_Hymn to Isis_; Fancott, Edmund
A thick, yellowed husk of paper curling at the corners as if folding into a womb: worn, not weary, it archives eras, centuries, civilizations. Its cloth is woven from a pride of trees. It is of the earth, but so very light. Like the depth of a lake, swimming to its own slender shorelines, its thick centre slowly recedes outward to its own searching corners that become tentacles.
I touch it, stroke it, smell it. It is ancient, hand-drawn. Place names are written with cursives and characters. The tiniest details are etched with artistry and delight: bright green hills, the hush of desert, vast “snowlands”. Forests spread like liquid over continents, stopping only at cliffs and fjords to then plunge into shades of turquoise. The map sings birds in their flight patterns and whistles sea creatures in their habitat. It sketches lavender temples, charcoal sites of beauty and battle. A spider’s web of connected particles, these places, passages are woven together by time. Its ribs, skin and bones holding together heaven and earth.
Exploring the map’s surface, I move my fingers tentatively to deep crevasses, sarcophagi holding dark wounds; blurs of crashing materials, forms -- living creatures, abstractions bound together in a violent dance. Embracing, they whirl in ecstasy; defacing, they fall. Turmeric stains, saffron scent, and metallic undertones characterize this bleeding ink. It is a work of art -- a timepiece -- this living map of worlds dreaming, breathing, dancing, colliding. What is this invitation, this invocation -- this opus that has landed in my hands, already raw from my own travels?
No signatures or emblems of ownership or authorship grace deface the map. The makers have left beautiful white spaces, untouched, expansive, and at the centre… I am breathless. There are simply no words to describe…
Is it my turn? Do I dare?
***
My brother, Dylan, grew up reading fantasy novels, playing Dungeons and Dragons, devouring history books rough with conquerors, battles, quests. Where was my quest? What kind of journeying, companions and honour awaited a girl like me, a little sister? My world seemed so, well, here. Now. Immediate. It was a world of soccer games, playing outside, canoe camping and friendships with real people who I could hug, laugh, dream with, confide in. Every so often Dylan invited me into his big, mysterious secret world of goblins and wizards. We created a character, a thief this time with a magic cloak… off we would go. But I wondered really who were my mates in these and other yet unmapped adventures of camaraderie, discovery and myth-making?
When I was twelve, I read The Hobbit as well as the illustrated version of Watership Down. I was moved by these adventures about saving what was “good”, acting courageously for self, community and standing up for what was right. But I did not see myself in these books whether as author or as its heroine -- I was neither a rabbit nor a hobbit.
It wasn’t until I read a book of a very different kind that I began to slowly understand. Then, it was possible to feel the unfolding of what it was to have a quest, a heritage of mystery, wisdom -- of human and mythical proportion, and come to know a community of wise, courageous people.
It was a poem in book form called Hymn to Isis, it was about goddesses, oracles, seekers. And it was written by my grandfather.
My poet-sage-artist grandfather, whose final contribution to this world was this sacred ode, a history in poem to Lilith, Eve and Isis. Edmund or Granpy, an English-born bohemian father of four (my mother, a sister to three brothers), died of throat cancer after birthing a radical expression of love to Woman. He waited until I was 6 months old before leaving this world. The book was published a few years later. I like to believe that he conceived this poem, sang it to and through me as I was developing my own beginnings of life, rendering my own map of the past and future, while swimming, swirling, being unveiled, in my mother’s womb. He sent his words through me, I sent my reply through him.
Sensual, luscious, luminous undulating language, I have grown up with Hymn to Isis forming and informing me in almost every stage of my life. The lessons of learning, yearning, of loving, revealing are slowly being uncovered as I see more deeply into my own self. “How can I teach you,” whispers Isis, “you who knows so much yet knows so little beyond your self?”
As an inquisitive, spirited teenager, these three aspects of woman enthralled me: Lilith, wild and luscious; Eve, the keeper of the house; Isis, goddess of fecundity, all-powerful. But I really loved Lilith, “proud unconquerable, the fire and the fury of love and lust, not I rejected Adam, he too mortal fell from my onslaught, an empty husk…” This changed everything -- Adam’s wife before Eve? She was too much for him! With the sexy language, the evocation of feminine power, the diving deep into the sinews of relationship, well, I rarely read the whole poem through. I found I did not have the patience for the seekers’ stories to the temple of Isis; I wanted to be Lilith.
As a young woman in university, I found the poem again, discovering the symbols of myth that are universal in literature and the history of goddesses. I used what I saw as the central theme to the book, love and reciprocity, in an essay on Canadian Literature in my first year English class. “No gift is greater that the receiver, no heaven beyond the love of the lover, no hell lower than love lost in lust.” This was my grandfather’s book! In the library! A Canadian author!
