“The word and the world”–reflecting on #Poetry #UU #MaryOliver

As part of an annual Unitarian Universalist service titled Poetry Sunday, I revisited what poetry means to me and read a poem by Mary Oliver. The talk is on YouTube and below the video is the text.

When I think about poetry and what it means to me, I think first about the image. There are many things that attract me to poetry – the immediacy of reading about another person’s experience which is often so direct that it feels intimate is one, the way the poem lies on the page – a kind of dance between the text and the white space is another, but most of all I think of the image and how the image is the most immediate way to convey the beauty of the world. Before I was a prose writer, I was a poet; before that, I was a photographer, which I still am. It seems I used to do many things. But I reconsider. Perhaps what I used to do is with me now in the things that I do. Perhaps when I am writing prose, I am influenced by the rhythms of poetry. Perhaps when I take a breath, it is all there too.

Take a breath with me; together we will feel the beauty, the vastness, the stillness, and the sound of everything.

We’ll start now and breathe to a count of three

(ring bell – beginning and end)

Thank you.

After her recent trip to Maine, Maryellen was mentioning the magic of seeing a loon. I remembered from my trips to Maine’s coastal areas, seeing this air and sea bird and remembering its long graceful dives from the sea air down under the gray waves of the ocean where it would catch its food.

After Maryellen and I talked about doing this Poetry Service together, I was delighted to find this poem by Mary Oliver, a Unitarian Universalist as well as a prominent author. Let me read it to you now.

The Loon

Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive

strikes me from sleep, and I rise

from the comfortable bed and go

to another room, where my books are lined up

in their neat and colorful rows. How

magical they are! I choose one

and open it. Soon

I have wandered in over the waves of the words

to the temple of thought.

                 And then I hear

outside, over the actual waves, the small,

perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,

and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out

to the fading moon, to the pink flush

swelling in the east that, soon,

will become the long, reasonable day.

                       Inside the house

it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight

in which I am sitting.

                 I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

***

It is the memory of the image and the image itself, the poem – the words and the white space on the page — that connects me to the word and the world.

–Namaste—

For more information on my most recent published novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:

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Reading from “When I Was Straight”#Poetry #LGBTQ #ImStillWithHer

 

 

 

Last month, I read “When I Was Straight” from my collection of poetry by the same name published by Insight To Riot Press in 1995.  I read at Jim Cory’s poetry salon in Philadelphia.  Jim was the founder of the collective.  Below is a photograph from Thom Nickels book “Literary Philadelphia” of founding members of the press, Jim Cory, CAConrad and myself. It felt good to remember/revive that incendiary rage!

 

 

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“Poetry Is Not A Luxury:” A UU Remembrance of Audre Lorde

I presented this at the Unitarian Universalist Church as part of  Poetry Sunday” where I am a lay minister. The segment is also on YouTube. Unitarian Universalism is a faith that encompasses all religious/spiritual backgrounds (including atheism, agnosticism and Buddhism) in a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”)

“Poetry Is Not A Luxury.”

This is a quote from Audre Lorde, the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet,” who dedicated her art and life to social justice. Audre lived from 1934 to 1992.

I first came across her work in the early 1980s. I was in my twenties and was a freshly minted lesbian-feminist. I was fortunate to come out in a diverse cultural and political women’s community — which is what we called it then — which described a community based on the values of feminism and included lesbians, bisexual and heterosexual women and men of all stripes. I was fortunate to have seen Audre read in person several times, including in Philadelphia and at the Audre Lorde “I Am Your Sister” conference in Boston held in 1990 two years before she died of cancer at the age of 58.

Audre Lorde authored 15 books of poetry and prose.  She was Poet Laureate of New York State from 1991 to 1992.  She was a major poet. But because of racism, homophobia, and sexism, she was not taught in  the 1970s in the public high schools when I was a student. Audre Lorde’s work is powerful and is about empowerment.  If she had been taught, I know for a fact that her work would have saved plenty of lives. 

When I read her book Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches first published by The Crossing Press in 1984, it became a kind of bible for me.  All of her essays held resonance for me — especially “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

But I always returned to her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”.  I’m going to share a few excerpts with you:

…..”it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.  That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

…..

“For each of us …. , there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, ‘Beautifully/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness/’ … and of impotence.

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness.  Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The … place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient and it is deep.”

“…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.  The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

When I am lucky, I find myself coming full circle with that wonderment I experienced when young — now combined with the wisdom of my years.  Revisiting Audre Lorde’s essay through a Unitarian Universalist lens was one of those experiences.  While this essay could evoke any of the UU Seven Principles, to me it is particularly evocative of the first:  “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

Poetry is something that has always made me feel more fully alive. It sheds new light on our commonalities and differences.  It enters the mystery and enlarges what is possible.

For this reason, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury.”

This piece was originally on OpEdNews

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