Transcendentalism and the American Voice

The father of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the leading architect of American poetry, Walt Whitman, had a complicated relationship. Emerson, a fountainhead of American individuality, praised the as yet unknown poet Whitman for his first edition of Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman, having been much inspired by Emerson and his philosophy of Transcendentalism, was honored by this high praise. Nevertheless, he unscrupulously realized a tremendous promotional plan and included an unauthorized publication of Emerson’s letter in a later edition of Leaves of Grass. For this brazen act Whitman received much criticism. Emerson had generously, albeit privately, acknowledged this budding poet as the poetic voice for Transcendentalism: “I give you joy of your free and brave thought.” Whitman shamelessly exploited this unsolicited praise without any recognition of Emerson’s bearing on his poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American scholar who joined other New England intellectuals to form the Transcendental Club. Transcendentalism emerged from Boston Unitarianism and the German Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The core belief was that humans were at their best in nature and uncorrupted by institutions and society. Adherents believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, self-reliance, and non-conformity. Emerson’s first book, Nature, which he published anonymously at his own expense, is the quintessential treatise on Transcendental thought:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (Emerson 511).

 Nature established Emerson as an intellectual force to be reckoned with, however, “because he so valued individual self-culture, Emerson was skeptical of the social reforms” that swept the country in the mid 19^th Century (Baym et al. 507). Despite his skepticism, he did support the emancipation of women and slaves and praised a homosexual poet.

Walt Whitman illustrated Emerson’s veneration of nature and self in his heroic poem “Song of Myself.” He opens with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” and continues with:

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy (Whitman 1025).

Whitman’s “transparent eyeball” is focused on “leaves of grass,” a metaphor for all the unique individuals, more alike than different, creating the national character of America. In what may be considered an apologetic letter to Emerson, Whitman wrote in 1856:

Of course, we shall have a national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon—with the states around the Mexican sea—with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa—with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island—with all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis—there is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of The States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception whatever—each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat—that newer America, answering face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas and shores (Whitman 1094-1095).

Whitman went on to acknowledge that Emerson “led The States” to those shores and “have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed” (1095).

In Walt Whitman’s America, author David Reynolds referred to Emerson’s letter to Whitman as the “Gettysburg Address of American literary commentary.” Reynolds explains how Whitman should have realized his debt to Emerson:

If Lincoln's Gettysburg Address remade America, as Garry Wills says, Emerson's letter came close to making Whitman. It was constantly reprinted, quoted, and cited by Whitman's defenders, often with Whitman's encouragement. Just as the Gettysburg Address soared above details of battles or political squabbles and made an eloquent generalization about the goals of the nation, so Emerson's letter made a holistic, transcendental statement about Whitman's poetry.  (qtd. in http://www. classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/whitman-emerson.htm)

Critics scolded Whitman for not asking Emerson’s permission to publish his private letter of praise, which would have been a proper and traditional gesture. Yet, Whitman’s impropriety was a demonstration of his utter incorporation of non-conformity, one of the tenants of Emersonian philosophy. It is this philosophy that established the American voice as independent of Mother England. It is Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that welcomed all these individual identities to unite in non-conformity:

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same (Whitman 1028).

In section 15 of  “Song of Myself” Whitman lists over 50 diverse Americans who “one and all I weave the song of myself.” From the “half-breed” who “straps on his light boots to compete in the race” and “groups of newly-come immigrants” to the floor-men, tinners, masons, flatboatmen, patriarchs, prostitutes, and “President holding a cabinet council,” all are Americans with a unique resonance that rings true to the song that is these United States (1033-1035).

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed.                                      
      New York: Norton, 2012. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.

      8^th ed.  New York: Norton. 2013. 508-536. Print.

Whitman, Walt. “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature.          

          Ed. Nina Baym. 8^th ed.  New York: Norton. 2013. 1088-1095. Print.

---. “Song of Myself.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.

      8^th ed.  New York: Norton. 2013. 1024-1067. Print.

Puritans in American Literature

Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.” He exemplified this most clearly in his crisis-of-faith story “Young Goodman Brown,” which was set in late 17^th Century Salem, MA. Salem, at that time, was the site of the infamous witchcraft trials and executions of 1692. This horrific and appalling scar on American history was also the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible.” Both Hawthorne and Miller utilize the power of literary art to illustrate the light and dark sides of human nature as the epic battle of good vs. evil is played out in a community of faith. These literary classics are momentous parables that verify George Santayana’s adage “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Hawthorne and Miller documented, for all time, the historic irony of a group of people seeking religious tolerance and freedom from persecution; these individuals then established a church with a rigid moral code that punished all who diversified and sinned against this code. True tales for today?