In second year, I found feminism -- as a course of study, and as a community. In cafés while skipping class, my girlfriends and I talked about what we were reading, and how it reflected our own lives. At the time, I secretly wished I could appear on Oprah and say something very clever and important to an apparently ignorant, patriarchal world. We cut our hair when we broke up with boyfriends, whispered, roared, loving our communion. Feminism was an affirmation of my own burgeoning beliefs on equality and expression, the personal and the political. These courses were exciting, uncomfortable, life-changing, and I saw the connection with my own mother’s struggle for rights, equality, policy, language, with this new language of my generation “identity politics” and “third wave”. Hadn’t both my grandmothers been pioneers and gone to university in the 1920s? But while I devoured this literature, clawed my way through post-structuralist theory, and drank too many cafés au lait, I was most drawn to this long, rich, and painfully invisible history in which women were central characters.
I spent hours in the McGill University library looking up women’s myths and symbols, the ancient stories of female leaders and goddesses whose lives were courageous, and stood or fell for an important cause, virtue, country. They were religious, political, common, from all parts of the world. It was so thrilling. I wrote articles for International Women’s Day in the ‘McGill Daily’ and designed tattoos according the meaning of a Celtic or pagan symbol, imagining the sisterhood I was connected to through this necklace of women through time.
In my final year of my undergraduate degree, Hymn to Isis came to life once again, in an independent video project made with three girlfriends. They read the poem and loved it, we sprinkled Jeanette Winterson’s modern myth-making into it and ta-da! Our video connected Eve, a contemporary young woman, with her Lilith and, ultimately, her Isis. We played with lighting, time, slow motion. We shot beautiful images of Eve walking through the snow of a ruined church in Montreal and then merged her into her Lilith self through music and a velvet costume change. In a final scene, this Eve is invited into a circle of candles in her apartment by the hand of Lilith. She sheds her old self; and together, naked, they dance to ancient drumming and the ululation of a songstress beating their passage through Time into Self, collapsing into Isis: three in one, one in three. How we got Tracy’s roommate to act in this, I don’t know, but we were breathless in our creation, very determined. We screened it for our class of nine and only our professor, who perhaps had an appreciation for the abstract, the complexity of our storytelling and editing (and likely for the risqué scenes,) gave us an ‘A’.
Isis, in her slim hardcover, her dusty rose envelop illustrated with whimsical line drawings of women with wide eyes, third eyes, flowers and butterflies has been my constant travel companion. She came with me on road trips across Arizona and through the Canadian Rockies, has come with me to bed, under the dim of morning discovering “the intimacy of the quivering senses poised on the brink of ecstasy, the ebb and flow, membrum erectum, membrum pendulum…” with a boyfriend while we tried to invent what might have been the “500 ways known to the Chinese and the 50 secret ways known only to the Emperor”. She flew off my bookshelf to be read over the phone in a flirtation with a boy who ran a bookstore and zoomed across oceans and time zones to India, in 1999, the first time I went there to work. “Bring a favourite book,” they advised, “something that will ground you should you feel lonely or overwhelmed.” I would be there for close to a year with an Indian non-governmental organization, working with the most marginalized communities for social justice and social change. Hymn to Isis came out one night, in the intimacy of a shared moment: my anchor, my compass.
I had brought The Hobbit, too, but it was Isis that initiated an intense bonding with my female roommates one dusty evening after a week in the chaos, colour of hope and despair of Indian social justice work. Our male roommate, Graham, was gone to the field, so Michelle, Betty and I sat together one evening after celebrating Shabbat with our ritual meal of kosher Pizza Hut. The roar of rickshaws and clang of urban cattle outside our window accompanied us on this hot night in Ahmedabad, the old capital of Gujarat, in central India. We were there through an internship with Aga Khan Foundation Canada, one Jew from Montreal, a pragmatic atheist from Harrison, BC, and me having come only with my questions about religion and faith. Working in a Jesuit-founded secular organization, I found myself seeking.
“I will read you my ‘favourite’ parts,” was my introduction. I searched for the beautiful poetry. But, they asked for the whole book. I had never read it aloud, in its entirety and it was hard not to become emotional. Many aspects of the poem became more pronounced to me in the process -- the beauty of its wholeness, of the stories of seekers going to the temple of Isis, the questions to the goddess, and her power in knowing when to reveal, when to conceal.
It was my second cry for a grandfather on this trip. The first was my grief reading in an email from my parents that Pere, my dad’s father had died peacefully of pneumonia in his 92nd year. I did not go home for the funeral, having just arrived in India. He and my grandmother had lived there in the 1950s. He was Canada’s first High Commissioner to a newly independent India. I knew I was where he would want me to be; in a place he and Nana had loved, into which they had poured their dreams and hopes. It became my mission to embark on a pilgrimage to their old house in Delhi. In some circular way, I was simply continuing the work that Pere had begun 40 years before; he in diplomacy, and me, his youngest grand-daughter, in community development.
