November 8, 2016
Most of you have read this crisp, wise, brief poem from William Carlos Williams. It came to mind this morning when many citizens in the US face into the wind’s teeth, one reality that women and men in this divided country share with each other.
blessings,
john sj
The Manoeuvre
I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they
turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.
Monday, November 7 – “not for grandeur, nor from fear”
Pretty much everyone I know around here is slamming work these days, like the heavy equipment pushing and growling as skilled workers build the College of Health Profession’s new wing. Energy blending with over-worked to-do lists and overdue emails.
A shout out to Sr. Beth Ann Finster, csj yesterday — a packed university chapel for mass celebrating her 50th year as a Sister of St. Joseph and her 32nd year at the university. Who packed the house and got volunteers hauling in loads of extra chairs? Students from this year, students from 25 years ago, lots of Detroit Mercy co-workers, some retired, some work-slammers for whom this Monday is the beginning of a new week. The congregation tested the acoustical range of a chapel radiant with sunshine pouring in. “Beth, lots and lots of people came out to tell stories about the beauty with which you live your life.” After mass an even larger crowd came over to the Jesuit Community Courtyard, partly made locally famous by the roses Beth plants there and partly by Jesuits who tend them through their season.
It would be a shame, I thought during morning prayer today, if the press of work and the tensions of this anxiety-laden election season allowed autumn to slip by us. Wherever you live, in Motown where the colors are breaking open these days, or Colorado, or Sweden, pause and listen 3 times today; let autumn be a song and you the listener. Want to?
Have a blest week,
john sj
Today’s Post – “Autumn’s russet colors”
“For the dogwood in our yard, late October
West Philly c. 1976 during grad school”
Autumn’s russet colors
Age without solemnity
Earthy and simple, they linger
Linger,
Not for grandeur
Nor from fear of the dust they will become
Their affection for this place
These ripening moments
Even me the beholder
Slows the pace of changing.
Let me be won by this warmth
To slow my chosen pace
To ripen affectionately.
jstsj
I want to thank Fr. Staudenmaier for the invitation to guest edit “A Work Day in Hard Times.” As I mentioned earlier this week, my aim has been to explore what poetry might provide us in times of great uncertainty and division, and of great passion and importance.
One of the things I find most important about poetry is the way it can exist in the gaps between things. By finding ways to describe the indescribable, poems find ways to span the seemingly unbridgeable: real and imagined, self and other, known and inconceivable. We need to be reminded that is possible right now.
I teach Lisa Parker’s “Snapping Beans” in my poetry classes. My students and I think it is a poem about the gaps that divide us. We believe it is a poem about the bridges between us.
Snapping Beans
for Fay Whitt
I snapped beans into the silver bowl
that sat on the splintering slats
of the porchswing between my grandma and me.
I was home for the weekend,
from school, from the North,
Grandma hummed “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”
as the sun rose, pushing its pink spikes
through the slant of cornstalks,
through the fly-eyed mesh of the screen.
We didn’t speak until the sun overcame
the feathered tips of the cornfield
and Grandma stopped humming. I could feel
the soft gray of her stare
against the side of my face
when she asked, How’s school a-goin?
I wanted to tell her about my classes,
the revelations by book and lecture
as real as any shout of faith,
potent as a swig of strychnine.
She reached the leather of her hand
over the bowl and cupped
my quivering chin;
the slick smooth of her palm held my face
the way she held cherry tomatoes under the spigot,
careful not to drop them,
and I wanted to tell her
about the nights I cried into the familiar
heartsick panels of the quilt she made me,
wishing myself home on the evening star.
I wanted to tell her
the evening star was a planet,
that my friends wore noserings and wrote poetry
about sex, about alcoholism, about Buddha.
I wanted to tell her
how my stomach burned acidic holes
at the thought of speaking in class,
speaking in an accent, speaking out of turn,
how I was tearing, splitting myself apart
with the slow-simmering guilt of being happy
despite it all.
I said, School’s fine.
We snapped beans into the silver bowl between us
and when a hickory leaf, still summer green,
skidded onto the porchfront,
Grandma said,
It’s funny how things blow loose like that.
Lisa Parker
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
313.993.1083
In describing what happens when we read literature, health humanities scholar Rita Charon uses the metaphor of a clearing. A story or poem, she proffers, provides a space we and others can enter, in which “any one in any place has the chance to make contact.”
A poem can be shared between all of us in a way an individual conversation cannot. And so, when we read together and share our attention to the form and meaning of the poetry or sacred text before us, we gather in the space our attention creates. In this clearing we have the chance to make contact with one another. We have the opportunity, Marie Howe suggests in her poem “The Map,” to understand:
The Map
The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.
The girl was going over her global studies homework
in the air where she drew the map with her finger
touching the Gobi desert,
the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,
and looking through her transparent map backwards
I did suddenly see,
how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.
