Volume 5, No. 11: Speaking & Singing

Greetings, poetry people. Earlier this week a friend sent me a blessing in the form of a song. It was exactly what I needed. I’ve been listening to it on repeat and crying. The lyrics are very beautiful, and, like my favorite blessings, seem quite simple at first. But the thing about blessings is they are meant to be repeated. A blessing is something you say over and over—at the same time every day, at moments that mark portals or transformations. It’s this quality of incantation that gives blessings their power.

Every lyric in this song-blessing feels potent to me, but there’s one line in particular that I haven’t been able to stop repeating to myself: “Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker.” There’s something about the doubleness of being both the singer and the speaker that resonates with me. What does it mean to be a speaker? A singer? What’s the difference? As I’ve walked around this week holding so many horrors—ongoing ICE detentions, ongoing genocide, ongoing repression of speech, ongoing attacks on trans lives, ongoing attempts to keep people from getting vaccines—I’ve been asking myself these questions: How do I speak? How do I sing?

This week is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The traditional greeting for the holiday is Shana Tova, which means literally “a good year,” although colloquially, at least in my family and I think among many Jews generally, the spirit of the greeting is for a sweet new year. L'Shana Tova, for a sweet new year.

My favorite Jewish blessing, however, is shehecheyanu, a blessing for the first time you do something. It’s a blessing we say on the first night of a holiday, for instance, but not the subsequent nights. It’s also used for special occasions, like the birth of a child, or seeing a friend after a long absence. The blessing translates to something like: “Blessed are you, creator of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.” It’s a blessing of gratitude for arrival.

I am not religious. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve been to Rosh Hashanah services. But shehecheyanu is a prayer I carry in my body. I think about it all the time, in ordinary moments. When I see the first golden leaves on a birch in the fall. When I say hello to my favorite tree on the ridge after a few days. Sitting down to dinner with a friend. Arriving home after being away. Shehecheyanu. Thank you for enabling me to reach this season.

I’ve also been talking this week, with my sweet friend who sent me the song-blessing, about the differences between activism and caring for the world. I’m not sure we’ve really figured it out yet (most truly worthwhile things can’t be figured out) but maybe it has something to do with the difference between singing and speaking. More and more I’ve come to think of my poetry as the way I care for the world. It doesn’t serve the same purpose as organizing, boycotting, mutual aid, protest, abolition work, etc. It doesn’t have to. This is a both/and situation. What I know is that I feel called upon to speak and to sing. “Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker.” I am walking my clumsy way toward the heart of this blessing.

I know shehecheyanu is technically a blessing about firsts, about arriving somewhere special or sweet, but what I love about it is its ordinariness. Every day we arrive in a new world, and most days, that arrival brings with it some new horror, some new violence. Every arrival, every day I wake up, whole-ish and alive and wildly happy to be so, alive and breathing in the green world, I think about the people who have not survived to say another shehecheyanu. These times are not unprecedented, but many, many people do not survive precedented times.

There’s room in shehecheyanu for complicated, grieving arrival. There’s room in it for singing and for speaking. It’s a blessing, I think, for what my friend Surabhi calls defiant aliveness. A blessing for arriving in this season—this season of sweetness, yes. Sweetness alongside devastation and despair. Arrival into another moment where we, alive, can decide to care for each other in every infinite and expanding way we can dream up.

In this issue...

• A Good Read: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

• A Poem & Its Worlds: Lakes

• Some Art: What Humans Do

• Tree Talk: Building Worlds, Very Slowly

• Citation Station: Always Thinking About Lou

• A Blessing for Messy & Endless Arrival

A Good Read: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

This is a selection of Mary Oliver’s poems published in the UK, meant to be an introduction to her work. It opens with the essay “Staying Alive” (an essay I love) and contains five sections with poems from books published from the 1980s through 2004. In addition to the opening essay, the book contains one other piece of prose, a short essay called “The Swan” which is about the poem of the same name—though, really, it’s about poem-making, which means it’s really about loving the world. (”There is only one question: // how to love this world,” says Oliver in ‘Peonies.’)

Anyway, this essay stunned me and I could not remember having read it before. It contains this remarkable sentence about the rules Oliver created for herself, regarding poems: “Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose.” I was certain, if I had read this sentence before, it wouldn’t have left me. It turns out this essay was reprinted from Winter Hours, a book I read in 2007, which is why I didn’t remember it. The sentence would have not meant then what it means to me now. Later in the essay Oliver writes, “I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.”

I often think about how much I love Mary Oliver and how much I love Carl Phillips, and about how the love I have for these two poets is my way of rejecting binaries, my way of holding opposite poetics side by side in my heart. I still think this is true, to a certain extent, although I’m always questioning myself, and right now I’m questioning the idea that any poetics can have an opposite. In any case, reading this essay made me think about the strange ways Oliver and Phillips are aligned—not in their approach, syntax, subject matter, obsessions, use of language, form, or any other poetic metric—but in their ideas about what a poem does in the world and does to its maker.

What does it mean for a poem to have a genuine body? I hope to never encounter an answer in a lifetime of attempts.