Tears have also come when thinking about my mum’s father, the one I had not known in person, but who in spirit spoke to my deepest place. It would have been a shock of recognition -- that both of these men would have guided me to this one place. This realization has come only recently. The memory is vivid: I was 29, on the cusp of discovering the fire of articulating and manifesting one’s purpose in the world. Swirling with questions and hungry for experience, I found in India a rite of passage. Not surprisingly, the experience burned me bright, left me raw, pushed me to see my purpose more clearly.
During those days, I did not have the words then: “pilgrimage”, “quest”. I saw only the epidermis of my map, and it led me back two generations to my socialist, diplomat grandfather whose driving passion, greatest fear, was to ensure there would not be a Third World War, in his lifetime, ever. It became apparent how I was stepping into the path that he in his time of fear and hope worked so hard to lay down and that in my own time, with my own resources, would build on that inheritance. It was a call into the river of public service. This was visible to me in the context of concrete injustices in man-made structures.
What lay under that river, was this other inheritance, a deeper tributary -- its source more mystical. There was another call to another kind of service, but I did not recognize it then. “To lift the veil of Isis is to pierce the heart of mystery.” Only after another rite of passage, laying myself bare -- burning and raw again -- with family, friends, in my own community, and touching the shores and core of India once again, would I skin a second membrane to this map, and the invitation-invocation that Isis held to me. But that is another story.
I am Isis
The gift of the gods is given freely
But the oracle speaks in riddles
So that fools can wallow in their folly
And the wise shall understand
But who shall proclaim the majesty of woman
I
I am Isis
Edmund Fancott
Hymn to Isis
With line drawings by Susan Fothergill
Peter Martin Associates
1973
Vanessa Reid is the executive publisher of ‘ascent magazine’. She has travelled extensively and now resides in Montreal.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Metropolis: My Memory Palace -- Sheniz Janmohamed
_Metropolis_; Dunlop, Rishma
As a South Asian Canadian poet searching for literature that I could identify with, Rishma Dunlop was one of the only poets I had access to. When I discovered her poetry collection, The Body of My Garden, I was taken aback by the proximity of her voice and the richness of her tone. From my experience studying Canadian poetry, I expected something more “prairie” or “suburban” and not something so unapologetically vibrant.
After meeting with Professor Dunlop and discussing literature and life with her over a few cups of cappuccino, I felt more assured about my own sense of “aesthetic”. I was less reluctant to occupy the liminal space of my second-generation South Asian Canadian identity.
Two years later, I picked up Dunlop’s Metropolis, finished a latte and walked back to my dorm room to read it. Sitting on the floor, I read it cover to cover. The voice was sharper, less kind, more haunting. It had an unfathomable maturity, almost mimicking the growth in my own life. Metropolis clanked words on concrete, walked with a lone woman down crowded streets, archived the fragmented lives of city dwellers.
My final year as an undergrad was a practice in discipline. After ending a three-year relationship that summer, my fourth year was my first year of university “alone”. I spent my time studying, bookmarking poems, conversing with female friends and strolling the streets of Toronto. It was difficult to adjust to the silence of being unattached -- not calling a man to quiet my fears, not meeting him in the foyer of his apartment building, not celebrating silly monthly anniversaries. There were times where I couldn’t visit certain cafes, bookstores or street corners. Each was marked with moments from a relationship that no longer existed.
In Metropolis, Dunlop delves into Cicero’s “Memory Palace”, which discusses the concept of remembering through “loci” (paths). For example, to memorize a speech, one would associate parts of it with particular locations around a city. To remember a section of the speech, one simply remembers the place with which that section was associated. I could relate because Toronto became my “Memory Palace”. The city was a palimpsest of memories from my past, unravelling my personal history in its bends. It took me a while to visit those old haunts, but I eventually allowed myself to create new memories in old spaces. I would amble down Bloor St.West on sunny mornings, collect my thoughts and prepare myself for the rest of the day. The city walk became a private meditation, a ritual, a chance to observe the world by maneuvering through it. I learned to recognize shady characters, walk with some sort of grace in high heels and ignore whistling construction workers. The city moulded me into a stronger young woman. After these experiences, when I read Metropolis, the poetic voice instantly resonated with me:
When your eyes have unclouded,
You will see the shine rising off the
Edges of things. You will hear a human
Breathing, sense of something blue, alive,
Singing.
Dunlop’s speaker is an observer, a woman who sits on the subway and watches the way people fold their hands, how they avoid eye contact. She alludes to the invisible gap of humanity in the cold horizon of steel towers, the sirens, the interactions between people:
The city is in the eye of the blackbird,
Fixed on skyscrapers, bus terminals,
Garbage dumps.
