Small, refreshing

Another day. One that the calendar claims occurs in 2026, although at times I disregard the calendar–another human-made thing, and I find so many human-made things destructive and frustrating. It’s not as though a “new” year puts away what has happened the previous 365 days the way I can put away the holiday decor. Which I haven’t actually done as yet. Anyway, we’re still in the first week of January, and Twelfth Night has barely arrived, so if I do want to acknowledge the calendar I can excuse my lack of clearing-away. But I can’t clear away the losses of the past year, and I don’t want to. I want to remember my friends for as long as I can.

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”

Play’s the thing

My freshman humanities professor, the brilliant, late Larry Fuchsberg, assigned Johan Huizinga‘s The Waning of the Middle Ages as one of the texts for our course…an unusual choice for American teens in 1975, as was another of our books, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. At 17, I found Burckhardt rather slow going stylistically (it was published in 1860, after all); by comparison, Huizinga (circa 1919) was refreshingly clear. I really enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I kept meaning to read his 1938 book Homo Ludens, but for awhile it was difficult to find in libraries or bookstores. Also, I lacked the time to track it down or read it. The premise interested me, though–that we humans evolved our culture from the “pointless, imaginative” urge to play, and that play is fundamental to our learning and our social structures. Also, we are not mechanical beings–the messy frolicsome-ness of people is as necessary for our survival as food, water, and shelter.

“Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.” 

Finally, I’ve begun to read Homo Ludens, and it’s even on Amazon now; also I discovered that it exists online here thanks to Yale University. Fifty years after my initial encounter with the author, I find his thinking just as interesting as I did in college, and just as difficult. As in his other books, Huizinga uses etymology as one of his methods of examining the meaning and culture of play. He was writing for an audience that he assumed was well-educated in the classics, so there are passages in Greek, Latin, and French that neither he nor the English translator bothers to translate for less linguistically-adept readers like me. Fortunately, such passages are brief and are used as sources for his argument, and I’m not reading to find fault with his material. I’m interested in his argument and insights as a whole, and intrigued by his thinking. He apologizes for his lack of sources (ha! There are hundreds of them) because he was “working in haste.” He composed this book in the Netherlands as Germany began to be a serious threat to Europe, and he wanted to get his ideas in print before he was silenced. In fact, his last few years were difficult. He had used his standing as a well-known cultural historian to criticize the Nazis and was arrested in 1942, basically house arrest; he died in 1945 just before the war was over.

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

I thank Larry Fuchsberg, musicologist, book-lover, and educator, for introducing me to Johan H. Teachers, you never know how much you may have influenced a student’s life, even decades later.

Last messages

End of another year. This one included some truly joyful times that will stay with me for quite awhile. But in that almost-inevitable reflection that arrives with the winter solstice, I find myself recalling dear ones whose lives closed in the past 12 months. I used to have physical reminders of friends and family, the last card or letter they wrote, something to put into a file or drawer or keepsake box and take out from time to time; a photograph or two, or maybe a recording of their voice on tape. Now that human communication has mostly migrated to the digital, to the “cloud,” those tangibles are much less common. But the messages persist.

A few weeks back, I migrated to a newer cellphone and, in the process, moved a year’s worth of text conversations to the new device (I’m not sure how I did that). All the old messages popped up, including three from dear people who are now deceased. Quite a different form of “ghosting.” I’ve kept in an online folder many email messages from my most frequent correspondent and long-time friend, who died February 1st, but I can’t quite bring myself to look at them yet. And it isn’t quite the same experience as opening and unfolding old letters.

I can’t bring myself to delete the messages from my phone, however. I suppose at some point that will occur, perhaps in another upgrade. Letters are ephemeral, too; all it takes is flood or fire. We have to rely on our minds, our memories, when it comes to recalling loved ones. Maybe that is what elegy is for, I don’t know.

