Writing

Happy Birthday Robert Burns

By Chip Cain | Published January 25, 2010

Scotland’s, favorite son, poet and songwriter is turning 251 today. Robert Burns is most remembered for the song Auld Lang Syne but has had over 368 of his poems recorded in song. Almost all of his works were written in the Scottish dialect of his day and have been translated into English for our benefit. He’s not my favorite poet, but is an influential one and as such I couldn’t pass up sharing his birthday with you. If you wish to read a sampling of his poems they can be found at the Poets website.

The Gift of The Unknown

By Chip Cain | Published January 12, 2009

As our culture changes, Walter Brueggemann has observed, we must restate eternal truths in order for them to remain truthful. For the faithful, the artistic imagination can safeguard the strangeness and newness of the gospel, preserving it from domestication by our ideologies and culture. This year, the Trinity Arts Conference theme urges us to curiosity and courage as we approach the changes essential to vibrant art.

Each year the Trinity Arts Conference draws filmmakers, journalists, actors, writers, poets, composers, visual artists, dancers, and musicians for three days of workshops, seminars, lectures, readings, exhibitions, and performances. We’ll meet in the congenial and relaxed atmosphere of the University of Dallas, a wooded cloister of studios, classrooms, auditoriums, and galleries.

The above was taken from their brochure

Interested? Here’s the link –> Trinity Arts Conference

A line of peace . . .

By Chip Cain | Published August 17, 2008

A line of peace might appear
if we restructure the sentence our lives are making,
revoked it’s reaffermation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .

Denise Levertov

I give myself to it

By Chip Cain | Published May 1, 2008

Although April 30th signals the end of National Poetry Month I sincerely hope you have enjoyed the poems and are inspired to pursue some on your own.

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
-Rilke

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes

By Chip Cain | Published April 30, 2008

The Day Is Gone, And All Its Sweets Are Gone

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and lang’rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday—or holinight
Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I’ve read love’s missal through today,
He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

by John Keats

Why, then, do I reject the bliss

By Chip Cain | Published April 29, 2008

On Preparing to Open the Bible

Why must I measure my accomplishments
against sick
and dying, the saint, the confessor, Mary
mourning the passage of a son
so superior to ordinary man
the He, according to our Lord, could die for one
and all. I live, and do the best I can.
And yet I worry over this
strange and lasting story
told by a bunch of martyrs. Will I miss
the opportunities of heavenly glory
if I get drunk, and fall asleep tonight
on the couch, stinking like a goat?
I guess I hope
my incontinence and flight
will be construed as human in the end.
I wish to be forgiven. Don’t we all?
Today I heard a friend,
a little boy, got picked up at a mall
and was abruptly sodomized
by some dumb bastard professing love to him.
Tomorrow I must look him in the eyes
and tell him to begin
by going back to life
and the fullness thereof. It makes me sick.
God won’t set things right.
Does He think. “You are much too quick
to judge My ways
when you should suffer like the rest
the mysteriousness of all your days
and nights. Read Me. I know what’s best.”
And so I meditate,
looking out the window into fields,
and wait
to read of Him who healed
the dying, who comforted the sick.
I’d like to think that I’m too smart for this.
But I am lying.
Why, then, do I reject the bliss
of giving in to Him, whom I like nonetheless?
In fact, I am like all the rest,
bewildered, odd – the earth is not enough
for those who wonder what they’re doing here.
I blow my nose,
supposing I have nothing more to fear,
then close
the book which I had flung
back in a rage
to think of that vastly superior age
when Christ came down from the clouds
to drink, and speak, blessing the human figure.
It is not the same.
The butcher, the baker, the unbeliever
hold fast to the things that make them glad
again and again. I am one of them.

by Dennis Sampson

'May you live in interesting times.' Chinese curse

By Chip Cain | Published April 25, 2008

Being Boring

‘May you live in interesting times.’ Chinese curse

 

If you ask me ‘What’s new?’, I have nothing to say

Except that the garden is growing.

I had a slight cold but it’s better today.

I’m content with the way things are going.

Yes, he is the same as he usually is,

Still eating and sleeping and snoring.

I get on with my work. He gets on with his.

I know this is all very boring.

 

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:

Tears and passion – I’ve used up a tankful.

No news is good news, and long may it last.

If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.

A happier cabbage you never did see,

My vegetable spirits are soaring.

If you’re after excitement, steer well clear of me.

I want to go on being boring.

 

I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for,

If you don’t need to find a new lover?

You drink and you listen and drink a bit more

And you take the next day to recover.

Someone to stay home with was all my desire

And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring,

I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire

To go on and on being boring.

 

by  Wendy Cope

An apology to William Doreski and Nancy Henry

By Chip Cain | Published April 24, 2008

If you read today’s poem ‘Death of An Old Dog’ earlier today and cameback to it again and thought the author’s name is different, you would be correct. I errantly assiged the poem to William Doreski when it was written by Nancy Henry.