Witness to muffled emergencies
Someone’s heart about to stop
Someone’s about to be delivered
Someone’s seeking redemption between
A woman’s legs.
She knows she is alone even when she is standing in a crowd, that people brush past her. She does not feel them, however:
Some days in the city nothing really touches us.
Everything is transparent, black-curtained government cars
Cast their shadows along the avenues. . .
When I read these poems, the poet and I are hardly any different. We occupy the same concrete world, witness the same bruised horizons, even wipe off the same shade of lipstick staining the rims of our coffee cups. Dunlop brings my world onto a page, and magnifies it with details and ideas I have been unable to pen into existence. There is also gravity lacing her words, an emotional weight that lends itself to uncertainty:
Some things keep you safe. . .
Until the blasted church,
Machete massacres
Rush hour bombs on subways,
Carnage that is the failure of love.
As a twenty-something woman stepping out of undergrad life, waiting for an acceptance letter to an MFA program, watching the daily bombardment of Islamic culture on a television screen, I was deeply moved by these words. I was moved by the feeling that we are never sure. Although this lack of surety is uncomfortable, it is inevitable. Dunlop’s carefully crafted poetry allowed me to accept this fact with some measure of maturity and sense of humour.
In the first year of an MFA program, I commuted via subway to attend classes. I would often take books to read when I got tired of noting down quirks of fellow riders. One morning, I glanced at my bookshelf and eyed the slim volume of Metropolis. I thought, “Dunlop. Why not?” That day I took it with me and read it, cover to cover, from Bay Station to Kipling. I found a strange relevance in the text through reading lines that described my environment. On the subway trip back, I just observed, as Dunlop might. I revelled in the exiting and entering of passengers, the crisp smacking open of a newspaper, the announcer’s drowsy voice. There I was -- completely alone, but confident. I had no idea what the next stop was, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the city had become my own, a metropolis of my mind. I was no longer afraid to get lost, because there was hope I’d find directions along the way.
Metropolis
Rishma Dunlop
Mansfield Press
2005Sheniz Janmohamed is a freelance writer, poet and spoken word artist. She holds an Honours BA in English and Religion from the University of Toronto. Recently, she completed her MFA in Creative Writing (Guelph) under the mentorship of author Janice Kulyk Keefer. Her thesis is a collection of essays and poems reflecting her triune identity as a Canadian with Kenyan and South Asian roots. She has also completed a manuscript of ghazals in English, and is collaborating with international dub/electronica artists on numerous musical/spoken word projects. Her work has appeared in various magazines as well as columns and book reviews in “City Masala Magazine”. She has performed at various venues across Toronto, including the Strong Words Reading Series, Toronto Poets’ Saturday Night Love, and Majlis Arts’ Figure of Speech series. To learn more about her, visit her site: www.myspace.com/shenizpoetics
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The Force -- Lori Hahnel
* This essay was orginally published as part of the "Women Who Love to Read" project at http://www.fairsfair.com/2007/12/26/the-force/.
_The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1934-1952_; Thomas, Dylan
Reading a Dylan Thomas poem in a library one afternoon, in 1986, helped me navigate through a time of great turmoil in my life. I was twenty-two years old, working as a receptionist at the Calgary office of Schlumberger, an international oil service company, and hated my job. My job entailed running the switchboard, dealing with couriers and clients at the front desk, typing after a fashion. This work was boring yet stressful – clients would vent their anger at not being able to reach certain employees who never bothered to tell me where they were; the switchboard was always lit up with calls; and, I was trapped at my desk unless I called someone over to relieve me. The job itself wasn’t so bad really, but I wasn’t the right person for it. At the time, there was no interest in the corporate world whatsoever in me. I was fighting my creativity, trying to push it away, trying to be happy in an office job. After all, my parents said, my progress was impressive: all the way up from temporary typist to full-time mail clerk to receptionist – who knew where I might end up? I really wanted to end up in a place no office job could lead me, I knew that. But unfortunately, for the time being, I seemed to be stuck with it.
Right after high school, my next step was to attend the Alberta College of Art since my intention was to become a commercial artist. The grind at ACA was notoriously tough though – eight-to-five classes five days a week, tons of homework, a sixty percent first year drop-out rate – and the competition to get into the Visual Communications program was fierce. My aim had always been to work as an artist, but when it became plain that there was no space for me in VComm, I decided to drop out. In my mind, there wasn't any use in having a diploma in textiles or painting. Unfortunately, this was in early 1982, when a major recession began. For a while, I was unemployed, doing odd jobs, a little drafting work my engineer father found for me, trying to think of what I wanted to do with my life. What I really wanted was to go back to school and earn a degree in English, learn to write fiction, something I’d wanted to pursue since childhood. What I had envisioned was to write on the side and create art for a living – pretty realistic, eh? My parents, however, felt I should think of a more practical career after the ACA experience.
