Tag: Poetry

A little more of less, please

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, life together, literatureLeave a comment

Writing is a good life metaphor.

typewriter.jpgThese are interesting days. I approach my life much as I do the page, with contentment but with trepidation. The clumsy plasticine oozing from my pen leaves me a bit numb. A little bored, to be honest. A stultifying sameness guards the words from taking on a life of their own, of actually taking anyone on any kind of journey.

This is especially true of poetry. Ironically, I find my greatest enemy to be the stronger, more captivating work of previous years. It is the equivalent of creative shadow-boxing, a grasping after one’s own ghosts. It is to hide from the potential of my own gifts. The glory days, whether in life or art, can straight-jacket us right out of good days now.

Life is often this way. In creative-artistic terms, this is so commonplace as to be ridiculously cliché. This haunting of the present by an elusively successful past can choke the life out of bold, new ventures. Even the very desire to try is rendered impotent. A sterility can only be achieved by writing. Shit, but still writing. When acedia takes hold it keeps me from even getting that far. Writing poorly is still better than writing nothing at all. Bad sex is still better than no sex at all!

frustrated writer.jpg

Does this call into question my dedication to word-craft? Do I need to turn in my lit-card? Have I become less a writer and more of a word-ler (word burglar)? I suppose the creative struggle can be compared to dieting. One can lose weight through amelioration of already good habits-in-stasis while destroying bad ones. But, for it to “take,” a completely different way of living is required. Sure, lose thirty pounds, buy new clothes, take a thousand selfies on a new, air-brushed social media persona. Eat McDonald’s and chocolate cake for a week or two afterward and one’s previous successes merely mock present realities.

“Look how well I was doing,” we crow. “The effort really paid off,” we chirp. “It’s about bloody time,” screams our waistband. We gaze with fondness and well-earned satisfaction at our accomplishment only to groan with the recognition that that was then and this is now. Shit.

It can be genuinely depressing to read poetry or other bits and bobs of writing from even a few years ago when I had over-weening confidence in an under-developed, largely self-indulgent output. Now, possessing some measure of success, a proven track record in this whole letters enterprise, I find confidence a bit shaky to say the least.

Perhaps this is a case of art imitating life. Never have I been so content with so little. Not that I have little. I have in fact considerably more of everything than I could ever use. But my requirements are far fewer than ever. My writing is undergoing massive change right now, too. It’s not as clever-turn-of-phrase-y as it was, relying instead on that which, though simpler, might actually say something. I guess I’m losing my desire and, frankly, the need, to write for the academy – words for lovers of words. Insider talk.

Now, I write because it acts like a shower. My soul gets buffed up a bit more. My heart gets a jolly good brushing and I feel refreshed. And, I want to tell people about it. I want people to know who I am so they can meet me here. A welcome mat more than a Hadron Collider of complexity. There is a loneliness in creating something only a handful of erudites with too much industry-speak in their tool-belts can enjoy. And by “enjoy” I mean quietly compare to their own far superior material. Ha! Rightly so.

create.jpg

I guess to live better, we must learn to live on purpose. Correspondingly, to create better means to engage the process with trembling tenacity, even in the face of overwhelming self-doubt in one’s own ability.

I want to be the best writer, poet, musician – person, I can be. But it appears that what that means is a whole lot less words and a lot more conversation. Less erudition, more simplicity. Less academy, more living room. Less library, more kitchen table. Less bookstore, more backyard barbecue. Less thinking, more doing. Less of someone else, more of me.

Well, how about that. I just wrote myself out of my own funk. I rest my case.

Morning, breath

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

As morning reaches where only night had been,

dew once more settles on the brittle earth

and breath returns to one,

so all can breathe again.

The sound of your laugh.

On By robertalanrifeIn National Poetry Month, Waxing Poetic1 Comment

I first posted this a few years ago. The reason I did so then is the same I do so now, to celebrate my wife’s birthday. In the digital age, discovering a person’s age is as easy as a cursor, a mouse, and a nosy desire to know something. But, in the interest of propriety, I say simply, “Happy _____ birthday, babe!”

Like thunder in rain-Rae's birthday16.jpg

Babe, you still brighten the road before me…

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

Dylan Thomas, a favorite poet and writer, says this about words in poetry:

And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing…There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. -as quoted by James Hillman in “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart” (a must read, by the way).