The setting for both tales was Salem, Massachusetts, established by Puritan colonists. Puritanism was a religious movement opposed to the perceived corruption and impurity of the Church of England. The Church was beginning to accept diverse views and high church practices that Puritans aimed to reform (MA Puritans) or separate from (Plymouth Colonists). Puritans believed in predestination and practiced covenants with God and their community. A Covenant of Grace deemed some chosen as God’s people who have a contract with God. Sins of disobedience against this contract were punishable. However, because Jesus Christ died for our sins, God was contracted to save sinners who confessed. ““The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,” declares the Lord. “As for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord. “My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you, and my words that I have put in your mouth will always be on your lips, on the lips of your children and on the lips of their descendants—from this time on and forever,” says the Lord” (Isaiah 59:20-21). The final covenant, the Covenant of Good Works, promised eternal life in heaven for a pure and righteous life on earth. For New England Puritans, these covenants offered a means of organization and governance both in the church and new Colonial society. God’s law was the only law and there was no separation of church and state. The strict laws of church and state left no room for error, despite the Covenant of Redemption; one could be punished for the mere appearance of impropriety. It is this public righteousness as well as the Puritan belief that the Devil had as much capacity to incorporate as did God which led to the hysterical witch hunts.

In the story of “Young Goodman Brown” a naive young man enters a dark forest where he meets a fellow traveler with a “staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake,” the devil, no doubt. This is the turning point for Goodman Brown - at this crossroads he is challenged to either keep Puritan covenant as he believes to be his righteous nature and heritage, or think for himself as an individual: “Let us walk on; nevertheless, reasoning as we go, and if I convince thee not, thou shalt turn back” (621). The devilish traveler challenges the  good man’s Christian heritage saying he was with his grandfather when he whipped a Quaker and set fire to an Indian village. The elder tries to reveal to the younger that all humans have within them the capacity for both good and evil. “Wickedness or not…I have a very general acquaintance here in New England” (621). This is the beginning of Brown’s loss of innocence and faith. He goes deeper into the forest and meets many of his other Christian neighbors, his congregation heading to the devil worshipping witch’s coven. Eventually, he also sees his wife, metaphorically named Faith, and her innocent pink ribbons dancing on the winds of sin. He is devastated that all he has known and seen in the light of day is not what it appears to be in the frightening dark of night. “Welcome, my children…to the communion of your race! Ye have found, thus young, your nature and your destiny.” Was this a dream? Hawthorne never fully reveals that fact to the reader. Toward the end of the story, however, the devil dashes all hope, “Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind” (627). Goodman Brown never recovered from his loss of faith in the good side of human nature. Too true today, this November 2016 day?

Arthur Miller’s play of the Salem witchcraft trials was an allegory for all time that also revealed the light and dark sides of human nature. He wrote “The Crucible” in response to McCarthyism and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller was suspected of anti-communist, un-American (and therefore un-Christian) activities. Just like in the Salem trials, he was asked to name names of others suspected of immoral acts. In his play, a group of young Puritan girls, rather than get in trouble for playing in the woods with the black slave Tituba, point their finger at the equally powerless slave, accusing her of being a witch. The town becomes hysterical as more and more men, women, and even dogs are named as witches. Through the process of naming, the previously powerless children rise in stature and status and persecution masquerades as virtue in this true-to-life witch-hunt. In the final scene, when John Proctor was asked why he refused to sign his name said, “with a cry of his whole soul: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!...How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name” (Crucible 4.293). Proctor considers his name the key to his individual identity and independence separate from the Puritan church/state in which he lived. At this time in Salem, MA "Every authority not only confirmed the existence of witches but never questioned the necessity of executing them"(Miller 5). To call or name a person a witch was a death sentence. The only way one accused of being a witch could escape the hanging rope in 1692 was to name the other witches. Tituba saved her neck by naming others. John Proctor refused, shouting, "You will not use me! I am no Sarah Good or Tituba, I am John Proctor! You will not use me!" (Crucible 4.281). Again, he differentiates himself from the collective mass hysteria with his name. Miller’s play reflects on the power of naming to divide and destroy. True today?