After a year and a half, I finally found full-time work as a foot courier. My employer was a printer and I hauled packages around the downtown core for $4.35 an hour. Six months later, I landed temporary work with Schlumberger and within a year, was Main Receptionist. This pleased my parents, but I hated the routine, the dullness, having to dress like an office lady. The situation was intolerable: engineers would take off and not let me know where they were going and then I’d have to deal with clients wanting to know where they were.
Often I’d take the C-Train to the main library, on my lunch hour, to get away from the noise and stress of the switchboard, to find a book to take with me, forget about my job, just be around books. Libraries had always been a place of refuge for me, place of escape, and then I seemed more drawn to them than ever before. One cold spring day, about a year after starting the receptionist job, I was browsing in the poetry section on the main floor, standing beside one of the huge plate glass windows that provides a view of Seventh Avenue and found something incredibly moving. I took a copy of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas off the shelf and opened it. The sound of a C-Train I remember very clearly rushing past. The sunlight was slanting through the window onto the page as I began reading these lines:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
I closed the book around my finger to keep my place after I finished the poem and took a deep breath. That was it, I realized. There was no going back. Now I knew what I had to do. No matter what my parents thought, no matter that there might not be any money in creative writing, I had to try. If I could ever write anything half as powerful, as heart-breakingly beautiful, it would be very fulfilling indeed. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas I took with me to the Social Sciences Department on the third floor of the library to find some information about university entrance.
That September, I started work on my English degree. Before long, the Calgary Public Library was my new job site. (The position was part-time.) There I continued to work after graduation. Today, I'm working my way up as a fiction writer, and it’s a longer, harder journey than I ever imagined. During those years of full-time work when I was paying off my student loan after university, I didn’t have the energy to try and do creative work, too. It was only once I had children and spent a lot of time at home that I had the time, and began to learn the patience.
And patience one needs in spades when one is a creative writer. It may be the most important attribute to have – it’s certainly something I need to work on. One receives rejections, waits for responses (some of which will never come, I'm sorry to say), hesitates, procrastinates, but ultimately one has to keep pushing on, because the next acceptance could be on its way. My work has won awards, been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and been broadcast on CBC Radio, but still the time between acceptances can be long, waiting for responses can seem interminable. The money earned by most creative writers is worse than laughable. Be that as it may, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, and the little success I’ve had brings me great satisfaction, more than any job ever could. The same force that drove Dylan Thomas, I like to think, drives me. To me, that’s worth it.
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1934 - 1952
Originally published by New Directions Publishing
1952
Lori Hahnel is the author of a novel, Love Minus Zero (Oberon, 2008), and a short story collection titled Nothing Sacred, forthcoming from Thistledown Press, in 2009. Her credits include CBC Radio, "The Fiddlehead", "Prairie Fire" and "Room Magazine"; more of her work is forthcoming in "The Fiddlehead" and "The Antigonish Review". She is currently at work on a second novel.
_The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1934-1952_; Thomas, Dylan
Reading a Dylan Thomas poem in a library one afternoon, in 1986, helped me navigate through a time of great turmoil in my life. I was twenty-two years old, working as a receptionist at the Calgary office of Schlumberger, an international oil service company, and hated my job. My job entailed running the switchboard, dealing with couriers and clients at the front desk, typing after a fashion. This work was boring yet stressful – clients would vent their anger at not being able to reach certain employees who never bothered to tell me where they were; the switchboard was always lit up with calls; and, I was trapped at my desk unless I called someone over to relieve me. The job itself wasn’t so bad really, but I wasn’t the right person for it. At the time, there was no interest in the corporate world whatsoever in me. I was fighting my creativity, trying to push it away, trying to be happy in an office job. After all, my parents said, my progress was impressive: all the way up from temporary typist to full-time mail clerk to receptionist – who knew where I might end up? I really wanted to end up in a place no office job could lead me, I knew that. But unfortunately, for the time being, I seemed to be stuck with it.
Right after high school, my next step was to attend the Alberta College of Art since my intention was to become a commercial artist. The grind at ACA was notoriously tough though – eight-to-five classes five days a week, tons of homework, a sixty percent first year drop-out rate – and the competition to get into the Visual Communications program was fierce. My aim had always been to work as an artist, but when it became plain that there was no space for me in VComm, I decided to drop out. In my mind, there wasn't any use in having a diploma in textiles or painting. Unfortunately, this was in early 1982, when a major recession began. For a while, I was unemployed, doing odd jobs, a little drafting work my engineer father found for me, trying to think of what I wanted to do with my life. What I really wanted was to go back to school and earn a degree in English, learn to write fiction, something I’d wanted to pursue since childhood. What I had envisioned was to write on the side and create art for a living – pretty realistic, eh? My parents, however, felt I should think of a more practical career after the ACA experience.
