*
If you've been reading this since back when I used to make things that you could hold onto--clothes and so on--you might remember this fabric I printed two summers ago. I have two panels left and I'll mail one to you if you leave me a comment on this post relating somehow to poetry. I'll pick two names randomly on Saturday (the 19th). Please make sure there's a way for me to contact you!
The fabric is hand-printed cotton. It has been heat-set, but should still be washed with care in cold water. Because of how I printed it, there will be little variations in the ink. The panels are about 15"x32". The image is a folkloric scene of birds, goats, rabbits, squirrels, and plants.
--
One of my favorite poems (I posted it about two years ago this time of year):
A Portrait in Nine Lines
E. Ethelbert Miller
I want to hold your face in my hands
just for its laughter. I love your hat.
I was standing in a bookstore when
you turned the corner. Page after page
reminds me of your arms. The wind
sits in a park reading a book of your
poems. Is today your birthday? Yes
is such an easy word to say. I know.
This is the portrait of you I love.
The fabric is hand-printed cotton. It has been heat-set, but should still be washed with care in cold water. Because of how I printed it, there will be little variations in the ink. The panels are about 15"x32". The image is a folkloric scene of birds, goats, rabbits, squirrels, and plants.
--
One of my favorite poems (I posted it about two years ago this time of year):
A Portrait in Nine Lines
E. Ethelbert Miller
I want to hold your face in my hands
just for its laughter. I love your hat.
I was standing in a bookstore when
you turned the corner. Page after page
reminds me of your arms. The wind
sits in a park reading a book of your
poems. Is today your birthday? Yes
is such an easy word to say. I know.
This is the portrait of you I love.
posted by Eireann at
4:42 AM
54 Comments:
I don't know what to write about poetry. The one in this post made me feel good, teary. You are one of the most mysterious, complex people I read. Wicked smart, I tell ya.
mad farmer.
[wendell berry.]
the mad farmer speaks the truth. always. makes you laugh. sometimes.
this little site of yours--it's one of my favorites for sure--and has everything to do with poetry.
I've admired your words and fabric creations for awhile now. The line of poetry that has been in my mind for the last few weeks is from jane hirshfield.."I know that hope is the hardest love we carry."
What if you slept?
And what if in your sleep,
you dreamed?
And what if, in your dream,
You went to heaven
And plucked a strange and Beautiful flower?
And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower in your hand?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Perhaps it is a cop-out not writing about poetry, just picking my favourite poem. I loved the one you posted, so beautifully honest and simple. The fabric is so lovely. Do you need a lot of equipement to do that kind of thing? I would love to give it a go myself! Thank you for the inspiration and the poetry.
This Is Just to Say
william carlos williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Probably my all-time favorite poem!
hi eireann.
so interesting that you posted that poem again. just last week i read all of your poetry posts again. i have been writing some but i have so much to learn. speaking of which, how is your book coming along?
yesterday, i learned to recognize the poetry hidden in and around the dirt road leading to my house.
the fabric is beautiful.
xo
lovely poem, lovely print. I've just started reading your blog and can't wait to dive in.
Best of luck with the giveaway! I'd be a very lucky girl to win.
wow! i have never posted here before -- but i have been reading your blog for a while, after stumbling on (and loving) "music for landing planes by". ironically, a few hours before you posted this, i looked back to find "a portrait in 9 lives" to give a friend of mine, because i love it so much.
just nice to be on something of a similar page with someone i find inspiring and inspired.
meg
interesting that you post so much recently on derrida, and the "yes" etc and then chose to post or re-post a poem which appears in a book alongside a poem titled "a portrait of yes in 14 lines"
maybe i'm stretching but the feeling surrounding such circumstance is nice
I meant also to say, speaking of loves and yeses, my mind drifts again to good ol' Molly Bloom
...or shall I wear a red yes...
wow--these are so nice to read. It's a gift to find them! Thanks for all your words. James: see http://flickr.com/photos/ohbara/2674503694/ too. :)
ah, yes...
:)
I absolutely love Sylvia Plath's poetry... it's dark and intense, but the way she uses language just makes me shiver and gives me goosebumps.
One of my favorite poems by her is "Tale of a Tub" - which is probably too long to post here, but you can read it here if you want.