~

As for the present–the Spirit of Christmas Present* ?–some of my Best Beloveds will be gathering here and there with me soon. Once the holiday hubbub dies down and the lonelier, cold January days arrive, I have poetry workshops to look forward to. They’ll be online, which suits my schedule in winter. Last year, I enrolled in two such workshops and found they spurred me to get a good deal of writing done, so I figured I might try repeating the process. Anita Skeen is doing another series for The Friends of Roethke Foundation with readings, prompts, and discussion on “writing toward wisdom.” In Dickens’ era, I’d be considered old enough to be wise (though most of us, Dickens certainly included, know better about age inevitably bringing wisdom). But the operating word for Skeen in this case is “toward.” It will be interesting to see where she takes her workshop participants in the new year.

* John Leech illustration

Systems

[I am aware that human hair isn’t good nesting material]

Late autumn reveals
oriole’s purse-like nest
constructed of my daughter’s hair.
Breeze touches 
what I cannot.
                                (November 2010)


~

I found this tanka-like poem, written when my daughter was away at college, among some old computer-based file folders I’ve been organizing. It’s one of many old poems of mine I’ve ‘rediscovered’ in the process of trying to keep my poetry systematized. Before I left my job at the university, I imagined that I would manage to organize and update my creative work files during the first year of retirement and keep everything in reasonable order once I had established a system. As if.

It’s not as though I haven’t made progress, made some brave efforts in the direction of archive and revision, culling and filing my drafts and “finished” poems (efforts that are both electronic and paper-based). The fact remains, however, that I do not possess the kind of mind that solves the keeping-track aspects of life very systematically; and, as writing remains a significant part of my life, it suffers from the same inefficiency. I admire artistically-minded people who can keep track of their work using logistically-useful methods that work for them. I’ve read their tips, their essays, talked to them about their systems, tried emulating them. Sometimes parts of their methods are helpful to me, but I lack something. Rigor? Ambition? Energy? The desire to spend the time required?

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

~

P. S. I continue to write my drafts with a pen.

Source material

Creative writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. In my own case, the answer to that varies a great deal. Sometimes ideas arise from personal experience, of course, but one’s life offers only so much material if you are a relatively staid person like me. Topics for poems can arise from recent headlines or from histories, written or oral; from conversations overheard in a grocery line; from stories other people tell me; from folk tales; from science books; from dreams; from works of art, and numerous other sources. It’s this wide array of possibilities that make the concept of the creative-writing prompt so popular. A quick Google search for “creative writing prompts” offered well over 20+ pages of entries, in several languages.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I have written pieces based upon prompts, especially when in a workshop or class, or when I feel rather tapped out of my own imaginative source material. I’m especially fond of writing that stems from viewing or experiencing a work of art–sculpture, painting, musical composition, dance, installation art (ekphrastic poems). Generally speaking, though, that’s not from whence my poems originate.

I can’t really say why I feel an urge to put down in writing specific reflections about something that’s caught my attention–or even what sort of experience evokes my response. Maybe I feel intrigued by an image, a detail, or an ambiguity–a question arises in my mind that I tussle with for awhile. Then, I may compose a draft and let it sit. Two days. Two years. Longer. Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.

I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.

That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.

By Robert Burton – Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1628, in the British Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84390857

Magnificent

Qesra Îshaq Paşa or Ishak Pasha Palace, Ağrı Province, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, 17th c.

For a recent poem draft, I looked up the etymology of the word “magnificent” even though I was fairly sure I knew it. Like many words, its meaning has altered a bit over the centuries, but in this case less so than most: from the old French, from Latin, the root words for “great” and “make,” it formerly referred to great-mindedness, courage, nobility [per the Online Etymology Dictionary] and later gained the additional meaning of splendor or costliness; “Meaning ‘greatness of appearance or character, grandeur, glory’ in English is from late 14c.,” whereas later uses of the word carry connotations of architecture, expensive taste, grand works of a more human variety.