After a year and a half, I finally found full-time work as a foot courier. My employer was a printer and I hauled packages around the downtown core for $4.35 an hour. Six months later, I landed temporary work with Schlumberger and within a year, was Main Receptionist. This pleased my parents, but I hated the routine, the dullness, having to dress like an office lady. The situation was intolerable: engineers would take off and not let me know where they were going and then I’d have to deal with clients wanting to know where they were.
Often I’d take the C-Train to the main library, on my lunch hour, to get away from the noise and stress of the switchboard, to find a book to take with me, forget about my job, just be around books. Libraries had always been a place of refuge for me, place of escape, and then I seemed more drawn to them than ever before. One cold spring day, about a year after starting the receptionist job, I was browsing in the poetry section on the main floor, standing beside one of the huge plate glass windows that provides a view of Seventh Avenue and found something incredibly moving. I took a copy of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas off the shelf and opened it. The sound of a C-Train I remember very clearly rushing past. The sunlight was slanting through the window onto the page as I began reading these lines:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
I closed the book around my finger to keep my place after I finished the poem and took a deep breath. That was it, I realized. There was no going back. Now I knew what I had to do. No matter what my parents thought, no matter that there might not be any money in creative writing, I had to try. If I could ever write anything half as powerful, as heart-breakingly beautiful, it would be very fulfilling indeed. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas I took with me to the Social Sciences Department on the third floor of the library to find some information about university entrance.
That September, I started work on my English degree. Before long, the Calgary Public Library was my new job site. (The position was part-time.) There I continued to work after graduation. Today, I'm working my way up as a fiction writer, and it’s a longer, harder journey than I ever imagined. During those years of full-time work when I was paying off my student loan after university, I didn’t have the energy to try and do creative work, too. It was only once I had children and spent a lot of time at home that I had the time, and began to learn the patience.
And patience one needs in spades when one is a creative writer. It may be the most important attribute to have – it’s certainly something I need to work on. One receives rejections, waits for responses (some of which will never come, I'm sorry to say), hesitates, procrastinates, but ultimately one has to keep pushing on, because the next acceptance could be on its way. My work has won awards, been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and been broadcast on CBC Radio, but still the time between acceptances can be long, waiting for responses can seem interminable. The money earned by most creative writers is worse than laughable. Be that as it may, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, and the little success I’ve had brings me great satisfaction, more than any job ever could. The same force that drove Dylan Thomas, I like to think, drives me. To me, that’s worth it.
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1934 - 1952
Originally published by New Directions Publishing
1952
Lori Hahnel is the author of a novel, Love Minus Zero (Oberon, 2008), and a short story collection titled Nothing Sacred, forthcoming from Thistledown Press, in 2009. Her credits include CBC Radio, "The Fiddlehead", "Prairie Fire" and "Room Magazine"; more of her work is forthcoming in "The Fiddlehead" and "The Antigonish Review". She is currently at work on a second novel.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
To Ripen Like a Tree -- Maureen Scott Harris
_Letters to a Young Poet_; Rilke, Rainer Maria
In the fall of 1961, I'm seventeen years old and have just started university. There I’ve discovered the huge continent of non-fiction – history, travel writing, letters, essays, autobiography and memoir – provinces I never dreamed existed as I read my way steadily through Zane Grey and Luke Short, with occasional detours to L.M. Montgomery and Rider Haggard. The life of books, and conversations about them, that I’m leading now – in class, sprawled on campus lawns, sitting around cafeteria tables – is my idea of paradise. Here anything seems possible, even the possibility I scarcely allow myself to think: that I might one day be a writer.
I read voraciously, ravished in turn by Andre Gide’s Fruits of the Earth and R. H. Blyth’s introduction to haiku, enlightened and excited by Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination, giddy with the French symbolist poets, stricken by T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. None of these are works I’m studying; I’ve gleaned them by chance or from talk with other students.
Some time that fall, I meet an awkward young man whose father is a professor in the German department. I don’t remember our conversations, but through him I find myself one winter morning holding a copy of his father’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’ve pulled it out of my bag as I sit down on the bus that will carry me to the University of Manitoba. I begin to read and am instantly entranced. “Explore the reason that bids you write," Rilke suggests, "find out if it has spread out its roots in the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die, if writing should be denied to you. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, ‘Must I write?’. . .” My heart creases with longing and delight – that someone might write such a thing – that such a thing might be possible.
