Poetic Neighbourhood
Welcome, friends and new subscribers! Today’s issue is about language and because of spring it starts in a meadow. I go back to a childhood poem, then share about Thomas Merton and Robert Lax going word-wild. And since the moon is full, there’s a contemplation on moonbeams.
Over in the Meadow
I’ve been wandering back to a familiar very early poetic neighbourhood, a place of resonance and discovery that has nurtured me throughout my reading and writing life. I remember vividly two little early reading books that for some reason transported me: Big Bear’s Sack and the delightful poem, Over in the Meadow.
Big Bear is long gone, and a Google image search shows me so many, many bear tales, but none of them are the one in my mind. Over in the Meadow is everywhere, but the words have been updated and made simpler as time moved on. (Who rhymes “even” with “seven”, right?) I couldn’t find the command to “bask” anywhere, and that had been my summertime favourite. I learned all about grammar, rhythm, rhyme, metaphor and fancy from this poem. It took me some googling to find the original from 1870. Here’s the part that says bask!
Over in the meadow, By the old mossy gate Lived a brown mother lizard And her little lizards eight. "Bask!" said the mother; "We bask!" said the eight So they basked in the sun On the old mossy gate.
This is an amazing meadow! Here at their mother’s command, ten spiders “spun lacy webs in their sly little den”, and I love how directly the lizard mother orders her eight little lizards to lie in the sun: "Bask!" said the mother; "We bask!" said the eight. So obedient.
I learned so much about language, words, and rhythm from this little poem. For example, the black mother crow taught her babies to caw. These were not a pedestrian six little crows. Language elevated them to be known as “the little crows six”. From now on they can be called “the six” as in: "We caw!" said the six. And there’s always purpose in the mother’s command. She has taught them to call for her. So we see the baby birds with beaks open wide as they cawed and they called, in their nest built of sticks.
More on how this poem works, and info on the author, Olive A Wadsworth, who sometimes signed her name O.A.W, as short for “only a woman” is here at All Poetry.
Robert Lax and Thomas Merton play in words - two old monkish writers act like fools together.
The book came into my hands at the library last month, from a cart of free give-away books and now this treasure is a night-table main feature. A letter or two each evening and I realize how wild these guys actually were, even in the supposedly repressed 1950s and early 1960s.
A Catch of Anti-Letters was edited by Merton a year before he died. It is Lax and Merton’s correspondence - so playful and free and wild and active with language games, alternate signatory names and greetings, all fun and festive yet close and caring - from Merton’s back problems and the monastery, to Lax and his writings and solitudes in Greece. All rolled along within the play way that their friend Ad Reinhardt expressed, the unlettered wordplay attitude of the Pogo cartoons. What a find!
In this 1956 Ad Reinhardt cartoon, the wordplay on the title A PORTEND OF THE ARTIST AS A YHUNG MANDALA out-Joyces Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Let’s rejoice! I mean Re-Joyce! Do I have to spell it out?
Moonbeams are the Rays of the Sun Made Cool
Flashback: The cave. The lake.
The cave of quartz high in the mountains illuminates our hearts while the reflective lake, cold and deep, holds our preserved desires and aspirations for generations to come.
Poetic imagination brings me into the stillness of the lake reflecting the moon. The full moon reflected in the still lake. Yoga nidra images come true. It all comes true, all of it.
I sit in the cave, envision that I row the small canoe on the lake, the lotus flowers and large, wide leaves (Beatrix Potter frog leaves) make this lake like the Himalayan lake, like the Albers’ Connecticut pond.
In vision, in illustration, they layer one upon the other like a layer cake of lakes.
YO HO O’Hara - no lotus, only cold depth, my canoe can row out to the middle of the lake, a bowl of mountains surrounds me there.
OM MANI PADME HUM -Himalaya mountain lake - lotus seen in meditation, in the mind’s eye.
AUM - Albers’ pond - so clogged with water lilies, wide Potter-frog leaves, our canoe can barely move through.
Full moon beams from the depth of the waters. All over the world, this reflected moon shines its meaning and power back up into the night. A more subtle vibration of light transforms. Moon reflects sun, lake reflects moon, ponds and pools reflect moon. Living waters all, calling up back to the sky. Each has a different tone or significant voice. Each is a version of the sun made cool, made poetic, made into a shining voice.
Each body of water sings or calls or tremendously echoes the vibrance of the moon in her fullness. And we are soothed by it, we are made calm by it, but only in the small waters. The ocean is the moon’s great answer, for there is death involved in here somehow.
In ourselves, our own waters are not reflecting but responding. So also we reply in kinship from our water.
The cave of quartz sings a particular tone when the moon is full. The frozen water is echoed in quartz. Deep in dark caves all over the world are the crystals of precious stones; even in the tiniest cranny, the moon's influence enlivens them. It is as if it illuminates them, for even here in darkness, there can be such activation. That enlivening is a reply from within the earth to the moonbeams, responding to those rays of the sun made cool.
(excerpt from a longer article)
Lunar Light
I’m so intrigued and affirmed by the slide images that NotebookLM creates from my writing, and have spent much of last month testing ways to embed these in my posts. I’m not completely happy with the options so far. I can either make a video, refer to an outside slide embed, or insert individual images one at a time. I wish my old friend Jim van Wyck were still here to advise me on this.1
Take a look anyway at some slides I selected for that Moonbeams piece. I’ve grouped them in three sections: Lunar Light, Resonant Lakes, and Lunar Chorus.
I see more clearly the main concepts that were peeking out through the words. Something may have been lost in this dazzling reflective refraction of writing translated into slides, but something new has emerged, too.
I’m gathering more new things to share next time. Any questions or comments? Requests?
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Curious about the rest? Writing, editing, and island life at carolsill.com.
Sadly, Jim passed away last week. He will be missed. He was a strong advocate for AI collaboration as an expansion of human creative scope.
Thanks for the tribute to Jim Van Wyck. I didn't know him well, but am now getting to know him better.
What a delightfully poetic offering in so many forms -- the imperatives of Nature, the madness of mystics, the luminescence of la luna -- and more! So grateful for your wise and playful guidance within that which can only be perceived via heart and imagination. Thank you Carol!