There are numerous incidents of this evil tendency of human nature to scapegoat and blame others for unfounded fears, guilt, or inexplicable trials and tribulations. Allow me to name just a few prime examples before and after McCarthyism: the Holocaust, naming of Muslim Americans after 9/11 as evil terrorists; all undocumented Mexican immigrants called aliens, drug dealers or thugs; the name calling on the political stage; or the calling out of LGBT people at the start of the AIDS crisis. As an act of bullying, name calling can destroy individual lives and communities. Throughout American history, nay human history, how often have we witnessed the religious right, the fundamental righteous, justify evil acts against fellow humans in the name of God and in their fear of those who think differently? Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller understood that literary art (all art actually) can serve as artifacts to mirror our humanity and inhumanity. We would be wise, today, to revisit the literature of Puritan America and reflect upon both the good and evil truths of our human nature. This Thanksgiving in 2016, I reflect on how a righteous denial of our human nature can have devastatingly deathly consequences to the individual freedoms and diverse beliefs the Puritans sought and celebrated on that first Thanksgiving.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Nina Baym. 8^th ed.  New York: Norton. 2013. 209-220. Print.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Print.

Miller, Arthur. "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?" The Guardian/The Observer. 17 June 2000. Web.

3 September 2016.

Twain's advice for good writing

I was assigned James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans to read for my American Lit class. Mark Twain had much to say about Cooper's writing and I strongly agree with his criticism:

One of the first self-editing lessons I give my writing students is on sentence fluency and word count. I tell them that if all the sentences have an even number of words it’s like singing a song in monotone quarter notes. Variety is the spice of life. Right? Sentence length assists in the tone and rhythm of the writing. Short sentences can leave the reader breathless where as long, effusive, effluvial, winding, redundant sentences, which of course are an author’s privilege if s/he should so choose, can have a most off-putting, disturbing, or daunting impact on an otherwise enthusiastic reader. Now what was I talking about? Oh yeah, sentence fluency. I randomly selected a sentence from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and counted the words. Can you guess? Seventy-one! Now maybe he just wanted to show off his aptitude for semi-colons; I agree with Mark Twain, however, that an author shall “eschew surplusage,” “Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it,” and “employ a simple and straightforward style” (Twain 2). Instead of:

“I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white,” the scout replied, surveying, with secret satisfaction, the faded colour of his bony and sinewy hand; “and I am willing to own that my people have many ways, of which, as an honest man, I can’t approve” (Cooper 487).

Cooper could have written, 'Hawk-eye responded, “I’m white, but I’m not prejudice.”' Although, Cooper’s convoluted journey to his point may be the deer path away from the real truth. Seems to me Hawk-eye is prejudice based on his “secret satisfaction” in his “genuine white” “sinewy hand.” Genuine implies pure, which implies the other (i.e. red skin Natives) as impure, thus insinuating a prejudicial racial hierarchy. Shades of Aryan? Although Hawk-eye has many Indian friends, he is opposed to interracial marriage and would just as soon kill an Iroquois who accused him of being bi-racial.

And what’s with “vaunts himself”? Clearly an offense to Twain’s rule number 13: “Use the right word, not its second cousin” (Twain 2). “I’m not one to brag,” Natty Bumppo remarked. This would be more in keeping with Twain’s rule number seven, which states that the characters must be consistent in their vernacular and diction. Four paragraphs previous to the offensive paragraph above, the white man speaks like an Indian in a Lone Ranger movie, “Your fathers came from the setting sun, crossed the big river…and mine came from the red sky of the morning.” You West/me East- Kemosabe! Meanwhile, his Indian friend speaks like a refined English gentleman, “Is there no difference, Hawk-eye, between the stone-headed arrow of the warrior, and the leaden bullet with which you kill?”(Cooper 487). Cooper wants us to know that Natty ain’t no bimbo bumpkin when it comes to the Native tongue, that he is more peachy-pink than white, which makes him closer to red, “…he said, speaking in the tongue which was known to all the natives who formerly inhabited the country between the Hudson and the Potomack, and of which we shall give a free translation for the benefit of the reader; endeavouring, at the same time , to preserve some of the peculiarities, both of the individual and of the language” [wordcount=59 or 69 if you add the beginning of that sentence] (Cooper 487). Eschew! By the way, I wonder, did Cooper know there were over 500 different languages spoken by tribes in the continental US at the time? 