Suddenly I realize the bus isn’t moving. The driver is speaking to me, telling me we’ve reached the campus. I look up and see I’m the only passenger still on board. But I haven’t finished reading. I tell the driver I’m not getting off, and he shrugs as I settle into my seat and keep reading. I ride all the way downtown again, finishing the letters. I remember they left me dazed, but filled with exultation. I don’t remember if I then rode back out to the university and my classes.
What I held in my hand that morning was not a book but a slender pamphlet of forty-six pages, bound in chaste grey cardboard, the author’s name and title printed in a black sans serif font on its front cover. I have it still. On the fly-leaf, in a round hand that bears only a faint resemblance to my current handwriting, are my name and the date, October 23, 1961. I stare at the date and lean into my memory, filled with doubt.
I think it was winter when I sat reading on that bus – the air outside it snappingly cold and clear, snow-covered streets glittering under bright blue sky and winter sun, bus windows frosted over, but not blocking out the brightness. But perhaps it wasn’t snow reflecting sunlight into the bus. Perhaps the light I remember sprang from the pages I was reading. When I return to myself looking down at those pages, light streams up from between the words, making me squint with the brilliance.
Must I write? That question haunts me, even now inducing a mixture of exultation and fear. As it did then, it suggests writing is possible, offering a kind of permission. But I recognize that it also stirs my secret conviction that if I turn and look into myself I will discover that in fact I will not die if I don’t write. I am also haunted by these later words from the letters: “. . .the feeling that one could live without writing is enough to prove that one should not write at all.” At that first reading I kept my fear buried, not admitting that I doubted I could write. But it was there, and grew stronger over the years. It is the case that I have lived without writing for intervals of several years at a time, and that I often write sporadically. My intermittent practice has seemed to me faithlessness, evidence that I’m not really a writer.
Over the more than forty years since I first read Letters to a Young Poet on that bus, I’ve read other translations, and indeed turned to it for reassurance, in spite of its hard question. I’ve also felt as ambivalent about it as I have about writing itself. For several years I decided, somewhat condescendingly, it was a work pitch-perfect for adolescence – when after all, one is ready to die rather than live a life without depth and feeling – but of scant help after that tumultuous time. Today, I want to retract that rather defensive judgment.
When I decided to write about it, I reread my original grey-covered copy of the Letters. Holding it in my hands and staring down at its slightly old-fashioned font, I felt reconnected to my initial excitement. I have been startled to discover how deeply it struck into me. In that first reading, Rilke’s words sounded a note I’d not heard before, a note that drew me slowly towards what has become central in my life: poetry, the reading and the writing of it. His conviction that a life dedicated to poetry was worthy, not irresponsible or foolish; his suggestion that you must learn to listen to your own heart and mind; and his insistence on ignoring the external world and its demands to attend to the inner world of longing and loneliness, seem again true to me, and I feel profoundly lucky to have found this manual of encouragement and belief.
In my rereading I’ve received another gift, a new way of considering that vexed question, "Must I write?" For I see that if I’ve been willing to let go of writing, writing has refused to let go of me. Again and again it has called me back to it, as I write and pause, write and pause, for varying lengths of time. Rilke told me about this, too, if I’d been paying full attention: “To be an artist is this: not to count or to reckon: to ripen like a tree which does not force its sap. . .”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Translated by K.W. Maurer
Winnipeg Printing & Eng. Co. Ltd.
St. James, Canada
Second edition, December, 1958.
(Translation done in 1943.)
Maureen Scott Harris is a poet and essayist. She has published two collections of poetry-- A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993) and Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004), and two chapbooks, "The World Speaks" (Junction Books, 2003) and "The Raven and the Writing Desk: Haiku Variations" (JackPine Press, 2007). In 2005, Drowning Lessons received the Trillium Book Award for Poetry from the Ontario Ministry of Culture. Her essay, “Opening the Griefcase” won first prize in Prairie Fire’s creative non-fiction contest, in 2007. She has been cathected to books since before she learned to read. Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto for many years. She has worked as a librarian, bookseller, freelance writer and editor, and is currently Production Manager for Brick Books.
In the fall of 1961, I'm seventeen years old and have just started university. There I’ve discovered the huge continent of non-fiction – history, travel writing, letters, essays, autobiography and memoir – provinces I never dreamed existed as I read my way steadily through Zane Grey and Luke Short, with occasional detours to L.M. Montgomery and Rider Haggard. The life of books, and conversations about them, that I’m leading now – in class, sprawled on campus lawns, sitting around cafeteria tables – is my idea of paradise. Here anything seems possible, even the possibility I scarcely allow myself to think: that I might one day be a writer.
I read voraciously, ravished in turn by Andre Gide’s Fruits of the Earth and R. H. Blyth’s introduction to haiku, enlightened and excited by Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination, giddy with the French symbolist poets, stricken by T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. None of these are works I’m studying; I’ve gleaned them by chance or from talk with other students.