Both poets are personal favorites of mine which is in part why the error. I apologize to them both and to you the readers. At least now you get to follow up on two fine poets.

She lies down there to be sipped up by the dewy grasses

By Chip Cain | Published April 24, 2008

Death of the Old Dog

It is time for the old dog to slip down
beneath the grass, to taste the sharp iron
of earth on her broad lolling tongue,
to yield the sap of her eyes to the blind worm
and her thick brown pelt to the cold roots
of the twisted Northern Spy behind the barn.
Her deep moans will shudder in its branches
with the wind that rattles the storm door
as she once did, let me in
to my coiled rag rug by the fire,
let me in.
She lies down there to be sipped up by the dewy grasses
to be swept, a colored dust-cloud,
painting the high sweep of canyon wind,
to be dropped from a hawk’s lizardy talons
becoming hawk, wind and all,
the clear substance that they swim in,
the slow honey amber of memory and light.

by Nancy Henry

There is time to read

By Chip Cain | Published April 23, 2008

The Perfect Day

You wake with
no aches
in the arms
of your beloved
to the smell of fresh coffee
you eat a giant breakfast
with no thought
of carbs
there is time to read
with a purring cat on your lap
later you walk by the ocean
with your dog
on this cut crystal day
your favorite music and the sun
fill the house
a short delicious nap
under a fleece throw
comes later
and the phone doesn’t ring
at dusk you roast a chicken,
bake bread, make an exquisite
chocolate cake
for some friends
you’ve been missing
someone brings you an
unexpected present
and the wine is just right with the food
after a wonderful party
you sink into sleep
in a clean nightgown
in fresh sheets
your sweetheart doesn’t snore
and in your dreams
and old piece of sadness
lifts away

by Alice N. Persons

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

By Chip Cain | Published April 22, 2008

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

by Philip Larkin

To coax an inquisitive soul

By Chip Cain | Published April 21, 2008

Happiness

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain –
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating –

and because this morning
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax an inquisitive soul
from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,
I drove into town to drink tea in the café
and write notes in a journal – mist rose from the bay
like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,
and a small flock of tundra swans
for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass
in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,
they are also called whistling swans, are very white,
and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,
and the notebook, turned to a new page,
was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,
I wrote: happiness! it is December; very cold,
we woke early this morning,
and lay in bed kissing,
our eyes squinched up like bats.

Robert Haas

I am burned out of it like the melody underneath

By Chip Cain | Published April 18, 2008

Diary

Spring is not so very promising as it is the thing
that looking back was fire, promising:
ignition, aspiration; it was not under my thumb.

Now when I pretend a future it is the moment
he holds the thing I say new-born,
delicate, sure to begin moving but

I am burned out of it like the melody underneath
(still not under my thumb)–
was he ambiguous, amphibian?

Underneath, his voice, the many ways
he gathers oxygen; it will not stop raining
until the buds push through the brittle trees.

If they fail we will not survive,
washed and washed with rain, will we?
No,we are not there yet.

She is pushing me two ways until
I am inside the paradox, the many lungs,
and they’re at it again, gathering oxygen;

no wonder I am wrung out
holding out for the promise of
something secret, after–

by Rachel Zucker

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

By Chip Cain | Published April 17, 2008

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

by Theodore Roethke

. . . caught in the eye. It stays

By Chip Cain | Published April 16, 2008

The Sycamore Gathers

The sycamore gathers
out of the sky, white
in the glance that looks up to it
through the black crisscross
of the window. But it is not a glance
that it offers itself to.
It is no lightning stroke
caught in the eye. It stays,
an old holding in place.
And its white is not so pure
as a glance would have it,
but emerges partially,
the tree’s renewal of itself,
among the mottled browns
and olives of the old bark.
Its dazzling comes into the sun
a little at a time
as though a god in it
is slowly revealing himself.
How often the man of the window
has studied its motley trunk,
the out-starting of its branches,
its smooth crotches,
its revelations of whiteness,
hoping to see beyond his glances,
the distorting geometry
of preconceptions and habit,
to know it beyond words.
All he has learned of it
does not add up to it.
There is a bird who nests in it
in the summer and seems to sing of it-
the quick lights among its leaves
-better than he can.
It is not by him imagining
its whiteness comes.
The world is greater than its words.
To speak of it the mind must bend.

by Wendell Berry

Quotation

By Chip Cain | Published April 16, 2008

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

-Carl Sandburg

. . . waves washing against the shore like promises.

By Chip Cain | Published April 15, 2008

Snapshot of a Lump

I imagine Nice and topless beaches,
women smoking and reading novels in the sun.
I pretend I am comfortable undressing
in front of men who go home to their wives,
in front of women who have seen
twenty pairs of breasts today,
in front of silent ghosts who walked
through these same doors before me,
who hoped doctors would find it soon enough,
that surgery, pills and chemo could save them.

Today, they target my lump
with a small round sticker, a metal capsule
embedded beneath clear plastic.
I am asked to wash off my deodorant,
wrap a lead apron around my waist,
pose for the nurse, for the white walls-
one arm resting on the mammogram machine,
that “come hither” look in my eyes.
This is my first time being photographed topless.
I tell the nurse, Will I be the centerfold
or just another playmate?