A couple of my favorite lines from it though:
"can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw
the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact intrudes even when the revolted eye is closed;"
"in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real."
if it won't be too much trouble, I'll post a second poem, because I just remembered it, and I really like it - the title is Floating Narcissus, and the author is Wan Ts'u (translated from Chinese):
Faded narcissus, floating down the river
to Tienouan... if you see there a young
girl dreaming, under a cinnamon tree that
has blossomed twice since we embraced,
tell her... I smell a fresh carnation to
remember her perfume.
Poetry? Me, I despise it. What a waste of time and movement of the heart, don't you think? It's pathetic to believe words will ever move anyone to anything, to think that a bird's song is poetry too. Three years for poetry is silliness and I ought to grow a garden instead.
Oh, swell, oh swell. Poetry has woken and stirred in me again, and I am so grateful.
And yes, as Shari asks, how is that darn manuscript coming along? I mean, really, a Ph.D?
xo xo xo xo and another xo
Thanks for leading me on a new trail of research today. I don't have a poem to post now, but thinking about it meant that I looked up a poet whose poems were set to music instrumentally (Agueda Pizarro) and looking in a new direction where I might not have otherwise paid attention.
i've never heard of this poet or read this poem, but I adore it, the way it skims over my own skin. Your work is beautiful.
I have been craving poems today like one craves red meat, or peppermint tea.
Here is what I have:
She says joy worth making. Not made in tonal, but long tobacco leaf hung over the row and in it I found shade and a world worth hiding inside. We ate vienna sausages on saltines, punched the meat so hard the cracker split. Our fingers little sausages, our fingers
sticky picking apart.
One of my favorites poets is also my friend: Allison Smythe. Recently she posted about home and what it means to us. You've posted about your travels and home(s) recently so I thought that it was worth including this bit from one of her recent posts into my comment:
Home is where you arrive.
....
And maybe you have to surrender something to find your way home; there is a world of other places you might be, including the place where you were born. You may need to lose a home to find one. Maybe it doesn't have to be a whole country you lose, but if it is, imagine how much deeper into you your sense of home, your newfound place, will sink. And part of what home feels like will always be the ache--that never goes--of exile from wherever it is that you are not and cannot now be again.
Home is a choice. But it's not you who makes it. You'll know you're home because it'll feel like you're the one who's been chosen.
~ an excerpt from "A Faster Kind of Sandstone" by Mark Tredinnick in Isotope
Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat.
Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman
-Anne Sexton
The first time I read this poem, I was in love with the way the words were alive and playful. It opened my eyes in many ways to what language could be. i feel inadequate in writing what this meant to me,
The ability to sculpt an image with language and sound and have people carry it with them like a truth,
beautiful.
I'm not sure what I love more, the wonderful comments that have come from offering something kind, or that so many people are like me, reading your site without usually commenting... so here's my comment:
I recently moved and was finding that words were just at the edges of things but staying frustratingly out of focus. Then I sat down and read a book I'd been given, Lynda Hull, and found I was dreaming in poetry again. The stuff between words, lovely non-language and when I woke there were lines to be written, translated by the morning sun. Here's part of one of the poems, Spring.
Light pierces the pane, glazes water
spilling from my hands over your hair.
This thin vein across your temple.
The factory whistle shrills and men walk
from locked trunks to their cars
at that time once called the gloaming
when the sky holds a dense glow
and voices shimmer then drift like shadows
netted among the branches of mulberry
and linden below the porch where we linger
over shrimp, Greek cheese.
"the sense of fateful tension, of the presence of the incredible, of impossibility surmounted, which penetrates me as I write you cannot be reached by verbal expression." Boris Pasternak writing to Rainer Marie Rilke, 1926
That is if communication between poets is about poetry, and I say it is, don't you? :)
Dear Eireann,
Thank you for all of the wonderful poetry posts - most especially your post "Walking Around" after pablo neruda (Oct. 07) which helped me through a very rough time recently. Here is my offering for you:
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives, the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we were meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
Sometimes
-Sheenagh Pugh
Your fabric reminded me of Marina Tsvetaeva who used a lot of folk images in her poetry. And in this part of the world the rowan tree's fruit is getting ripe and red now, so I was thinking of this poem:
In a red cluster
In a red cluster
The rowan tree blazed.
The leaves were falling,
I was born.
Hundreds of bells
Were quarreling.
The day was Saturday:
John the Divine.
Even now
I feel like nibbling at
The fiery rowan's
bitter branch.
August 16, 1916 (Marina Tsvetaeva)
I don't know if you speak Russian (I have the impression that you speak a lot of languages), if you do, check out the original, of course!
