Diane Morrow

(from) The Spell by Marie Howe

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 8, 2008 in Uncategorized

Every day when I pick up my four-year-old daughter from preschool she climbs into her back booster seat and says, Mom–tell me your story. And almost every day I tell her: I dropped you off, I taught my class I ate a tuna fish sandwich, wrote e-mails, returned phone calls, talked with students and then I came to pick you up. And almost every day I think, My God, is that what I did? These lines are from the middle of Ms. Howe’s poem. They offer a certain intimacy, one that I find appealing. It strikes me that a poet can use language to hold a reader at a distance–can perform acrobatic feats with language—look—be amazed—or a poet can use language to invite a reader in a bit—into a particular moment, or, say, into the poem itself. And this inviting, it can be terribly deft and skillful. Achieving a kind of naturalness of tone—a sense of conversation—but, at the same time, it’s not literal conversation. It’s a distillation of conversation—an essence of conversation. Still, it has the sound of conversation, the cadence. Robert Frost does this. William Carlos Williams sometimes. Deft but not showy. Ordinary in the way a Shaker chair is ordinary? The poem doesn’t actually begin with the “I” in the car with the young child. The poem begins when the neighbor, Pablo, another four-year-old, has lost his wand and he’s trying to perform spells with his finger but that’s not working so well, and his mother tries to give him a chopstick to use, but—nope—that’s not going to do it. (A poet these days in Pablo’s predicament then? Trying to perform spells without a wand? Trying to weave magic with only the most ordinary language?) The poem continues with the daughter in the car. It locates itself in a particular day—yesterday. The daughter is not content with the mother’s account of her day–the sandwich and the e-mails. She wants to know “the whole thing.” And the mother answers. It’s one of the surprises of the poem, that turn.And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, ok Elise died Oh. The poem continues: Elise is dead and the world feels weary and brokenhearted. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, in the dream last night I felt my life building up around me and when I stepped forward and away from it and turned around I saw a high and frozen crested wave. I love how this poem descends in layers. Goes beneath the ordinary. To a dream—this image of a frozen crested wave. The daughter continues to ask for more. New images are unearthed. A goose. A winged serpent. Still, the daughter is relentless. “Tell me the whole story.” And I said, Elise is dead, and all the frozen tears are mine of course and if that wave broke it might wash my life clear and I might begin again from now and from here. Ah. if that wave broke. . . An image, I think, worth going down through layers for. And one of the many things I like about this poem is the way it seems to...

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 31, 2008 in Uncategorized

I carried this collection in my purse for whole weeks this summer. Read it in the mornings with coffee. Lived with the poems for a while. Let them spill a bit into my life. Prior to this, and for a while lately, I’ve been reading poetry, when I did read it, mostly online. And it was refreshing for a change to have the whole book. To be able to turn pages. To be able to turn the pages back to a particular poem. To feel the way the poems echo off one another. I like this collection a lot. I anticipated liking it because her previous collection, What the Living Do, was such a knockout. There, Marie Howe wrote about family, about the dying of a brother with AIDS, and about the time after—the book leading up to a kind of epiphany as to what the living do after. This book is after that. After the epiphany. Ordinary time. It begins with a prologue: The rules, once again, applied One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish. The so-called kings were dead.And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story, and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it. People generally worshipped where their parents had worshipped— the men who’d hijacked the airplane prayed where the dead pilots had been sitting, and the passengers prayed from their seats —so many songs went up and out into the thinning air . . . People, listening and watching, nodded and wept, and, leaving the theater, one turned to the other and said, What do you want to do now? And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do? It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. First Sunday, second Sunday. And then (for who knows how long) it was here. This prologue, when I first read it, stopped me in my tracks. Like a gate at an entrance to a garden. An arched gateway perhaps. Lovely. Haunting. Both arresting, and beckoning. Both. You want to go forward but at the same time you want to just stop first and look at the gate—soak it in—that experience of being at the gate. The rules, once again, applied One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish. The so-called kings were dead.It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. What I remember about ordinary time as a child (I attended a Catholic grade school) is that it was the time when the holidays were over—and when the priests changed the color of their vestments. After the purple of advent and lent, and after the white of holidays—the green of ordinary time. The time after. Or perhaps the time between. Marie Howe writes here about going to the market, and the movies. She writes about limbo (Ah, she too must have been raised Catholic. Indeed. Wikipedia tells me she attended Sacred Heart Convent School.) She writes a series of poems in the middle of the book, “Poems from the Life of Mary,” including one about the moon in the well at night. She writes about marriage and prayer and reading novels. She writes about a mother’s body. She writes about loss and about raising a daughter. My favorite poem right now in...

Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 28, 2008 in Healing Places, Healing Poetry

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. _________________________________ I love that the trigger for the writing of this poem was the sound of a fountain in a shop window on Fleet Street in London. I learned about this in a footnote, in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the note containing a brief passage from Yeats’ autobiography: I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I love that it sounds here, in his description, almost as if the fountain itself were remembering the lake water—rather than Yeats. And I love that the poem has its source in a sudden remembrance—but Yeats places the poem in the future tense. Actually, he begins with the future tense and moves toward the present. The poem makes me think of Nina, a woman who was one of my teachers in the uses of imagery for healing. She once told us that when were guiding a person to conjure a healing place we should always call a person back to the present tense. Call them gently, but still call them. Not, the lake was blue and cold. But the lake is blue and cold. (Say that a person begins to conjure a healing place by remembering a lake. And say that they remember riding the old rickety bus down to the lake and they remember the dock, the soft wood, they remember walking out to the edge of the dock, sitting down, placing their feet in the water. The next question could pull a person into the present tense. What else do you notice? What does the water feel like? Not what did it feel like, but what does it feel like? And what else do you notice? And what else?) Not I heard lake water lapping. But now—right now—I will arise and go now—even though the island may be at some distance, or seem to be at some distance——— I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. Photo from Wikimedia...

Writing and Healing Idea #44: Rest Hour

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 12, 2007 in Writing Ideas

When I was at summer camp as a girl we were required every day after lunch to go back to our cabins and take a rest hour. I didn’t like rest hour then as much as I would probably like it now, but I did like it that before rest hour was Store, and this meant that you could prepare for rest hour by lining up at the small store window and buying one of those long flat striped pieces of taffy, and then, if you wanted, you could make the taffy last most of the hour. For this particular writing idea, consider giving yourself a respite—a reprieve—a break—from writing—-or from healing—or from something. Consider a Rest Hour. Or a Rest Day—or a Rest Week—you get the idea. You can launch this rest time by first writing about it—what you would most like for it to be. Or you can launch this by going to the store and laying in a few key supplies. Taffy? A good book? Lemon-ade? Or you can launch this time of rest by, well,...

Stronger than Dirt: A Recommended Book [Part Two]

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 10, 2007 in Recommended Books, Writing about Goals and Vision

In early August, in spite of obstacles, Chris Losee and Kim Schaye harvest at their flower farm for the first time. They cut zinnias and cosmos along with a scattering of wildflowers from the roadside, and they drive down to the city in a van loaded with five-gallon buckets of cut flowers and zucchini. They’re headed for a market in Greenwich Village where they’ve reserved a space. They’re optimistic. They don’t think they’ve harvested quite enough to make the one thousand dollars they’d hoped for from a first market, but they figure they’re probably carrying eight hundred dollars worth of produce, give or take. They arrive in Greenwich Village at the greenmarket, set up a card table, put out their sign and they begin making and selling bouquets of flowers. And people buy them. Things seem to be moving. They’re a little thrilled—understandably. Then, at the end of the day they count their money. 160 dollars. That’s their gross take. They subtract the day’s expenses—the market fee and gas and the money they paid a friend to help out—and their net take is zero. Zero. Their expectations have been confounded. Which provides yet another plot point in their story, and is yet one more reason why I like this book. Chris’s stated vision all along has been “to create a situation in which the land could support us.” They’d borrowed from Kim’s retirement fund to make a downpayment on the farm. They’d grown those three thousand tomato and pepper plants in their bedroom. They’d invested two years of their lives, and a fair chunk of their savings. And the net take on their first market day: zero. Kim admits, in the book, to some panic after this first market. Perhaps Chris was panicking too, inwardly. But what he also does is to make another meticulous notebook entry. In this entry, “First Greenmarket,” which he includes as in illustration in their book, he lists the date of the market, the location, the contents of the buckets, the market conditions, the gross take, the expenses—in other words, the data of the first market. Then, at the very bottom of the entry, beneath the data, he writes a terse reflection: “Conclusion: Bring more good flowers.” At the next market they take in three hundred and twenty dollars. By September a few cherry tomatoes have managed to ripen, and a variety of wildflowers had come into bloom around their cultivated crops. One Saturday in September they manage to take in six hundred. At the end of the season, after the first frost, Chris makes a final tally: a total gross for the first year of 4435 dollars. Before expenses. Chris’s first response? “. . . you can’t support a family of hamsters for a year on that sum of money.” His second response? He begins figuring out a plan for the next season. This is what I like about this book—the way they keep reflecting on their data—and revising their plan—and the way they’re able to make this process so transparent in their book. They build a greenhouse so they can start crops earlier. They choose flowers and vegetables that they know now will grow well and sell well. They become more skilled at cutting and arranging flowers. The second year they take...

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