Archive for the ‘Poems to inspire’ Category
Cindy on October 19th, 2011
There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.” –Nathaniel Hawthorne
Maybe it’s a symptom of middle age, or maybe it’s just my old Celtic soul stirring up a seasonal memory.
Either way, late October always tugs on my sleeve and insists that I slow down to take stock of the passing year. Despite the “worries of the week” — or whatever I’ve chosen to focus on — Mother Nature reminds me that life is all about cycles. Some seasons flow more easily than others, but I have many reasons to be grateful for every one I’m given.
Last week, when I looked down over the ravine that dips toward the river behind our home in St. Joseph, I remembered an excerpt from this poem by Billy Collins:
Directions
The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things, and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.
But it is hard to speak of these things –
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories;
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles;
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.
—Billy Collins, excerpted from The Art of Drowning
Cindy on August 23rd, 2011
My eyes like old glass windows, dusted with lost days, are ready to hold the new light.” — Margo LaGattuta, from “Pretending to Be a Barn”
I found the e-mail from another writer-friend early this morning. It wasn’t unexpected, though I’d learned only two days ago that Margo LaGattuta was suddenly terminally ill.
“Margo died peacefully tonight, surrounded by her sons and sisters and friends….It was quite beautiful and I just know she’s writing a poem about it….”
It’s never easy to lose a mentor or a friend, and the best we can hope for is one last chance to say thank you. Which is why I am grateful to writer Carolyn Walker for contacting me this week — just in time to make it to the hospital to see Margo yesterday morning.
Over the years, Margo became a treasured friend. Whenever we were speaking at the same writers’ conferences, or attending literary events around town, I loved spotting her smiling face and wild bohemian outfits in the crowds of more conservatively dressed journalists and writers who were attending the programs. She always looked every inch the poet — the unbridled creative spirit — that she was.
She interviewed me for her radio show (“Art in the Air”/ WPON) after my first book was published in 1994, and in the process, I learned a thing or two from Margo about book promotion. Later on, it meant the world to me when she agreed to be the keynote speaker at the banquet when my second book, Writing Home, was awarded “Book of the Year” by Think Club Publications in 2006. There was also a time when the two of us wrote columns for the same newspaper, so we’d often chat on the phone when we had trouble navigating the ever-changing seas of print journalism.
But our relationship began as teacher and student. It seems that whenever I was going through a dry spell, or felt lost and blocked, Margo happened to be offering a local creative writing workshop that would shake me out of myself and inspire me to start writing again. In particular, I remember a weekend workshop at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, about 18 years ago, which I attended a month after my father died. That same year, the travel magazine I’d been editing for five years suddenly folded — and I had no idea what to do next. I was blocked and sad.
But after that weekend workshop at Cranbrook, I felt as if the fog had magically lifted. Margo helped me find new ways to express my grief, and best of all, I got back on my proverbial horse and rode off to one of the most productive periods of my writing life.
I know I’m only one of hundreds (or thousands) claiming to be moved and changed by Margo’s “Inventing the Invisible” workshops, not to mention all the students she inspired in her college English classes over the years. Her encouragement launched countless writing careers. And, of course, we all deeply admired her poetry, newspaper columns, and essays. Shocked by her sudden passing, many of us are asking: Where will we find another Margo?
I am going through another rough period now, as my widowed mother is slowing drifting down the foggy river of dementia, and requiring much of my time and care. Once again, I’m at a creative impasse. When I arrived at Margo’s bedside at the hospital yesterday, I desperately wanted to say: “Margo, I need your advice again.” Instead, I simply thanked her for everything — for introducing me to some of my favorite poets, including Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and Margo LaGattuta. I told her I was grateful for all the times she helped rescue and refuel my creative soul. I also told her that Billy Collins had just come out with a new book of poems, and that I didn’t think they were as good as his earlier stuff. She was unable to speak, but she smiled.