I love reading your blog, because I love yes, luck and love. :-)
PS. I just noticed that in a comment above Rilke and Pasternak are mentioned - dare I say that Tsvetaeva was friends with both of them and wrote poetic letters to them? Everything is connected with everything...
since I recently had a new baby these words from a Carl Sandburg poem have been floating through my mind:
You know being born is important.
You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
You understand the payday of love is so old,
So involved, so traced with the circles of the moon,
So cunning with the secrets of the salts of the blood
It must be older than the moon, older than the salt.
when i was an undergrad, i took a survey course from a brilliant but rather chilly old poetry scholar. one day we were discussing the nature of the sonnet and he broke his all-business affect to tell us about the time the NIMH summoned him.
a new schizophrenic in-patient of theirs had been subdued and regulated with drug therapy, but still could not communicate. he was speaking, but seemed not to hear others, and his words, though they had something of the rhythm of english, were syntactically confused and perhaps unfamiliar in their arrangements.
something about the way he spoke sounded to a few of the physicians like old poetry, but they could not be more specific about what caused this sensation in the listener, or even how it manifested itself.
so they called up my professor, who went down to the hospital to see about this man, who was growing more and more isolated and despondent by the day. after listening to him for a moment, prof. x immediately recognized lines from one of shakespeare's numbered sonnets.
the patient was reciting.
the professor, having nearly all 50 memorized, replied in kind with a few select lines from another sonnet, and the patient warmed to him immediately.
they carried on like this for a long while, communicating quite effectively using snippets of the sonnets. slowly, prof. x began to speak original verse in iambic pentameter, which, over time, the patient grew to be able to do as well, eventually communicating even with those who could not tailor the meter of their speech.
how the patient had grown so attached to the sonnets, or even where he had encountered them, our professor was never told.
Poetry?
Sorry, you have the wrong person...
You need to talk to my lovely daughter.
She's the philosopher.
Fabric?
Now you have my attention!
I can just imagine caressing those lovely images.
I'm the fabric lover.
The Cow
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.
Ogden Nash
I love Ogden Nash.
look
my fingers, which
touched you
and your warmth and crisp
littleness
- see? do not resemble my
fingers. My wrists hands
which held carefully the soft silence
of you(and you body
smile eyes feet hands)
are different
from what they were. My arms
in which all of you lay folded
quietly,like a
leaf or some flower
newly made by Spring
Herself,are not my
arms. I do not recognise
as myself this which i find before
me in a mirror. i do
not believe
i have ever seen these things;
someone who you love
and who is slenderer
taller than
myself has entered and become such
lips as i use to talk with,
a new person is alive and
gestures with my
or perhaps it is you who
with my voice
are
playing.
- e. e. cummings
To me, this is the most beautiful poem about the transformative power of love and my favorite poem ever.
Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!
Mosquito at my ear–
does it think
i'm deaf?
New Year's morning–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Even with insects–
some can sing,
some can't.
For you fleas too
the nights must be long,
they must be lonely.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Don't kill that fly!
Look–it's wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
–Kobaayashi Issa
(thanks for the lovely blog!)
I've always loved "the Rain" by Robert Creeley
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
Love is not all; It is not meat nor drink...
It's an introduction, to leave comments, and I want to treat it as such. With poetry & tactile handmade art, I enjoy that you devote time to true craftsmanship. Prose usually results.
The quality of life here has a slow food aspect. You can make time to be more thoughtful when you don't over-commit to the hustle and bustle around you, and craft stems from thoughtfulness.
i'd be filled with glee
if you picked me!
i know, it's lame. i'm no poet, but i know it. aack. sorry again.
how do you feel about Kay Ryan?
One of the ancient maps of the world is heart-shaped,
carefully drawn and once washed with bright colors,
though the colors have faded
as you might expect
feelings to fade
from a fragile old heart,
the brown map of a life. But feeling is indelible, and longing infinite, a starburst compass
pointing in all the directions
two lovers might go, a fresh breeze
swelling their sails, the future uncharted, still far from the edge
where the sea pours into the stars.
-Ted Kooser
***On a side note I love, love, love the fabric!!!
Night, and the moon!
My neighbor, playing on his flute -
out of tune!
- Kojo
p.s. love the fabric! i, too, make things and would love to use that fabric for some of my projects!
Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites:
Elimination Dance
By Michael Ondaatje
Those who are allergic to the sea
*
Those who have resisted depravity
*
Men who shave beards of in stages, pausing to take photographs
*
American Rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
*
Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
*
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman's stomach after lunch and later, after slowing the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs
*
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
*
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
*
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host's missing contact lens along with the dessert
*
Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice.
i have to say that you have made me take another look at poetry. i have always felt that it took another frame of mind to really grasp the poem. in its essentialness i sometimes stumbled - but when i hear you talk and describe poetry the way i talk and describe and understand fine art i feel as if the poems are not so veiled. so thank you.
your fabric is amazing. anyone would be lucky to get it!
Dear Eireann,
Your fabric reminds me of the art/textiles I saw women making when I lived in Mexico. So lovely.
About poetry: I miss it. I'm reading it often these days, but my own words seem difficult and far away. I trust that this will pass.
From one of my favorite poems, "Turning Over the Earth," by Ralph Black:
And still, somehow, we find ourselves in this / one spot, reeking of loam and the salt of caves, / tethered like kites. Still, we learn the names of home, / we learn to drift, to dig in, to stay put, we learn to love / the quick trace of fire at the ends of our fingers.
Jen
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I love how much you love Derrida
Love Song
How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects, in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned? And what violinist holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
i love this poem. it's so beautiful and touching. enjoy!
Unfinished Love Theorem
Like light
it can travel in waves
or lines
depending on the circumstances.
When I first noticed it, it was travelling in waves
and I could just see its sail pop hopefully up
on the horizon now and then
as it was keeling, or gibing,
or doing whatever brave ocean craft do
when the water is a little lumpy.
I admired its buoyancy, its neat fittings,
the way everything a person could need
was stowed in its purpose-built compartments.
I liked the way it was rigged, and aligned
with particular stars and magnetisms.
Now I’m in amongst it, I find it is travelling in lines,
the underground veins of a railway, hidden,
signposted, never drawn to scale on maps.
It is moving all sorts of things about,
taking good folk to their work, taking them out
and home to their rumpled bedrooms.
I admire its secret progress, how it can speed
or lull you on its beating window,
how it spills you out up silver
stairs and it’s unexpected sun, or night lights
shining, seeming so bright, so very surprising.
hi...
gorgeous fabric, i would love to have that for my table.
this robert frost poem is a favorite of mine, especially it's use in the film 'the outsiders'...
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
I made a new years resolution to read more poetry, starting with the weekly new yorker poems. It's made a wonderful difference to make time for this!
my favorite poem, Tigers by Eliza Griswold
What are we now but voices
who promise each other a life
neither one can deliver
not for lack of wanting
but wanting won't make it so
We cling to a vine
at the cliff's edge.
There are tigers above
and below. Let us love
one another and let go.
most comforting.
Tabletop
(written by me)
I glanced sideways across that early a.m. tabletop
you had laid, so perfectly, with yesterday's freebie mimentos
2 plastic spoons, 2 paper cups ,and 3 sugar cubes
Why 3?
I asked, but instead of answering with your sleepy lips, you traced
The white swollen birds stamped between us on tablecloth
So I'd know
2 cubes up for the birds and then my job, my lucky job
To suck the 3rd from your mouth.
Everyone else posted lovely poems but my favorite poem is not.
you fit into me
like a hook in an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
(Margaret Atwood)
Enjoy your blog!
i love your site and the fabric is beautiful...the first lines of Walt Whitman's On the Beach at Night remind me of childhood summers at our lake house:
On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
This poem is precious. The moment I read it, it made me want to write it out and give it to someone that I love.
Poetry on paper?
Best gift ever.
The panel is incredible, but so's yr reading list. I'll trade you:
Star Dust (Frank Bidart),
The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy (C. P. Cavafy),
Selected Poems (Zbigniew Herbert),
Little Boat (Jean Valentine),
Crush (Richard Siken),
and The Savage Detectives (Robert Bolano) a novel dedicated to poetry.
this fabric is already a poem
in the summer, i always become a closet romantic; it always starts in the same exact way (cliched!) i buy ornate things faced in gold, secretly re-read all the magical realists, recite pablo neruda to myself on saturday mornings, paddle around in the surf and wonder why the excess always seems to fade when it gets cool. my design style reverts to exuberant but spare mid-century modern, and i become practical again.
It was amazing to read all the beautiful comments and favorite poems (and poem snippets). It inspires me to dig up some books of poetry and start reading.
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