Cooper, James Fenimore. “The Last of the Mohicans.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature.  8^th ed.  Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton. 2013. 482-491. Print.
Twain, Mark. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Virginia.edu. Mark Twain in His Times, 2012. Web. 5 Sept. 2016. http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html

Me & Emily D.

Another reading response for my World Lit. class.

1129

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

            ~Emily Dickinson

I came across a “Bait/Rebait” argument published in 1982 by the National Council of Teachers of English. The statement debated was: “It is dishonest of English Teachers to ignore the homosexuality of literary figures whose works they teach” The con opinion is barely worth addressing as it quotes a letter to Ann Landers as defense and opens with the argument that “…we know that homosexuality is disapproved of by the majority of taxpayers who support the school.”  The pro opinion written by Richard Follett is based on the premise that “A taboo about the lesbian/gay identity of an author is as imbalanced as a neurotic focus on that single issue…Surrendering to deception so we will not be thought different from others negates the pursuit of truth embedded in teaching literature. The writers who have produced the literature we teach deserve to have the truth shared about their lives. We have no other moral option but to side with the truth openly” (Follett and Larson). That truth, however, even in 2016, “must dazzle gradually.”

In 1982, I was finishing my undergraduate degree, heading into a teaching career, and was about to finally come out of the closet. My first partner was an English teacher who introduced me to a canon of lesbian literature starting with Radclyffe Hall’s classic The Well of Loneliness. She, of course, did not offer this canon to her high school students anymore than she discussed Walt Whitman’s homosexual orientation in relation to his poetry or I discussed AIDS in my health classes. AlthoughThe Well of Loneliness, written in 1928, did not reflect my internal landscape (aka Butch/Femme paradigm or sexual invert), here was a character in a book who felt what I felt, experienced societal and familial rejection for those feelings just as I did. For the first time in my reading life I heard MY heart beat and break on the page. I found my people not only in the characters, but the author and her associates. I found MY history, MY culture, MY place, MY voice.

The LGBT voice is frequently silenced, particularly in the public schools. The political, literary, artistic, and social contributions of LGBT persons are often excluded, distorted, or censored from school texts/curriculum. This gap in history sends the message that the LGBT story is one of inferiority – it doesn’t count in the national narrative, leading LGBT youth to conclude they don't matter. Identity is formed from a shared narrative, a common history. Keeping this subject matter out of textbooks and discussions offends the dignity of LGBT children. Oregon school districts have made strides in the formation of Gay Straight Alliances and anti-discrimination practices. However, nationally, 64% of LGBT youth still feel unsafe at school due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Many report that the school made no effort to respond effectively to harassment.

While national acceptance of LGBT-identified people is on the rise, a study by The Human Rights Campaign reported 92% of LGBT youth still hear negative slurs about them at school, on the Internet, or from their peers. Additionally, 73% of LGBT youth say they are more honest online than in the real world - suggesting a need to remain anonymous in pursuit of self-expression. In an article in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, author Henri Cole (Middle Earth) was asked what elements of his gay identity might contribute to his unique literary voice. He responded, “I think my love of simile is connected to homosexuality. Nothing is ever exactly itself, like me” (Hennessy). When I read that, I thought immediately of Emily D.’s line, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” How many years did I circumloquaciously circumnavigate the truth of my identity, my voice? How fearful was I of the brightness of that voice, that truth?

Was Miss Emily gay? Her orientation will forever be a mystery to us all, but there is no question she had a Sapphic relationship with her neighbor and sister-in-law Susan Huntington. In 1998 I fell upon a collection of her letters and poems to Susan in a book titled Open Me Carefully. The work is classic Emily with its dashes and unconventional capitalization. It’s also filled with universal wisdom, social context of her day, and passion. Where would I be today if this poem was included in my English class along with all the other love poems of the traditional canon?

Sweet Sue,

There is
no first, or last,
in Forever —
It is Centre, there,
all the time —
To believe — is enough,
and the right of
supposing —
Take back that 
"Bee" and "Buttercup" —
I have no Field
for them, though
       for the Woman
whom I prefer,
Here is Festival —
When my Hands
are Cut, Her
fingers will be 
found inside —
Our beautiful Neigh-
bor "moved" in May —
It leaves an
Unimportance.
Take the Key to 
the Lily, now, and
I will lock the Rose — (Hart and Smith 130)

Works Cited

Follett, Richard J. and Larson, Rayna. “Bait/Rebait: It is Dishonest of English Teachers to Ignore the Homosexuality of Lierary Figures Who Works They Teach.” The English Journal Vol. 71. No. 4 (Apr., 1982): 18-21. Jstor. Web. 27 June 2016.

