Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

For the vast majority of Dudley Randall’s life he lived in the city of Detroit. Detroit shaped his aesthetic and his identity. He moved here with his family at the age of six and published his first poem in the Detroit Free Press at the age of 13. He worked in Ford’s foundries, received degrees from Wayne University and the University of Michigan, and served as a librarian in the Wayne County Federated Library System. He founded Broadside Press in Detroit. In 1969 he joined the University of Detroit as a reference librarian. Later, he honored us as our poet-in-residence. In 1981 Randall was named Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit by Mayor Coleman Young.

We can hear Randall’s deep respect for the people and rhythms of this city in poems like “George”.

Rosemary Weatherston
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture

“George”

When I was a boy desiring the title of man And toiling to earn it In the inferno of the foundry knockout, I watched and admired you working by my side, As, goggled, with mask on your mouth and shoulders bright with sweat, You mastered the monstrous, lumpish cylinder blocks, And when they clotted the line and plunged to the floor With force enough to tear your foot in two, You calmly stepped aside.

One day when the line broke down and the blocks reared up Groaning, grinding, and mounted like an ocean wave And then rushed thundering down like an avalanche, And we frantically dodged, then braced our heads together To form an arch to lift and stack them, You gave me your highest accolade:
You said: “You not afraid of sweat. You strong as a mule.”

Now, here, in the hospital,
In a ward where old men wait to die,
You sit, and watch time go by.
You cannot read the books I bring, not even Those that are only picture books, As you sit among the senile wrecks, The psychopaths, the incontinent.

One day when you fell from your chair and stared at the air With the look of fright which sight of death inspires, I lifted you like a cylinder block, and said, “Don’t be afraid Of a little fall, for you’ll be here A long time yet, because you’re strong as a mule.”

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Weather.com‘s “next 10 days” feature looks promising.   A warming beginning today,  highes in the 40s and 30s til Sunday and even then a cooling trend with highs way down into the 20s.   And while some melting goes on Thursday to Sunday we should get some help with flooding from gusty winds — though tomorrow could give us more melting at once than we’ll like.   Perhaps the single digit days are behind us.  And Spring Training has begun — “hope springs eternal,” as they say.

Wednesdays this month are focussed on Martin Luther King Jr’s teaching on “The Beloved Community.”   Today we are posting  the  14  quotes chosen for places on The Inscription Wall of the MLK Memorial on the Mall in Washington.  Some are famous, some you may not have seen before.

Have a good day,

john sj

Tuesday February 18  –  Meister Eckhart  (c. 1260 -c. 1327)

Meister Eckhart, a German Dominican, theologian, philosopher and mystic, was known along with his writings for sermons addressed to ordinary people as well as to  women and men more more visibly engaged in Church life.   Eckhart died just twenty years before the peak of the European pandemic known as The Black Death which killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s people.  One might be inclined to set his intuition about the identity of God as embodied in laughter and affection as an antidote before the fact for the terrified and violent fears that convulsed  Europe in the mid-14th century  as the living worked to bury some 100 to 200 million of those who died around them.  A grim time badly in need of  the rebirth of Europe’s sense of humor and  playfulness.

How does a university simultaneously challenge its students to risk the terrors of self discovery and of attention to the whole fabric of human behavior while encouraging in those same students a resilient sense of humour about that same human condition?   It is one of the great challenges of teachers and one of the great gifts that great mentors offer their students.

This saying of Meister Eckhart might make a good short text to read outloud in front of your mirror when winter grows overlong or students show their less attractive sides when under pressure, from fear that they do not have the inner stuff to find their voice and engage the real world with generous desires.

Have a good day.

john st sj

Today’s Post — This Trinitarian saying is attributed to Meister Eckhart.

Indeed I say, the soul will bring forth Person

if God laughs to her and she laughs back to him.

To speak in parable, the Father laughs to the Son

and the Son laughs back to the Father;

And this laughter begets liking,

and liking begets joy, and joy begets love,

and love begets Person,

and Person begets the Holy Spirit.”