Marie Howe
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
313.993.1083
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
Elizabeth Alexander
2009 Presidential Inauguration poem
Guest editing “A Work Day in Hard Times” the week before U.S. elections, elections that have been marked by so much contention, anger, and fear, I find myself drawn to the words that head its mast:
In easy times you don’t have to be so careful about your language; you will spontaneously find playful words, wise with kindness. In hard time it helps to pay attention to word choices lest we slide into cynical, frightened or bitter language that biases our imaginations. The poems or sacred text in these posts are beautiful, just the thing to pay attention to in hard times. —Fr. John Staudenmaier, S.J.
This week I will be posting poems that speak to what poetry might provide us at this moment if we pay it our attention—reminders, clearings, bridges.
In her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” Elizabeth Alexander poses a question, a question that asks us to remember our starting place:
Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?
Elizabeth Alexander
Hear Krista Tippet, host of On Being, interview Elizabeth Alexander on what poetry works in us—and in our children—and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
313.993.1083
Thursday October 27
Today-Tomorrow our university Trustee’s quarterly meeting, we’ll be slamming tasks and talks and visiting.
So here, a day early, is a short poem I love to pieces and occasionally post. Back Monday on regular schedule. Have a blest weekend.
john sj
Today’s Post: The Manoeuvre
I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they
turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.
William Carlos Williams
(September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams
Wednesday October 26
A New Flower “. . . I . . . found myself
with a new flower . . . ”
Strong poems find language to bring readers close to some deep, human, inner experience. Today’s post, Denise Levertov’s “A New Flower,” reminds me of Richard Wilbur’s 1921 “The Writer” (posted October 10, 2016 — https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/?s=the+writer). Wilbur writes of a young woman writing in her room, pausing to consider a next step in the process, risking youth with its brave, creative, uncertainties (“young as she is, the stuff of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy”). Levertov brings the reader deep into a moment of sheer beauty in the autumn of the poet’s life.
To this reader, both poets lead me into wonder and stillness. You too, perhaps. Best to read this one softly, out loud but almost in a whisper. Pauses help too, of course.
Have a blest day,
Most of the sunflower’s bright petals
had fallen, so I stripped the few
poised to go, and found myself
with a new flower: the center,
that round cushion of dark-roast
coffee brown, tipped with uncountable
minute florets of gold, more noticeable
now that the clear, shiny yellow was gone,
and around it a ring of green, the petals
from behind the petals, there all the time,
each having the form of a sacred flame
or bo-tree leaf, a playful, jubilant form
(taken for granted in Paisley patterns)
and the light coming through them, so that
where, in double or triple rank, like a bevy
of Renaissance angels, they overlapped,
there was shadow, a darker shade
of the same spring green – a new flower
on this fall day, revealed within
the autumn of its own brief bloom
Denise Levertov
Monday, October 24, “stooks arise
around”
Hopkins often chooses words with long historical roots that wrinkle the foreheads of present-tense readers; hence the definition of “stooks”: “. . . sheaves set upright in a field” — http://www.thefreedictionary.com/stooks
1st morning back on campus, savoring sun, gusty winds, and a high pressure atmosphere (+ 30.19 in.) An excellent end-of-October day to post “Hurrahing in the Harvest,” an Autumn favorite of many people. The only things I changed from Oct 26 last year, are the precise sunrise and sunset moments.
Enjoy the day,
john sj
Friday, October 14 – Work Day/Hard Time list takes a (Jesuit) retreat week
Packing for my annual Jesuit retreat, on Connecticut’s south shore of the Long Island Sound and on the banks of The Hammonasset River, a tidal estuary with sea birds and marsh grass. Some breathing time.
Back Sunday October 23.
Have a blest mid-October week,
john st sj
Today’s post — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali # 5
I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side,
The works that I have in hand
I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face
my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil
in a shoreless sea of toil.
Now is the time to sit quiet,
face to face with thee
and to sing dedication of life
in this silent and overflowing leisure.
p.s. Here’s a tidal estuary where I go each year to be still for a while. I happened to be standing in this place in October 2005 when my sister called my cell phone to tell me that our 102 year old mom had just died. For me, a place of wild beauty; the Long Island Sound plays with its shore line c. 1000 yards behind where I stood when I took this pic.
a special place for me
john sj
Friday October 14 – this news just out this morning
We are proud to announce the winners in this year’s Alpha Sigma Nu Book Awards competition. Among the many outstanding entries, these four books stood out to judges as examples of scholarship at its best on our Jesuit campuses.
Katherine Moran and Rosanne Burson, I am proud to know you.
john st, sj
http://www.alphasigmanu.org/index.php/asn-book-awards/
Katherine Moran and Rosanne Burson,University of Detroit Mercy
Detroit Mercy previous winners
UNIVERSITY OF DETROIT MERCY
John Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers, 1995
Carla F. Groh, Women’s Mental Health: A Clinical Guide for Primary Care Providers, 2012
Joan C. Urbancic, Women’s Mental Health: A Clinical Guide for Primary Care Providers, 2012