I bemoan earlier days when poets were the prophets of the people. Words, stories and cultural anecdotes were the food-stuff of our existence, not the quaint, winter-hazed mist on the edges of our choked, windowed lives. They took center stage where the very words themselves were the Homeric epic of small existences writ large through bardic retelling to others thirsty to feel their enjoining on the stalk of shared time.

I begin here a short series of poetry about poetry, words about words; the metalanguage of the language, lost but longing to be refound, non-linear and non-pragmatic, seeking instead to rebuild the world through the unwasted beauty of redemptive syntax. To that end, I give you…

I

There you lay, face down in a puddle of

old dreams. Your brow, damp from

sweating out doubt-filled promises-

the mantric words of small men, of sullen women

bathing on stolen rooftops of run down tenements.

* * * * *

Goliath has defeated David with small,

pebbled words, slung out quietly across

the distance between them, too far

for slings filled with ancient anger.

Gruff prayers traded for slick threats.

* * * * *

Setesh broods his flustering fare. He sits

at the table of the unmemoried death,

serving up sighs and groans – the language

of lusty crows, too boisterous to still

their cantankerosity; too new and

untested to feed even their open-mouthed young.

* * * * *

Brush off the fog that settles on

your hunger for colored story, embattled songs,

for words floating and submerged under the borders,

planted in places too deep to be found

by spade, knife, wallet or hammer.

Longing letters taste like a lover’s kiss.

Dismissals – on considering responses to things

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Parables, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

That same girl passes him in the hallway, more aloof than ever;

like the neighborhood cat that pisses on my door.

There is no response to the constant

calling of her name. Just an unambitious purr,

the casual dismissal of a creature to

unreasonable expectations.

_

I passed him on the street yesterday,

that guy I met at the poetry reading.

It was hard keeping his eyes long enough

to finish a sentence, let alone fragments

of a conversation fraught with the dismissal of a

 “yes, it’s really me here” mystique.

_

She stood with a cardboard sign that read

hungry and unemployed with kids pls help god bless

I could see her through the Starbucks window

where my second Americano was already cold.

That second guy wasn’t as good as the first.

He never leaves me room for cream.

Is that too much to ask?

_

She wasn’t typically a make-up gal

preferring the girl next door simplicity

of less-is -more. But tonight

she dressed up, even eyeliner and dark,

red lipstick and skin-tight black dress.

He glanced at her twice at dinner

through the glare of his cell phone screen,

 that never dimmed.

_

I sometimes shudder to think what remains

in the shadows of what’s left after encounters

dense with the unwieldy results of non-praise,

of missing the open doors, sips not taken from

frosty mugs of welcome, the sleepy

dismissals of what’s right now,

hesitant on the stoop of another’s hopes.

What can they expect from me?

Gratitude? Platitudes? Assuredness? Distraction?

A snotty hanky full of rare humility, raw and pink?

_

The game starts in half an hour.

“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”: why I write poetry

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

poet's pen

“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”

There are as many ways of self-expression as there are people…self-expressing. One can say something in many and varied ways. There, see? Unlike other, non-poetic forms of writing, poetry evokes rather than explains. Now, good prose also can do this. But, somehow, there is an economy of words and focus of emotion in poetry, a kind of escalator narrative that moves us up and down at will, that prose cannot seem to create in as neat and succinct a way. Prose tells the story of our life on paper. Poetry crunches up the paper and then makes sense of the wrinkles. Prose seeks to pull petals off the flower and, in deconstructing it, find it. Poetry imagines the soul of the flower and, in ways both sensory and direct, introduces us. Prose tells us how beautiful the flower is. Poetry tells the flower how beautiful we are. In a real sense, poetry is a flower, a kind of natural face given to the mystery of our being.

Poetry doesn’t take us from A to B. It asks why we even need B in the first place, or at least takes the longer, scenic route. Prose needs readers to engage with its detail and form. Poetry needs but to exist since it is both beauty and the suggestion thereof. It is an invitation not to read but to be read. “If a tree falls in the forest” is a question we ask ourselves. The poet shows how cool a silent tree really is. It is the art of words rather than the science of language. Moreover, the lucidity and dominance of its spatial, nuanced non-rhetoric leaves a big, front door through which those of us thirsty for something other than exactitude and definition may find our Narnia. A good narrative will give us the tale, the wardrobe, the place. Poetry helps us live the tale. Prose ushers us to turkey dinner at Grandma’s house. Poetry ushers us to Grandma whose heart was the crucible of love out of which came our dinner.

