Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday May 14 – urban farming & young energy

I’m cheating a little.   I got up early to prepare for today’s Half-Day Mission Retreat with a great mix of UDM people (1 dean, 1 associate vp,  5 faculty members,  1 coach, several more administrators, several recently hired staff members, and 3 trustees ).   Then I opened the Detroit News on-line to revel a little in the Tiger’s 9th inning come from behind win over the Baltimore O’s and I stopped at this column on the front page: “Michigan Urban Farming Initiative.”  It’s another interesting urban farm that looks to be thriving and growing over on the East Side (7432 Brush, near East Grand Blvd).  12,000 lbs of fresh organic veggies last year, more on the way as more city lots are added.

No. Not the second coming of Jesus descent upon the earth all in one piece.  Not even a UDM project, though our Law School’s one day conference, “Going to Seed: Urban Agriculture in Distressed Cities” (March 7), brought a powerful mix of experts from across the US to explore the legal dimensions of one of Detroit’s growing faces of urban change; over 1500 farms in the city, so I hear.  And that is a UDM farming project.   But Columnist by Marney Rich Keenan tells a good story that might tell you about a piece of the city’s life worth attention.

Yes, I’m also cheating on the rule that these posts should require about 2 minutes of your time.  I’d guess this might take 3.  But we’re right in the middle of summer planting time.  So . . .   here’s the column and a lead picture.

Have a good day.

john st sj

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140514/LIFESTYLE/305140025/Michigan-Urban-Farming-Initiative-produces-food-change-North-End

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 street music at Eastern Market

A couple Saturdays ago on the corner of Winder and Russell, kitty corner from Shed 2, by Rockies, the drummer wasn’t there. Pretty astonishing since he has become a fixture for quite a while. Agile and slender, instantly recognizable, he filled the street with breath-taking cadences. He was fun too, noticing you notice him, without missing a beat. He’ll be back I am sure. Well, pretty sure anyway. Since I don’t even know his name, certainty would be presumptious for a passerby like myself. Street music is like that, it shapes lives, puts a lift in a walker’s step, but you don’t own it.

The other day I came across a poetry website — This week’s poems from “A Year of Being Here”
(http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=457a3577c6b36ca98077cfe6b&id=4c951f5105&e=0b70d2e1dc#mctoc4). You can sign up on a daily or a weekly basis. I decided on weekly. This is my first browsing venture. Wendy Cope rewarded me with her contemplation of a young man on the street playing his flute.

Have a blest day.

john sj

p.s. I hope the cherry trees pop their blossom today but even without them, over by Briggs, campus looks fine.

New Season

No coats today. Buds bulge on chestnut trees,
and on the doorstep of a big, old house
a young man stands and plays his flute.

I watch the silver notes fly up
and circle in blue sky above the traffic,
travelling where they will.

And suddenly this paving stone
midway between my front door and the bus stop
is a starting point.

From here I can go anywhere I choose.

Wendy Cope in Serious Concerns (1992)

Monday May 12 — A silence in which another voice may speak

Commencement days. Lots of immediate work to dress campus at its best (missed, though, on the laggard cherry trees alongside Briggs). Lots of logistic work to get graduates and faculty+admins dressed for the solemnity; get the music right, get hospitality ready for speakers and 50 year alums.

In Dentistry many graduates are hooded by one or two or three of their kin who are already dentists; In Law three faculty have the hooding down to a rhythm. Even so, one tall grad knelt down as if to help the hooders reach over the top of his head, only to take an engagement ring out of his pocket and hold it out to the woman, one of those hooding, he asked to marry him. Saturday’s Baccalaureate Mass packed the Gesu Church. At the main campus commencement, The University first hooded Gerry Stockhausen, sj our immediate past president. His address was laced with wisdom and corney jokes. No one who had shared time with him at UDM was surprised. One UDM trustee, Brian Cloyd from Steelcase in Grand Rapids, told me how moved he was by the diversity of the main campus students as they walked to receive their diplomas. The whole human fabric, it seemed, showed itself; all of us were invited to pay attention to the beauty that we are.

Today’s post has a name for this kind of paying attention; Mary Oliver calls it “Praying.”

Have a good day.

john sj

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver

Something to catch my attention
Front sidewalk of Lansing Reilly – July 20, 2008 – 8:31 am

Friday, May 9th, 2014

This is another of my favorite poems, “What the Living Do.” Marie Howe wrote it after the death of her brother John from AIDS. It captures the experience of the one who is left behind, the everydayness of life, the small moments, the yearning, the slog. And the cherishing.

What the Living Do
Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks
in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

April 1994

You can hear Marie Howe read the poem and talk about her brother and the rest of her large “Catholic lefty” family in her 2011 interview with Terri Gross. She reads the poem towards the beginning of the interview:
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141502211/poet-marie-howe-on-what-the-living-do-after-loss

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D.

Yesterday I posted about the role that fiction and poetry can play in helping us imagine individuals when we are faced with suffering on a mass scale. Today I want to share a poem by Agha Shahid Ali, “At the Museum,” that to me captures the powerful experience of encountering another person through art. In 1990, Ali wrote about seeing the statue of a servant girl from Harappa. If it is the sculpture I think it is, she is 4,500 years old. She was excavated in 1926 in a house in Pakistan. He would have seen her in the National Museum in India.

What I think is most remarkable is the way that Ali imagines the lived experience beyond her smile. He considers her labor, her ache, the way she must have “had to play woman / to her lord.” He also imagines her sculptor. “No one keeps records / of soldiers and slaves,” but she was cast in bronze and waits, in time, for all of us to see her. And, of course, we see her in Ali’s poem too, and she smiles at us.