Some time that fall, I meet an awkward young man whose father is a professor in the German department. I don’t remember our conversations, but through him I find myself one winter morning holding a copy of his father’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’ve pulled it out of my bag as I sit down on the bus that will carry me to the University of Manitoba. I begin to read and am instantly entranced. “Explore the reason that bids you write," Rilke suggests, "find out if it has spread out its roots in the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die, if writing should be denied to you. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, ‘Must I write?’. . .” My heart creases with longing and delight – that someone might write such a thing – that such a thing might be possible.
Suddenly I realize the bus isn’t moving. The driver is speaking to me, telling me we’ve reached the campus. I look up and see I’m the only passenger still on board. But I haven’t finished reading. I tell the driver I’m not getting off, and he shrugs as I settle into my seat and keep reading. I ride all the way downtown again, finishing the letters. I remember they left me dazed, but filled with exultation. I don’t remember if I then rode back out to the university and my classes.
What I held in my hand that morning was not a book but a slender pamphlet of forty-six pages, bound in chaste grey cardboard, the author’s name and title printed in a black sans serif font on its front cover. I have it still. On the fly-leaf, in a round hand that bears only a faint resemblance to my current handwriting, are my name and the date, October 23, 1961. I stare at the date and lean into my memory, filled with doubt.
I think it was winter when I sat reading on that bus – the air outside it snappingly cold and clear, snow-covered streets glittering under bright blue sky and winter sun, bus windows frosted over, but not blocking out the brightness. But perhaps it wasn’t snow reflecting sunlight into the bus. Perhaps the light I remember sprang from the pages I was reading. When I return to myself looking down at those pages, light streams up from between the words, making me squint with the brilliance.
Must I write? That question haunts me, even now inducing a mixture of exultation and fear. As it did then, it suggests writing is possible, offering a kind of permission. But I recognize that it also stirs my secret conviction that if I turn and look into myself I will discover that in fact I will not die if I don’t write. I am also haunted by these later words from the letters: “. . .the feeling that one could live without writing is enough to prove that one should not write at all.” At that first reading I kept my fear buried, not admitting that I doubted I could write. But it was there, and grew stronger over the years. It is the case that I have lived without writing for intervals of several years at a time, and that I often write sporadically. My intermittent practice has seemed to me faithlessness, evidence that I’m not really a writer.
Over the more than forty years since I first read Letters to a Young Poet on that bus, I’ve read other translations, and indeed turned to it for reassurance, in spite of its hard question. I’ve also felt as ambivalent about it as I have about writing itself. For several years I decided, somewhat condescendingly, it was a work pitch-perfect for adolescence – when after all, one is ready to die rather than live a life without depth and feeling – but of scant help after that tumultuous time. Today, I want to retract that rather defensive judgment.
When I decided to write about it, I reread my original grey-covered copy of the Letters. Holding it in my hands and staring down at its slightly old-fashioned font, I felt reconnected to my initial excitement. I have been startled to discover how deeply it struck into me. In that first reading, Rilke’s words sounded a note I’d not heard before, a note that drew me slowly towards what has become central in my life: poetry, the reading and the writing of it. His conviction that a life dedicated to poetry was worthy, not irresponsible or foolish; his suggestion that you must learn to listen to your own heart and mind; and his insistence on ignoring the external world and its demands to attend to the inner world of longing and loneliness, seem again true to me, and I feel profoundly lucky to have found this manual of encouragement and belief.
In my rereading I’ve received another gift, a new way of considering that vexed question, "Must I write?" For I see that if I’ve been willing to let go of writing, writing has refused to let go of me. Again and again it has called me back to it, as I write and pause, write and pause, for varying lengths of time. Rilke told me about this, too, if I’d been paying full attention: “To be an artist is this: not to count or to reckon: to ripen like a tree which does not force its sap. . .”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Translated by K.W. Maurer
Winnipeg Printing & Eng. Co. Ltd.
St. James, Canada
Second edition, December, 1958.
(Translation done in 1943.)
Maureen Scott Harris is a poet and essayist. She has published two collections of poetry-- A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993) and Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004), and two chapbooks, "The World Speaks" (Junction Books, 2003) and "The Raven and the Writing Desk: Haiku Variations" (JackPine Press, 2007). In 2005, Drowning Lessons received the Trillium Book Award for Poetry from the Ontario Ministry of Culture. Her essay, “Opening the Griefcase” won first prize in Prairie Fire’s creative non-fiction contest, in 2007. She has been cathected to books since before she learned to read. Harris was born in Prince Rupert, BC, grew up in Winnipeg, and has lived in Toronto for many years. She has worked as a librarian, bookseller, freelance writer and editor, and is currently Production Manager for Brick Books.
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