A Poem & Its Worlds: Lakes

Over the weekend I took a virtual workshop with Patrycja Humienik, author of We Contain Landscapes, one of my favorite books of the year so far. She is so lovely! If you are a poet and have a chance to take a class with her, I recommend it so much. The workshop was called “Lake Effect” and we spent an hour and a half thinking about lakes, reading poems about lakes, talking about lakes, and writing poems about lakes. It was so watery and wonderful.

One of the poems we read was this stunning one by Erin L. McCoy, which I am still digesting. We also looked at lake-loop by Natalie Diaz, which I am definitely not prepared to write about yet, but WOW. It contains the line, “I unzip the lake, walk into what I am—” and, okay, I’ll never be done reading that one.

Anyway, now I’m thinking a lot about the punctuation of water. Does water even have punctuation? Or is water punctuation-less? Can I punctuate a lake? The other day I wrote the line: “I can’t put a period into a poem about a lake” and I’m still not sure what it means but I know I am drawn to the fact that water both refuses and demands stillness.

Some Art: What Humans Do

I saw this piece earlier in the month at the Smith College Museum of Art and I adore it. You can see more of Amanda Williams’s art here.

Meanwhile in one of my two art history classes, we talked about this Minoan fresco of bulls jumping and guess what, I also adore it.

I was at a poetry reading the other day (Krysten Hill and Terrance Hayes, they were both amazing!) and in the Q&A someone asked what they thought the future of poetry was “in this political climate.” I honestly can’t remember what either poet said. I think it’s a fair question, a good question. I think we should be talking about what it means to make poems right now, about what poetry can and cannot do. As poets, as artists, as people who look at and are moved by art, we should be wrestling with the role poetry plays, with its possibilities and limitations.

And then I look at this fresco of a bull from 3,425 years ago.

And then I look at this painting of a pig found in a cave in Indonesia, dated to around 51,000 years ago.

I am not certain of much, but I do know that humans make art. We are going to go on making art until we go extinct. It’s worth talking about why it matters—or even if it matters. And, alongside that endless conversation: it’s been happening for at least 50,000 years. It’s going to keep happening. This is what we do.

Tree Talk: Building Worlds, Very Slowly

I’m currently listening to The Light Eaters by Zoey Schlanger. It’s basically a book about how plants are magical, except, you know, it’s science. But science is magic, so my first point stands. Anyway, I am enjoying it so much. Schlanger loves plants, and respects them deeply. She talks to a lot of botanists and other plant scientists about their work because she basically cannot stop thinking about plants (relatable). The chapter I just read is all about how plants have developed ways to hear! Schlanger is most interested in the question of plant intelligence, which is apparently a hot item in the science world, but I’m sort of like, well, I’ve put my hands on my favorite tree and I’ve watched it change season to season and I know—I know—it knows things I will never know.

I love the way Schalnger wrestles with what intelligence, communication, and consciousness mean. She does so through science, but she never loses her sense of reverence and wonder for plants. Which, again—science is reverence and wonder. This question of how to be in relationship with beings whose experience of the world is so beyond my understanding is always on my mind these days. So this book is really doing it for me.

The other day my boss (who is also my friend) and I were having a weekly check-in, talking about how we’re doing. I was talking about how daunting the task in front of me feels, the task of changing my life so that I can give more of myself to the world, the task of trying, in daily ways and as-yet-to-be-imagined ways, to build pockets of the world I want to live in. I was talking about how slow it all felt.

And he said: “That’s what trees do. They build the world they want to live in, very, very slowly.”

Citation Station: Always Thinking About Lou

This week I read The Lilac People by Milo Todd, easily one of my favorite novels of the year. It’s devastating, but also incredibly beautiful. It follows several trans men on two timelines, in 1933 and 1945 Germany. I am still processing it, and will be for a long time, but it has left me with so much to think and feel about archives and the responsibility of queerness, complicity and grief, how to live a moral life under facsism, the relationship between survival and liberation. Shout out to my friend Camilla for a) telling me to read this book and b) articulating the tension between survival and liberation that underpins this book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Lou Sullivan lately (I am always thinking about him). I’ve been thinking about how grateful I am that we have his diaries. I mean, grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s hard for me to imagine being in the world without that gift. But the diaries are not his life. He documented his life in those pages, and then he died. And I’ve been thinking about citation as an act of love, and about how Lou is everywhere, all over trans lit, all over trans liberation movements, how he’s not the only one, but how he’s one of the ones. And I’m thinking about all the ways his life—not the record of it he put into the archive, but his actual living—has touched so many people. All the ripples his living made. The conversations, the touches, the meetings, the moments of laughter, the sex, the phone calls. Where do all of those things live? There is a difference between an archive and a life. A difference between citation and lineage. A difference between survival and liberation.

Apparently Milo Todd named the characters in his novel after real trans men who lived during that time. Here is a photo of Lou Sullivan that I love more than most photos that exist in the world:

A Blessing for Messy & Endless Arrival

I’ll leave you with two more lines from the blessing that’s been animating my week.

“May you enter now as otter, without falter, into water.”

“Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing.”

Shana tova, friends. Thank you for being here. Wishing you all moments of sweetness and strength in the bleak and (in the little world-pockets that we make, yes, brightening) hours ahead.