Monday February 17

Eight people from UDM got in the Engineering & Science 15 passenger van on Friday and drove through some wet and windy weather  270 miles to Cincinnati and Xavier University.  We were the ninth cohort from Detroit to participate in these annual weekend gatherings.  Each year I find a similar magic.  We engage in the conference theme with faculty from other mid-west Jesuit universities.   When UDM hosted in 2011 our theme was, no surprise, “Urban Commitments.”   This year focussed on the 200th anniversary of the Restoration of the Jesuits.  Jesuits had been suppressed by the pope in 1773 and restored by another pope in 1814.   No matter the theme, when  faculty  meet as peers from a network of schools we hear about one another’s university troubles & successes and trade stories about how we do things in our home places.   That’s part of the magic.    Perhaps the longer term effect on the 8 of us will be the birth of friendships among ourselves.   When we climbed aboard at the Livernois entrance Friday morning none of us knew all of us and most of us only knew one or two of us.  When we climbed off Sunday afternoon, we had the makings of friendships across campuses and colleges and intellectual commitments.  Lots of story telling about our work,  and why we decided to take the path we chose.  Lots of stories about our marriages and children and siblings and where we grew up.   Magic.

We also talked about the challenges facing universities in the U.S. today.   Along with awareness of tough times, I heard kinship and courage and  pride at what we stand for in Detroit

Magic.  Of course it was snowing when we unloaded our suitcases.

Today’s post, a reprise from September 27, celebrates the sacredness of how human beings live & work; here at UDM and everywhere in the world; all of us — faculty, facilities, offices, residence life, the registrar and admissions.  In Poem # 1 Rabindranath Tagore writes of sacred beauty woven through ordinary humanity.

Happy new work week.

john st sj

Rabindranath Tagore  Poem # 1 Gitanjali

Tagore died in the city of his birth, Calcutta, in 1941.  He vastly influenced poetry, sacred and secular, not only in India but around the world.  He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Thou hast made me endless,  such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,

and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart

loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou pourest,

and still there is room to fill.

Friday February 14

Garrison Keillor, now and again, jusk knocks me flat with his eloquence and passion for words.   Here’s a piece I came to cherish decades ago.  It makes a good celebration of Valentine’s Day in this most wintry of winters.

Seven faculty —  Yvonne Antczak and Melanie Mayberry (SOD), Mary Serowoky and Carmen Stokes (CHP), Shadi Banitaan (E&S),  Pam Wilkins (SOL) and Laurie Ann Britt-Smith (CLAE) and I will climb in the E&S nifty van for a c. 4 hour trek to Xavier in Cincinnati for this year’s Heartland Delta Faculty Conversation weekend.  Laurie Ann is one of the plenary speakers.

Have a great weekend.

john st sj

The Heart of the Matter
Garrison Keillor – Valentine’s Day 1989 — New York Times Op Ed Page

All lovers are secret lovers.  They require vast privacy because their passion, so gorgeous and thrilling to each other, is incomprehensible to everyone else, a joke, even to their own children.  No one can quite imagine the spark that lit the fire between one’s parents; their desire seems improbable, like love between porcupines.

So the children of lovers become the chaperones of their middle age, forcing them to find even more ingenious disguises — including the ultimate one, indifference.  For it’s the purpose of every couple to keep their secret, their magic, knowing that public disclosure diminishes its force.  Telling the world the truth about your true love is a doomed enterprise, amusing for the world but disastrous for you.

Love is the mainspring of our lives, and only fiction and songs tell the truth about it.  Newspapers are useless on the subject, offering antique Victorian wedding announcements, quaint old advice columns, the tangled illicit affairs of the prominent and the dull narcissism of their confessions, shallow “life style” pieces about sexuality and family, the same old horse feathers — all of it valuable as some sort of dismal folklore but nothing sharp and authentic, nothing as informative as Bobbie Ann Mason, Roy Orbison, John Cheever or a few thousand other storytellers.

This is a huge lapse of journalism that makes it impotent to describe the real world.  After all, love is no light breeze on the lake.  People die for it, people leave home,  people throw away political power for love and even for the thinnest illusion of it, as if power were cold coffee.  .  .  .

. . . .    Passionate love is more powerful than greed, stronger than the force of inertia: It has power to arouse us from the couch, whip us into shape, light the bonfire of curiosity and propel us on lifelong adventures against staggering odds.  People are capable of such love at any time of life, and people in love are capable of anything at all, including homicide, poetry, heroic fasts or endless revels.  People in love walk straight off the cliff and into midair, and so long as they hold onto their secret they never fall into the sea.

In a 1970 article published in the Black Academy Review, Dudley Randall wrote of the African American people: “We are a nation of twenty-two million souls, larger than Athens in the Age of Pericles or England in the age of Elizabeth. There is no reason why we should not create and support a literature which will be to our own nation what those literatures were to theirs” (47).