Hart, Ellen Louise and Smith, Martha Nell. (ed.) Open Me Carefully. Massachusettes: Paris Press, 1998. Print.

Hennessy, Christopher. “Ten Ways of Looking at Gay Poetry.” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide12:5 (2005): 10. GenderWatch. Web. 26 June 2016.

White Silence is Violence

I have been silent on this blog in part because I've been writing papers for two graduate English literature classes. Below is a reading response to Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga

excerpt from Salt. 

          by Nayyirah Waheed

if we
wanted
to.
people of color
could
burn the world down.
for what
we
have experienced.
are experiencing.
but
we don’t.

— how stunningly beautiful that our sacred respect for the earth is deeper than our rage. 

I “was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is,” Doris Lessing wrote of herself in relationship to the racial injustice she witnessed in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for the 24 years she lived there (Lessing 716). From 1925-1949 Lessing was in the center of social/political conflict resulting from the infiltration of white British settlers onto tribal land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which divided the territory into Native (unaliented) and European (alienated) areas, set the scene for her story, The Old Chief Mshlanga. The story begins with a detached third person black and white point of view. On the land is a “white farm” with a msasa tree “notable for the vivid colorings (pink through copper) of its spring foliage and for the fragrance of its white flowers” a “pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle,” and “a white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape” (718). This Caucasian landscape is contrasted with the “amorphous black mass” of other that “instilled a consciousness of danger, of something unpleasant, that made it easy to laugh out loud, crudely…there is a certain kind of laughter that is fear, afraid of itself” (719).

With this trigger-finger black and white tension in place, Lessing pulls the reader in with a brilliant shift to first-person point-of-view. Bam, we are the white girl walking through corn fields, conscious of the ploughed soil beneath our feet, “the great red clods…like a choppy red sea” (720). The hierarchy of white over black is established and the foreshadowing of bloodshed red on the land is further enforced when we meet Chief Mshlanga “his hair grizzled white, a dark red blanket slung over his shoulders like a cloak” (720).

This story, set in 1925 Rhodesia, was published in 1951 available to an American audience, “a generation radicalized by the civil rights movement of the 1950s” (Behrent). The story still speaks to the “color wars” raging in the United States today in 2016. I read my longing “to let both black and white people meet gently, with tolerance for each other’s differences” (Lessing 721). Until 2012, in my small relatively white landscape of Portland, OR, I thought, like Doris Lessing, that this gentle meeting of races “seemed quite easy” (721). But then there was Trayvon Martin and “Black Lives Matter” and “White Silence is Violence.” Tolerance was never enough and this story is an old, old story. As writer Anne Lamott said in a recent Facebook post, “Life has always been this scary here, and we have always been as vulnerable as kittens. Plagues and Visigoths, snakes and schizophrenia; Cain is still killing Abel and nature means that everyone dies. I hate this. It's too horrible for words.”

I learned as a white dance major in college taking my first African dance class that there was “a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn” (Lessing 721).  I could only imitate and hopefully not appropriate; I could fill my body with respect and awe and wonder for a culture in a land I would never truly know. Yet today, in Portland, OR, I read “it is my country as well as the black man’s country,” yet unlike Lessing I’m wondering if there really is “plenty of room for all of us, without elbowing each other off the pavements and roads” (721). Tolerance is not enough. Inclusion is not enough. Yesterday, I thought the ideal was pluralism: beyond inclusion to an embrace of our differences so that those differences blend and swirl and spin in a cosmic reverse centrifuge creating a “stunningly beautiful” rainbow Earth.

Today, I’m not so sure. I know that “Silence =Death!” But what do I, a white woman who has never even stepped on any African soil, have a right to say or write today? I am not afraid to speak, I feel compelled to write something because "white silence is violence" and I am a pacifist. But what value do my words have in this narrative? I have experienced discrimination, a loss of civil rights, but my experience is not the black experience and I refuse to co-opt the black narrative. So what, if anything, am I allowed to say today? 