The draft I was working on was about Melville and whales, but of course thanks to stopping to look something up, I went down a research rabbit hole and ended up deciding that the magnificence whales possess would be more of the greatness of appearance sort and perhaps was not quite the way I want to describe whales. But the word did put me in mind of some of the monumental temples, mosaics, palaces, castles, and sculptures I saw in Turkey last month. Many of those are “magnificent,” but they act as reminders of how fleeting human magnificence is, in comparison to whales. Whales evolved into their modern form about 4 million years ago, long before humans were modern humans, let alone building palaces or temples to please the gods, intimidate their enemies or their subjects, or glorify and deify their kings.

The photo below is of the temple and perhaps the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene (because archaeologists have so far discovered no actual tomb, the existence of said tomb is speculative, though the site is considered to be a hierothesion). The top of the hill is not natural but is a gravel tumulus. Human-made. Gravel hauled up the mountain to increase the size of the mountain and deter potential grave-robbers. Who else would do that work but slaves?

https://annemichael.blog/2025/10/20/back-in-time/

I know the theme’s been written into poetry before, but in these times it seems to bear repeating. Here’s an early draft I’ve been working on, in loose blank verse, in which I invoke a famous poet whose poem on the theme has lasted a mere two centuries. But that’s longer than many an empire has endured.

~

Hierothesion (Nemrut Dağ)

Tomb or temple, likely both, one king’s
angling for a pantheon he’d crafted
on his own, as kings will do when empire
hardens in their veins. They turn to stone.
Minions, memorize my name! (like
Ozymandias, as Shelley can attest).

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

We know him not. And what has made us pause
speaks not of his glory but of our dismay:
how much purely human work, slaves’ toil and toll,
it took, interring him this way, high up
and rubble-laid, to raise him above all.

Where are those workers’ bones? We walk on them.
This we know without a temple or a tomb.




Guascas

I don’t usually write about food, other than what I’ve been growing in my garden, although on my trip to eastern Turkey I tasted some dishes totally new to me (such as hangel, yogurt soup, and dondurma, all of which were delicious). And this past weekend, in New York City, I had a Colombian stew called ajiaco that requires an ingredient that grows in my garden. An herb that I have long considered a weed. Guascas.

While searching the internet for ajiaco recipes I learned that ajiaco calls for guascas, which apparently can be found in dried form in grocery stores that carry items common in South and Central American cuisine. It’s also used in Mexico’s sopa de guías and in some West African dishes. When I looked up guasca, I discovered that it is galinsoga parviflora–naturalized here in North America and found in my garden by the zillions. I pull these plants up constantly from April until October; there are still a few in leaf and bloom out there, despite three recent frosts.

Well then! I harvested some galinsoga and some cilantro that’s also been hanging in there through early November, and bought three varieties of potatoes at the farmer’s market (yellow, red, and white) and a garlic bulb and local onions, and got some of this summer’s sweet corn out of my freezer, and tried making ajiaco.

The act of preparing and cooking food can be nourishing in itself, when I am in the right mood. On a cool and overcast day, trees getting leafless, wind picking up…it was a good day to try a new recipe. The stew turned out well, though I will try a few more variations to tweak the flavor in future. But the thing that struck me as I was looking up various online recipes is that the food writers kept saying “guascas is difficult to find in markets and buying online may be best.”

Hm. How about checking your gardens? Chances are fairly good you’ll find quickweed or gallant soldier growing among the vegetables; it’s considered a “common weed” in U.S. gardens. Next year while I’m yanking the galinsoga out, I will set a little aside for cooking.

https://plantsam.com/galinsoga-parviflora/

Walking

Numerous so-called health and fitness articles continually pop up on my screen, and many of them not only tout the benefits of walking but claim to know how many minutes or miles of walking (or rate of speed and such) are necessary to ward off dementia, keep your heart healthy, your bones in shape, your muscles well-conditioned, your circulatory system moving, your lungs going, or to extend your life. Oh, and relieve stress. And while you are at it you can get a device for your wrist or an app on your cellphone to monitor your pace, steps, heartbeat, etc.

