Throwing poems on the compost heap
Keeping things dirty and weird as prayer
If anyone is keeping track, you may have noticed a lapse in consistency in posting on my part. If you did notice, (bless your heart) I apologize. Sort of.
If you’re anything like me, you are relieved by this small reprieve- to have one less voice (mine) adding to the cacophony- one less perspective to consider, one less parallel journey to witness.
You are no doubt struggling again to determine what is yours to show up for, and what is not only conscionable but wholly imperative that you refrain from cementing opinions about. While simultaneously allowing your heart to vibrate with curiosity, not to deaden its cadence.
You are shedding layers of protection you’ve woven from threads of belief spun from the devastatingly biased fibers of personal narrative. You are grieving the unraveling of what once felt to be your linear evolutionary trajectory- your arc of morality bending towards enlightenment- that perhaps has served less to expand your consciousness than it has to optimize your ability to cavalierly disassociate.
You seek quiet and elusive rest and you feel enormous guilt for the relative comfort of your fatigue.
I hope you can find joy in your human connections right now. I won’t bombard you with heady missives about conceptual interconnectedness and individuation- instead I’d just like to share this dispatch from what I consider to be my personal harvesting ground, The LongTime- where the labor of unfurling one’s vulnerability bears the fruit of festive ritual, and where art, baseball and family intersect.
(pictured above: Print by Tim Kerr, Book by Joe Poznanski, LongTimes by Jack Sanders. Baseball art and literature and my Sunday morning heavenly choir.)
Last Thursday was the opening of High & Away- the baseball themed art show conceived by Jack Sanders. I gave you guys a peek of the weird sculptural embroidered elements I was working on for one of my pieces for the show- I still don’t have a great photo of the finished piece, but here’s a picture I took prior to its installation- and the poem I wrote to accompany it.
The Green Grass
Under the green grass
suspending our game of catch,
did we awaken Demeter’s choir,
summoning their delight?
Sweet clumsy human ritual-
a primordial reenactment of
the voltaic language of alchemy-
A playful prayer.
Above the green grass, a ball-
a philosopher's stone,
an airborne hyphae,
weaving from two, a third.
Below, a captive audience,
a cacophony.
neither bonded nor free but entangled
nodding in amperic cadence.
And here’s the artist bio that I wrote for the show- I am no fan of artist bio writing, although I love to read them when they’re not about me. But this one is maybe my favorite of any I’ve ever come up with. I guess I see myself most clearly as a player on a team, and through the knowing there is an unprecious earnestness to the game we’ve come together to play.
Lastly, this week also was the publication of yet another highly entertaining edition of The LongTimes, the quarterly journal documenting Your Texas Playboy’s- their games, their ecosystem, their manifesto. Captain Jack decided to make this the Poetry Edition, and he asked me to contribute.
Because I seem to be inherently incapable of not making things significantly harder than they need to be, I opted to write a sestina- I remembered that my dear pal and gifted poet Liz Garton Scanlon had at one point penned one of this type of poem so I assumed it was A Fun Thing To Do Why Not Give It A Try Even Though I Don’t Write Poems Much.
The structure of a sestina is as follows:
“A sestina is a form that uses six six-line stanzas, each using the same six words at the end of its lines in different orders, followed by an envoi of three lines using two of those words to each line.”
It turns out that low and behold writing poems is actually quite challenging enough- and writing them with boundaries both strict and unfamiliar can be genuinely physically painful.
After many hours of unnecessary self-inflicted agony and the help of Liz The Poem Midwife And Erstwhile Running Buddy, this poem mercifully intersected with its deadline, and now it exists in physical print, where others can read it, which is mortifying and hilarious. Thank you Liz, Thank you Jack, and why did neither of you quietly tell me to stick to the whole stitching alien faces on denim jackets dog and pony show, dammit?
I won’t transcribe the poem for you, if you want to read it you’re gonna have to get yourself a copy of The LongTimes or get out your magnifying glass.
To anyone needing a sign that you can survive putting something weird and unfinished feeling out into the world, please allow the above baseball creature and overly earnest sestina to grant you some small permission. My prayer for us all in this moment is to relish the messiness of polyculture and to develop an allergy to things overtly curated: especially in the realm of art and ideas.
Stay dirty, my friends.