Schedule for my upcoming course focused on accessing "The Deep Voice"

Wild Geese

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver

The sound of wild geese squawking and barking wakes me these days. Depending on my mood and the time of day, I am raised up or saddened by the sound that signals their departure. Autumn. Fall. Falling back. The loss of daylight hours. It’s the only time of the year when I feel a sense of wistfulness, an acute awareness of the passage of time. And it seems to be the central theme of every poem written about autumn. Yet, I don’t want to stay with this feeling. I prefer Mary Oliver’s response to the wild geese. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.”

Exercise: Spend a moment outside taking in the autumn air, listening to the sounds of the world around you. While outside, read aloud Mary Oliver’s poem and listen to the repetition of the sounds that begin with “meanwhile” and roll on and on. Jack Grapes calls this voice the “To Be Read and Sung” voice. “The voice Greek and Roman orators....the voice of the Old Testament and the Deep South; the voice that speaks to the multitudes, a voice that is meant to rouse and inspire.” Write your own prose poem about autumn using the repetition and rhythm in the Mary Oliver poem. Speak to the Multitudes. Offer your imagination to the world!!

Cultivate your garden

Maine Lupines - Patricia Shea

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Man the Reformer,” a lecture read before the Mechanics Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841.)

This morning, I walked out into the newly planted garden at our newly rehabbed house in Rockport, Maine, and paused, spying a squirrel, yawing mouth full of nut, who was going from plant to plant in search of the perfect home for his chestnut. Ahh, I thought he’s squirreling away something, creating a stash for the winter. Pulled into the squirrel’s world, I abandoned, for a moment, my concerns about the falling-apart world around us: hoards of starving people; over-population; ice caps melting; polar bears dying; environmental disasters; wildly gyrating stock markets; massive unemployment; the NBA lockout; the Greeks! The national debt! Ruthless dictators! A polarized society; a deadlocked Congress! Is it a function of age that I am more concerned--my sense of mortality causing me to ponder the world I will leave behind? Rather than going inside and saying the Metta Prayer 21 times (I’d done that already), I stayed my attention on the squirrel and my garden. How soothing it was to be among the flowers; to inhale their fragrance; to wonder at the bees; to observe the ways of the squirrels. As I quieted my mind, the last line of Candide floated
into my consciousness and (after silently offering thanks to my parents for my excellent liberal arts education), I smiled. Voltaire, speaking as Candide, whispered, “We must cultivate our garden.” Or, let’s abandon the cares of the world and turn our attention to what is before us. The final words of wisdom, the final line of the book, from a man who has seen many continents, much calamity and gnashing of teeth, has found and lost love, friends, gold, and returned home to buy a farm, live in community and begin a pastoral existence.

How like writing this is – cultivating our own words, sowing each word in a line on a page, shutting out, for a moment, the cares of the world. And how much more satisfying this farming of words is than paying attention to the world’s woes. Many authors have been gardeners. May Sarton, the American poet and novelist who lived in New England in her youth, as well as in her final years, says, “Gardening gives me back a sense of proportion about everything.” And Walt Whitman, “Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.” Listen to how poetic Nathaniel Hawthorne sounds when talking about his garden at the The Old Manse, his residence on the banks of the Concord River, “ I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.” I think of the expression “It’s nothing but a hill of beans” and marvel how a writer can change an ordinary bean into a line of poetry.

So, writers, I propose you cultivate your gardens, whatever form that might take.
Exercise: Choose five verbs, five nouns, five adjectives, five adverbs* from the
world of gardening, and create a short poem out of them.

Here’s a possible list:

Verbs: Cultivate, water, plant, nourish, turn over, mulch, splash, sprinkle, feed,
dig, hybridize, fertilize, focus, place, sow.

Nouns: Perennial, squash, seed, root, stem, juniper, sunflower, sweet pea, earth, soil, clay, rosemary.

Adjectives: Ochre, sweet, fragrant, lavender, spicy, woodsy, buttery, orchid-pink, juicy, crisp, wild.

Adverbs: Mindfully, carefully, artfully, gingerly, sequentially, playfully, seasonally, gently, deeply, naturally.

*I know I usually rant and rave about the use of adverbs, but they have their place and it’s fun to sprinkle them sparingly among the rows of words. (Yes, and that sentence has two adverbs!!)

Patricia Shea