My breast is pressed flat – a torpedo,
a pyramid, a triangle, a rocket on this altar;
this can’t be good for anyone.

Finally, the nurse, winded
from fumbling, smiles,
says, “Don’t breathe or move.”
A flash and my breast is free,
but only for a moment.

In the waiting room, I sit between magazines,
an article on Venice,
health charts, people in white.
I pretend I am comfortable watching
other women escorted off to a side room,
where results are given with condolences.

I imagine leaving here
with negative results and returned lives.
I imagine future trips to France,
to novels I will write and days spent
beneath a blue and white sun umbrella,
waves washing against the shore like promises.

by Kelli Russell Agodon

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

By Chip Cain | Published April 15, 2008

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry

reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows

the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of

the richness and diversity of his existence. When

power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

 

“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets

knew politics, I am convinced the world would be

a little better place in which to live.”

 

–Sen. John F. Kennedy, Address at Harvard University, 1956

The seen, the known . . .

By Chip Cain | Published April 14, 2008

Monet’s Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

by Robert Hayden

. . . Grace Where I Live.

By Chip Cain | Published April 12, 2008

What I Have Found

This place that claims my midlife
labor is not an Eden I have made.
It is a place of trial.
My hope resides in yielding
to what calls me still to stay.

No charming serpent curls
about my arm and whispers
in my ear. But I am tempted
nonetheless. Like Homer
I take the stories of my people,
I give them shape, and hand
them down. What I pass on
is truth made new — half-truth
spun through kind invention.

The world I make is finer
than the world I know. How else
contain the bitterness, the pain,
the grief? I have not lied.

I say my words; I seek
the wholeness of the world.
Like Homer I am blind.
I see what is not here.
I see this place by word
and grace a new creation.
That word is what I’ve found.
That grace is where I live.

by John Leax

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.

By Chip Cain | Published April 10, 2008

The Embrace

You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

by Mark Doty

Aquainted With The Night: Robert Frost

By Chip Cain | Published April 9, 2008

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qzo7fKGgWU&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en]

Then I heard wings overhead

By Chip Cain | Published April 8, 2008

The Bat

I was reading about rationalism,
the kind of thing we do up north
in early winter, where the sun
leaves work for the day at 4:15.

Maybe the world is intelligible
to the rational mind;
and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
for nothing….

Then I heard wings overhead.

The cats and I chased the bat
in circles – living room, kitchen,
pantry, kitchen, living room….
At every turn it evaded us

like the identity of the third person
in the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.

by Jane Kenyon

Doors and Windows

By Chip Cain | Published April 7, 2008

Door

Why should I care
Which way you go through me?

I am responsible only
For the dividing furniture

From the changeful weather,
The past from the future,

The dream from the waker.
Inside, outside,

It’s all one to me.
Who passes through one way

May come back the other way.
If what’s promised on one side

Is denied on the other,
You work it out then.

Being neutral, I choose
To stay just here.

Window

It is no more than an eyehole
On the outside scene
Making everything
– The snow, the runaway dog,
The boys brawling in the car
Skidding against the tree –
Content to be contained
Within a reasonable frame?
Or could it be

A casement dividing
A real observer from a view
Of untrammeled possibility,
Its pane connecting
A man in a room in
Steam heat and a battered chair
With his future
Which he could not see
Were it not there?

Perhaps it’s the lens that allows
Errant swift and swallows
In a downward swoop
Of their tumbling flight
To glimpse the man waiting
For the future to happen –
While he’s caged in time
They’re free to look in,
And its gift is insight.

by Daniel Hoffman

April: National Poetry Month

By Chip Cain | Published March 31, 2008

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
-Mark Strand

Beginning tomorrow I will be posting a poem each weekday and if time allows I will be posting poems on the weekends as well. I hope to see you here; and if there is a poem you like, or not, please leave your comments.

To wet your appetite, here is a poem a day early:

With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach

By William Stafford

We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.
Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.
How far could you swim, Daddy,
such a storm?”

As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

A connect for you writer types

By Chip Cain | Published February 25, 2008

The Festival of Faith & Writing is a biennial gathering of readers and writers hosted by Calvin College and will take place at Calvin College on April 17-19, 2008.

" There was such a glory over everything."

By Chip Cain | Published February 11, 2008
When I found I had crossed that line, [on her first escape from slavery, 1845] I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything.

– Harriet Tubman (1820?-1913) to her biographer, Sarah H. Bradford, c. 1868

Don’t forget February is Black History Month.

American Masterpieces: Democracy and the Arts

By Chip Cain | Published February 4, 2008

American Masterpieces: Democracy and the Art An Op Ed piece by Makoto Fujimura, an artist and a National Council on the Arts member.

 

 

“Arts advocacy is not a conservative or liberal agenda: it is the agenda of any great nation, of any civilized society.”