I write poetry because, for me, it is prayer. It allows extreme right-brained thinkers like myself to engage with words in more dancelike fashion, treating them more like lovers than telemarketers. I can simply close my eyes and, through the mystery of my subconscious, knit to God’s own being, walk through the veil of here to there without having to explain why or even how I got there. Poetry is perfect for people who can’t figure things out but for whom the things are just as cool unfigured out. Mystery wins every time.

If you had no idea what the hell I just wrote, you’re not quite ready for poetry…just yet.

Photo: www.blog.ted.com

bathroom mirror conversation

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic1 Comment

Wait. What are these words

etched so blatantly in this fog-ged mirror

beside the shower

curtain of immodesty;

before me yet beyond my senses,

in ears endampened, engrossed, entombed-

like my murmuring heart?

Skin awash, adazzle;

insides asleep, awaiting…

There, there I see on glass, smeared,

perhaps by finger, nose, or shoulder –

condensation wiped from misty mirrors

word for word what I most misunderstand

and least fathom.

Traces left, glances of a face

revealed yet indeterminable; known, un-strange;

but surprising now, and terrible

soft and fearsome, lithe but

too big to hide even

in the darkest corners of my indirection.

Droplets dive to swim and speak

the intangible peace of this lilting voice.

Like an eyeball widget

refusing to stand still, darting to and fro,

never seen straight on,

just out of focus,

you write this tale, shrouded

in the vagueness of a loving stare,

adroit and sharp, a repeated repetition,

repeating yet again the same words:

“I have made you clean.”

Still, I know this face.

It is yours, subtle One.

It is mine.

It is ours.

of winter

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

perforate my insolated heart

with rock and stone and bits of branch

that scratch the earthen sky

with its insistent icy gaze

latch yourself rock, stock and thicket,

the budless arms of winter, skin and bone

wrap themselves around the icier heart

of my discontent

cry with wonder at my lack of wonder

this chill stream of unconscious boredom

alive in its deathly hold

we, together, sleep.

where once I stood

brazen, half alive but sure

of my surety finding

none but rockbed nourishment

in place of deeper food

but I refuse to dig.

in this time, non-colored

void of spring’s lithe dance

or summer’s lazy strolls,

only still

lonely, stilled,

stillness alone.

so be it,

come, sweet winter

come, bid me bid goodnight to my childish fears

hypnotize me, embalm and embranch me

let the stark, new life of death

feed this wafer-thin soul.

kiss me with frozen resurrection

till snow becomes dew

and we both

ascend

A short poem from last summer.

On By robertalanrifeIn sacramental living, the artsLeave a comment

Yakima to Ellensberg

July 21, 2010

Mottled and tustled blows

the Spring lint of fields;

hills blown dry in Summer’s bosom.

Little drunk parch-ed promise

whispers her secrets.

Moving over the gentle curves of

her brown back, full-breasted,

bloated not from watered spring

but gloating in perpetual want –

satisfied with less; less than satisfied

having drawn her drink from wells unseen.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…

Thoughts from the beach…

On By robertalanrifeIn faith, sacramental living, the arts1 Comment

Thoughts from the beach…

To commemorate a beach walk with my wife.

 

1

Beauty.  Random squalor in effortless

Wave deposits her treasure

In our efforts to build that which

Hand could never grasp we trade

Quintessential.  Queer.  Quiet for

Quantifiable.  Quick.  Casual.

Oh, such grand wordless words-

Wonder, World-watched prayers

Waiting…waiting.

That which is unseen – now

I see.

2

Wind-soaked beach-stained

Dark; darker still where waves

Kiss the sand of my imagination.

Flat boards float on round earth

Plays with my finitude and finer still,

Fills my earthen breath with

Deeper wind.

3

Dare she flits on so light a wing,

Fading into vastness, blue

The sky and water, one.

Where one defines what much cannot

In so many syllables contain

The vast smallness of it all.

May 12, 2003