each of these books.  Books are my love language and literally nothing compares to the feeling I get when people tell me they're reading a book I recommended or they're enjoying one of my favorites.  So, if you choose to pick up one of these, please do let me know and mention what you think of it.


Below I've compiled the final list with links to each review:

1. The Fault in Our Stars
2. The Princess Bride
3. Pygmalion
4. At the Back of the North Wind
5. A Wrinkle in Time
6. The Count of Monte Cristo
7. A Study in Scarlet
8. Northanger Abbey
9. The Woman in White
10. Much Ado about Nothing
11. Animal Farm
12. The Age of Innocence
13. Six Characters in Search of an Author
14. Oedipus Tyrannus
15. The Picture of Dorian Gray
16. Room
17. History of Love
18. Ender's Game
19. Manalive
20. Surprised by Oxford
21. A Severe Mercy
22. To the Lighthouse
23. Heart of Darkness
24. Hunchback of Notre-Dame
25. The Scarlet Pimpernel
26. A Tale of Two Cities
27. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
28. To Kill a Mockingbird
29. Wieland
30. Phantom of the Opera
31. Frankenstein

Happy reading!