As universal as Randall’s vision of an African American literature was, however, it was never prescriptive. “A poet is not a jukebox,” he asserts in his poem by the same title, “A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets his pen in motion.”

Sometimes what agitated Randall’s heart was political, as in his most famous poem, the “Ballad of Birmingham,” which was about bombing deaths of four little girls in a Birmingham church during the civil rights movement.

Other times, his pen was moved by love. In honor of Valentine’s day, here are two such poems, “delicate and lovely.”

Rosemary Weatherston
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture

“The brightness moved us softly”

Light flowed between black branches and new snow
into the shaded room and touched your eyes.
Your slow lids made another soft sun rise
upon your face, and as that morning glow
spread in your cheeks and blushed upon your lips,
the brightness moved us softly to a kiss.

“The Profile on the Pillow”

After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,

delicate and lovely as a child’s.
Perhaps
you will cease to love me.
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,

but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.

Wednesday, February 12

Sun is shining all over this morning.  Still,  it’s only 0º at 8:48.  Wasn’t it Peter Gabriel who sang the song  “Don’t give up.  Please, don’t give up.”

Have a good day anyway.

john sj

“Beloved Community”  MLK
Starting around 1956 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began to call the world to create the “Beloved Community.”   “I am not talking about some emotional bosh when I talk about love . . . you love those who don’t love you . . .  because God loves.   This year we are posting one “Beloved Community” text around campus each week during Black History Monday and hosting conversations  about what  “Beloved Community” might  mean at UDM.  For more information, see: http://www.udmercy.edu/news_events/news/by-year/2014/files/01-14-MLK.htm

“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of hate is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of love is reconciliation and creation of the beloved  community.”

– adapted from Martin Luther King Jr., 1957

Tuesday February 11

I have not posted a poem by Mary Oliver recently.  “Making the House Ready for the Lord” emerges from the depths of winter.  If I use my imagination and take her images seriously, it makes my toes curl a little; maybe especially the squirrel.   “It’s cold outside,” says the poet,  “How deep might the capacity for welcome run?  Whose house is it anyway?”

Winter won’t last forever.   Have a blest day.

john sj

Making the House Ready for the Lord

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but

still nothing is as shining as it should be

for you. Under the sink, for example, is an

uproar of mice – it is the season of their

many children. What shall I do? And under

the eaves

and through the walls the squirrels

have gnawed their ragged entrances – but it is

the season

when they need shelter, so what shall I do?

And the raccoon limps into the kitchen and

opens the cupboard

while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;

what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling

in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly

up the path to the door. And still I believe

you will

come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,

the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering

sea-goose, know

that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,

as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in,

Come in.

Mary Oliver

Monday February 10, 2014

Thinking about these work day posts has led me to look around for poets new to me.  A friend, some years ago, gave me  David Whyte’s The House of Belonging.  Her gift note wishes me a happy 60th so that puts it 14 years back.  It’s been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to pay attention.  Someone, the poet and my friend who gave this book to me, have created a place waiting for me to find it.  That’s the point of David Wagoner’s poem “Lost” which leads off David Whyte’s book.  It’s blown me away and  so far I haven’t gotten past it.

“Lost” echoes a wisdom many Lakota friends taught me 50 years ago when I came to the Pine Ridge Reservation to learn how to teach and to become a grown up.  I use 3 short sayings as one of my email signatures.

a wisdom-saying born on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation

“Time spent baking bread follows the pace of yeast”

“Motorcycling alone; I move as a  tiny person in a vast world”

“If I pause long enough, I  hear the sound of grass growing,  and trees, each at its own pace.”

Here’s David Wagoner’s way to say something similar.  Welcome to a new work week in the middle of February.

john sj

Lost

Stand still.   The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost.  Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner (1976)

{Frontispiece in  David Whyte,  The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press, 1997}

Friday, February 7 — Snow,   Beauty,  Promises,  fatigue.

This winter’s snow is acting like winter:  demanding & labor-intense, wearisome. .  As a help to transcending plodding through these days, here is an offering from  Robert Frost (1874-1963),  one of the great U.S.  poets of the 20th century.   “Stopping by Woods” is one of his understated classics, exploring the tension   between stillness and beauty vs commitments and weariness.

Have a good weekend.

john st sj

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost. Reprinted with the permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.