The final products were despicable, but the creation thereof was truly sublime. In Sheila’s class, I was finally understanding what artists mean when they say that art is in its creation and not necessarily in its final "product." I created an abecedarian and a tritina and an erasure and an ekphrasis. On January 6, it felt like the most obvious thing in the world to do.
Long ago, I had written a bucket list with only one item: take a poetry class, question mark? It had felt so silly at the time.
In January, US Americans watched a celebration of white supremacy anger play out on our national mall, but January was also the month I signed up for Poetry and Meditation: A Writing Workshop with Sheila McMullin. But they say it takes discipline, so I continue to write anyways, week after week, shit upon shit upon paper. I tried out poetic prose, and then I tried out tiny ethnographic sketches, and then I felt like anything I wrote was horrible. I worked out questions about my father (I know / that I was receiving your hopes into my person), I examined emotions about my mother (sepia-filtered stories punctuated by my mother’s laugh), and I lauded my six siblings (my better six-sevenths, / my anchor / my gravity), crying through the entire last stanza. A fellow Unitarian launched a writer’s workshop, and suddenly I was writing poetry every single Monday. I copied it by hand into notecards and mailed it to my brother-in-law, who’d just lost his job (patient, plodding, a green skin), and to my friend, who’d just lost her husband and couldn’t leave her house to seek the necessary human warmth (the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty). Then it was June, and I memorized the poem Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon. There, we selected our next poem: Tactica y Estrategia, by Mario Benedetti (Mi táctica es mirarte / aprender como sos / quererte como sos). We drove home and dropped towels beneath trees down the street from my apartment. We drove further and plopped our towels beneath shade trees near a rare lake (sitting in a garden / among late-blooming roses / and dark cascades of leaves). We set out towels in a park in Palm Springs, hopscotching through droplets from a sprinkler to reach the shade of a tree (make the redolent air/tremble and shimmer with the heat / of possibility). Then my friend Steven and I escaped for a camping trip to Joshua Tree, and we spent the whole weekend memorizing the poem Romantics, by Lisel Mueller. Spring felt especially fierce those days, and I like to think that those flower descriptions were us speaking poetry to each other. The next day, we called to discuss the riotous joy of the flowers on our daily walks. Then it was May, and my friend Arline called to talk about church finances we found ourselves reading each other poems, instead. Suddenly, poetry was spewing from my own fingertips. Manuel Iris wrote Para Decircnos Luego del Ocaso, and a fountain of emotion exploded down my face. Troy walked us through a meditation, and the world simply stopped so that I could breathe. Then it was April, and The Well held a poetry gathering. Every color in the garden reflected the blinding sunlight in psychedelic relief.
TACTICA Y ESTRATEGIA MARIO BENEDETTI FULL
I stood gazing at the top of a pole where a tiny bird sang an impossibly diverse range of songs for a full fifteen minutes. I walked around the Stoneview Nature Center in Culver City, and I examined every flower, every caterpillar, and every egg under every leaf. The impact of his death propelled me into the pandemic clinging to poetry as my own kind of life support, and poetry has been my practice ever since. I was in love with him and the simple beauty he stood for, the simple beauty he wielded, adamantly, against all the evils of the day (Maestros, campesinos y la juventud / Unidos en la solidaridad). Then he had set his poems to music, and we sang them together at the First Unitarian Church. Félix had welded machines in a factory, he had taught children guitar in a garden, and he had written poetry. Two and a half weeks after Los Angeles went into lockdown, a poet passed away.
0 kommentar(er)