Tonight I’ll pull down Margo’s books of poetry from my shelves and reread my favorites. Here is one from The Dream Givers (Lake Shore Publishing; 1990). It’s an early poem that, for me, conjures the light and spirit Margo brought to her work, her students, her creative life:
I CAME BY A RIVER
and the journey flashed
through me like a light
year. Some electric sound
got me moving from
the original place over
mountains and dusty
windows outside of time.
I became a small shadow,
something anyone might have
missed. I began spinning
deep in tomorrow’s orchard.
I came by a river
and the water keeps rising.
I came to begin something wild.
(By Margo LaGattuta; 1990; Lake Shore Press.)
– Top photo: “Morning in Vinsetta Park” by Cindy La Ferle; 2010 –
___________
MEMORIAL POETRY READING
Celebrate Margo and her poetry Wednesday, August 31, 7 – 10pm, at the Lido Gallery in Birmingham. Bring ONE of your favorite Margo poems to read aloud to honor her memory. This event is free to the public.
COMMUNITY LIFESTYLES REMEMBERS MARGO
The September 5 issue of Community Lifestyles, where Margo published her popular “Word in Edgewise” columns, will be devoted to her memory. This issue will include a new piece I wrote, detailing Margo’s influence and impact on the metro-Detroit writing community. Watch for the issue online or in your mailbox if you live in the area.
Cindy on April 14th, 2011
The eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.” –Rumi
For collectors of inspirational quotes, the ecstatic poems of the Persian mystic Rumi are pure gold. I find most of my favorites in one of the finest anthologies of Rumi’s work, The Soul of Rumi, translated by the incredible Coleman Barks. “The Soul is here for its own joy” is such a powerful line that I just had to use it in a collage earlier this year.
Click on the images for a detailed view. You’ll note that the dress was assembled from magazine ads and scraps of wrapping paper. The word “ops” appears on the elbow of the figure. This was totally unintentional; I didn’t notice it until after I layered another coat of glaze on the piece. Talk about a message for a recovering perfectionist! 
Cindy on February 13th, 2011
Then all the moments of the past began to line up behind that moment.” — Billy Collins
One of the things I admire most about poet Billy Collins is the way he mines the ordinary for beauty, then renders a work of art. In “This Much I Do Remember,” he recalls a tender moment that most couples can relate to: the leisurely hour at the dinner table after a good meal has been shared. Given the way he depicts the woman in the poem, I’m guessing she’s his wife of many years.
I can’t help but fight tears every time I read it. It underscores the familiar comfort of a longtime relationship, reminding me of my own marriage. With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, I’m reminded, too, that true love can’t be fully expressed (or measured) in gifts of jewelry or flowers or expensive chocolates. It’s all about the quality of the everyday moments we share. Wishing you all a happy Valentines Day! — CL
This Much I Do Remember
By Billy Collins
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way the stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.
Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.
–From Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, University of Pittsburgh Press; 1998–
Cindy on November 8th, 2010
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.” — Billy Collins
I’m often amazed at how a particular poem (or a memoir or a novel) can shimmer with new meaning when you reread it years later. I first read Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness” in Questions About Angels more than 10 years ago. While I found it amusing, it didn’t really hit me where I lived at the time.
This week, while thumbing through Collins’ anthology, Sailing Alone Around the Room, the poem found me again. This time, my heart jumped as I read the line, “one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain….” Of course, I thought immediately of my mother’s struggle with dementia, and her sudden inability to access key dates and events — the year her mother died; the city where she was born; the time she was hit by a car in a parking lot.
My middle-aged friends and I often laugh nervously about the fact that we sometimes walk into a room and forget what we’re looking for. Or how we can’t recall the name of a film classic we’ve always loved. Occasional slips of memory are fodder for menopausal humor, yet we’re all secretly haunted by the unnerving possibility of losing information and memories we treasure. Likewise, this poem is laced with Collins’ trademark wit, but ends on a wistful note. — CL
Forgetfulness
By Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
– Collage detail from an altered book by Cindy La Ferle –
Maybe it’s a symptom of middle age, or maybe it’s just my old Celtic soul stirring up a seasonal memory.