Allowables
-Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

Works Cited:

Behrent, Megan. “A Golden Writer.” Socialist Worker 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 July 2016.

Lessing, Doris. The Old Chief Mshlanga. S. Akbari, W. Denecke, V. Dharwadker, B. Fuchs, C. Levine, P. Lewis, M. Puchner, E. Wilson (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature. (Vol. F 3^rd ed. pp. 716-726) New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2012.

Transformation

False Monarch

This month I finish my final class for certification in Transformative Language Arts. It is a crossroads on a journey that I officially began in 2007 at Goddard College, but really has been a life journey for me. The poem this morning in my daily reading was by Jeanne Lohmann, a NW Quaker poet I happened to meet in a writing workshop in Spoleto, Italy in 2000. The poem is titled A Certainty of Transformations from her book Shaking the Tree. I'd like to share the second half of the poem here, but encourage you to read the full poem.

"...My heart pumps messages beyond the flow of blood,
and I've achieved a person eager for renewal.
Affection's earth enough to sprout such change,
and love's the richer mix for metamorphosis.
Yet mystery is where the final trust resides
and I've been transient there at other times,
often enough to know that change is how we're made.
Surprise hides laughing around corners
and weeping is a necessary healing
doubly releasing to those who've learned
to see beyond the surfaces of tears.
Lively creation labors everywhere.
We are upheld by all we do not see,
our lives enmeshed in endless restless worlds.
The whole of me moves straight toward transformation.
Alive in ways I cannot imagine I will continue,
relinquishing all that I am to new remarkable forms,
translated in death to a fresh becoming."

Ramage

I learned a new poetry form, Ramage, invented by Robert Bly.  Here are two examples:

Homage Ramage to Daylight

One crow two caws and the day launched unalarmed

with a white-green frost unlike the usual gray.

I missed the changing of the guards

from full moon to sun star day –

a covenant kept despite my absence.

So I kneel in awe before this common morning,

after a doubtful night and daunting pall.

I kneel in awe at the promise kept by my Beloved light.

The Chronic Tempest

Lime heat startles and shouts bitter darts,

an assault on her winter skin. Hibernating squint

into the imminent past. Tears salt the edge of fear

and sweat seeps down her susceptible spine.

Across stark sand, over clamoring waves,

a bruise-purple storm hangs in suspense,

cloaked but familiar, tsunami ready

to drown her in unexamined history.

For the Malheur Bird Sanctuary

The sanctuary, now held hostage by militia men, began as a way to protect wild birds from being destroyed for the millinery pleasures of ladies' fancy hats. For the sanctuary now in danger, I re-post this poem:

Price of Beauty

The birds of paradise pay

fascinating feathery frills

marketed for millinery trade

magenta bellies and emerald throats

Fascinating feathery frills

a plume craze into extinction

magenta bellies and emerald throats

women wear the males on their heads

A plume craze into extinction

one ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold

women wear the males on their heads

courtship props of the highest price

One ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold

I would just die to have that hat.

Courtship props of the highest price

the birds of paradise pay

From Graham Oak Park

Oregon White Oak

Oaks are opportunists like the pioneers

seeking open territory, uncrowded
by fancy fir or large leaf maple

stout and craggy, crooked limbs gray
and fissured bark they are
the cornerstones of scarcity -

old men of the savannah.

The White oak splits readily

despite its hardness, and oh the gall -

calluses in their foliage,

hard-shelled hollow spheres

and lichen hanging on leafless limbs

impart an eerie appearance on winter nights.

Yet mistletoe, too can be found in the crown

of these majestic elders
mistletoe seeming to say Kiss me 
won’t you please come, 
sit under my canopy the old oak beckons

I have shade and wisdom and years to offer

won’t you, won’t you please

come, sit with me 

Cinquain Snow

Cinquain Snow

Sober snowfall

pillow-white sky

mesmerizing array

Wilson Bentley buffet

flake to individual flake

uniqueness united in drifts

Which is the illusion ~

unique or unity?

Were I to gaze

from a distance

into the glass snow globe

that is my earth today

we snowflakes would swirl and free fall

landing on a communal mound

then melt into puddles

to evaporate in

order to start

over again

or we

millions

would soon collect

on cedar limbs

like abominable

insentient beings

hanging out along Nordic tracks

a cheering crowd of spectators

in this strange race ~ a marcescence

like deciduous in winter

withering, yet still so attached