At the Museum
Agha Shahid Ali

But in 2500 B.C. Harappa,
who cast in bronze a servant girl?
No one keeps records
of soldiers and slaves.
The sculptor knew this,
polishing the ache
Off her fingers stiff
from washing the walls
and scrubbing the floors,
from stirring the meat
and the crushed asafoetida
in the bitter gourd.
But I’m grateful she smiled
at the sculptor,
as she smiles at me
in bronze,
a child who had to play woman
to her lord
when the warm June rains
came to Harappa.

April 1990

“The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro,” National Museum, Delhi, India

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D.

Much of my research has focused on the emotional and ethical impact of empathy and literature. How do we imagine ourselves in the place of fictional characters and “feel with” their emotions? How can our feelings for fictional characters affect our real-world beliefs and behaviors? My research has focused on cross-class empathy in Victorian literature about poverty. Nineteenth-century novelists and poets, I argue, were at once deeply invested in prompting empathy for the poor and skeptical that they could ever fully succeed.

Two of my favorite quotes about empathy are from contemporary American writers Barbara Kingsolver and Annie Dillard. Both illuminate some of the key obstacles to empathy; together they suggest how literature might work to overcome some of those barriers.

“The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else’s point of view. It differs dramatically from a newspaper, which imparts information while allowing you to remain rooted in your own perspective. A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, “How very sad,” then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter’s cheek. You could taste that person’s breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.”
Barbara Kingsolver, “Jabberwocky”

“On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
“‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. “‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’”
Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D.

The “new science” of happiness, it would seem, confirms many of the things we have known all along. Help other people. Don’t worry too much about the past. Be grateful.

Gratitude does not come to us naturally. One of the tasks of any parent is to cultivate gratitude in our children, to help them recognize the blessings they have been given.

Perhaps this is why saying grace before a meal is one of the oldest and most universal human rituals. In the Quaker tradition in which I was raised, grace is given in silence. Growing up we also said the traditional Moravian grace (a rhyming couplet): “Come Lord Jesus, our guest to be, and bless these gifts bestowed by thee.” I am afraid my brothers and I often recited it so quickly that it had little meaning beyond familiar sounds.

Now that I am a parent, my family has what we call “Gratitude Journal.” My four-year old calls names and we say what we are grateful for in our lives or our day. She always goes last: “I am grateful for everything in the whole entire world!”

One of my favorite examples of grace is from J. S. Woodsworth, a pioneer of social democracy in Canada:

“We are thankful for these and all the good things of life. We recognize that they are a part of our common heritage and come to us through the efforts of our brothers and sisters the world over. What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all. To this end, may we take our share in the world’s work and the world’s struggles.”

I would be grateful to hear how other people on this list feel and express gratitude. Please reply to me individually and I will collect responses to post on the listserv blog.

Mary-Catherine

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D.

Thank you to Father Staudenmaier for inviting me to guest curate the Mission and Identity Poetry listserv. It might be difficult to choose readings for the rest of the week, but the first is easy.
Monday May 5th, 2014
Everyone should have a favorite poem.
Mine is one that works equally well in moments of sadness and joy. We included it on our wedding program and the birth announcements of our two daughters. I expect one of them will reference it somehow when I die.
Raymond Carver wrote “Late Fragment” soon before he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty. It is the last poem in his final book.
He called it a fragment, but to me it is complete.

“Late Fragment”
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D.

Friday, May 2, 2014  — time for a little rest

Bet I am not the only one tired; and glad to see Friday. A weekend after even campus parking lots get a rest from the press and hustle of student traffic.

Here’s a long-loved poem I’ve posted before. Good coaching for slower breathing these next couple days.

john st sj

Today’s Post 

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.

Tagore 5

Daffodils at Sunrise – April 1, 2010

Thursday May 1, 2014 The First Day of May

Some friends of mine more or less hold their breath until May 1; April, in their experience, is unreliable — blustery, chilly, rainy with an occasional seductive charming day and hints of leaves and touches of hearty early flowers like daffodils. The farther north you live the more unreliable April is. But May is a month that can be counted on to deliver early summer’s blessings: flowering trees, perennials, summer plantings. In Motown, Flower Day at Eastern Market gathers the largest crowds of the year by the many tens of thousands. May is the month you get the knees of old gardening pants down and dirty from working the earth, fingernails too.

In the U.S., until the 1935 National Labor Relations Act guaranteed the rights of workers to organize (and was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1937), US labor history meant sporadic violent rebellions by workers against brutal work conditions. For people with long memories. May 1 can be more about factory worker organization than flowers. The first of the Catholic Church’s series of major teachings on the rights of worker, Pope Leo XIII’s daring encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” wwas issued May 15, 1891.

Is this a good day to pay attention to flowers or to worker oppression or to both? The human condition — relief and beauty and springtime and hope plus 21st century slavery and global trafficking. Both matter on the first day of May. Both will matter tomorrow and the next day and the next.

I once heard Alice Walker on NPR explain the title of her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. After she came to adulthood, Walker traveled to as many of her childhood homes as she could find. I remember her saying something like this: “Most of the time I couldn’t find the shack in which we lived; it had fallen down and disappeared. But my mother’s gardens were still there and I found them.” Imagine May flower work confronting the relentless horror of real, present tense slavery. That strikes me as a good May 1 prayer.

Have a good day.

john sj

Rocky Mountain National Park, July 9, 2011