But not everyone can walk. Too many of us forget that, take it for granted–especially “content” developers online angling for clicks. And, while I do like walking, I don’t particularly relish being told how I should go about it. I agree that it would probably be good for me to walk at a brisk pace for an hour every day, and some days I am inclined to do just that. There are other days I want to hike up a hill, or take a pokey amble around my meadow, or wander through a nearby park, or climb Nemrut Dağ just as dawn breaks. Or curl up on the sofa and read a book. I appreciate routine, but not invariable routine.

Autumn happens to be a time of year I like a slow stroll or hike; save the brisk walks for cooler, lousier weather. Now that most of the leaves have fallen, I can spy bird nests and paper-wasp nests (there’s one of those in our tamarack tree; last year, there was one in the Japanese maple). Milkweed puffs are swirling in somewhat chilly air, red berries decorate shrubs and trees. Red-tailed hawks and black buzzards wheel overhead. No reason to churn through the scenery at a rapid pace.

A. R. Ammons wrote an essay titled “A Poem Is a Walk,” in which he describes the physical act of taking a stroll “with” a poem, rhythm, breathing, the stride; he says both a walk and a poem are useless–though you might want to read the essay before agreeing or disagreeing on the uselessness, since his essay is almost a phenomenological argument (and we have to decide what is meant by “useless”). [Note: The essay is paywalled behind University of Arizona’s site, and–oddly–the one legible free version I found is here, from the Università degli Studi di Milano! Well worth reading, though, and in English.]

I think better when I walk slowly and steadily, with pauses to look around. That’s when images come to mind, metaphors, descriptions, sensations, ideas. Sometimes, it is a kind of haiku-walking, generally undirected. I don’t plan to reflect on anything or come up with prompts for poems. And I don’t do it to improve my life expectancy.

I just like to walk. And maybe, a walk is a poem.

Elegy (dog)

I heard about Laika, the first dog in space, many years ago when I was a child; but on a recent visit to The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA, I learned more about the early space programs in the USSR and the USA and the (mis)treatment of animals chosen for experimental flights. These animals are lovingly portrayed in portraits on the museum’s third floor.

I don’t think I’ve ever written an elegy for my own beloved dog, gone many years now. But I felt moved to write this one. We’re in the All Souls Day period; I don’t know whether dogs have souls, or whether people do, but it seems a good time to do some remembering.

~

Dog in Space

Constrained
while trained,
you kept
your hardworking 
heart, your 
trusting lack
of expectations.
If you knew
you were to die
it was no different
from the street
except instead
of death from 
city’s cold
it was due
to module’s heat.
Re-entry sent
you everywhere,
cosmically dispersed.
Of all the objects
and beings
our kind has
pitched into
outer space
you, Laika,
are most
beautiful 
for your
willingness.

~~


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika

Zeugma

Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam.

Photo [Euphrates] by Fu0131rat Gedikou011flu on Pexels.com

Turkey itself is, and has ever been, a bridge–for trade, cultures, conquests, languages, religions: a place of shifting allegiances and changing empires. Arab traders brought Islam from the south, while Seljuk Turks brought their version of Islam from the northeast (Kyrgyzstan and the Turkic Khaganate, a region of Medieval-era Muslim nomadic groups with substantial dynasties and a loose empire that spanned into what is now China, hence the Uyghurs of today’s China). Earlier, the Christian gospel had arrived along the Mediterranean shores from Jerusalem and then probably through Syria to Ephesus, a Hellenic city south of Istanbul. St. Jude the Apostle/St. Thaddeus supposedly got as far as Şanlıurfa, then known as Edessa, where an early Armenian king converted to Christianity before 100 AD. So they say.

~~~

Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.

Joining and breaking apart and rejoining in new ways, Turkey spans cities, rivers, and eons.