Going to the "Weird" City

One of the most beautiful words a writer gets to hear is "yes". Sometimes, we have long dry spells waiting for the oasis of acceptance. This is the season of both acceptance and rejection letters as so many of us check our inboxes for responses from conferences, residencies, fellowships, and of course the ever rolling train of submissions.

I was thrilled to recently find my name on the list of 2013 CantoMundo Fellows. I cannot wait to be in the excellent company of so many incredibly talented and accomplished poets this June in Austin, Texas.

When I was a little girl being called "weird" used to make me cry. To be completely honest, it stings a bit even now. (Mean people, go on notice, you know who  you are!) So I think it is apt that CantoMundo is held in a city whose slogan "Keep Austin Weird," fits perfectly with yours truly. Score one for weird little sisters everywhere. May we forever dress funny, talk funny, run like girls, perfect the art of hypnotizing goats, make cardboard shoes for everyone we love, be unafraid to wear the aforementioned cardboard shoes in public places with your siblings who have refused to wear their own (even though they fit them), write poetry on our bedroom walls when we run out of paper but not inspiration, bring home strays, read the dictionary because words make us happy, accept no substitute for the authentically strange and mysterious, and never, ever, bow to the pressure of the often suggested, "Can't you just be like everyone else?" Answer: No. Hell, no. Keeping it weird, like a Boss!

Poetry Makes Might

In light of the violence and destruction in Oslo today, I wanted to post a poem that speaks to the absolute and enduring might of loving another person, even across lifetimes. This translation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore is one of my favorite readings on any given day. In the belief that words are true power, that words create thoughts, and thoughts create reality what better reaction to violence than poetry read aloud at cribs and kitchen tables, in heatwaves and heartbreaks. Poetry whispered or sung might be the answer to life's unanswerable questions. Who knows? Given enough attention, poetry might have the power to make enough space in our hearts for peace--for might as expressed today causing the end of human life is an empty mouth; the abyss of an expressionless face. Be mighty in response, read poetry this week to yourself or anyone who will listen. Maybe start with this one:

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

~Rabindranath Tagore

From Selected Poems, Translated by William Radice

Read Silver Sparrow

Summer is one of my favorite times to read, and I would bet it is one of yours too. Especially right now as so many of us are in the grips of a serious heatwave. Why not turn on the fan, turn up the air conditioning, put your feet up and read. My recommendation this week is Silver Sparrow, the third novel by author, Tayari Jones. I was captivated by the voices in the novel and could not put it down. The novel begins, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist..." and the story picks up speed from there with gorgeous storytelling,complex characters,  and tension that will not turn you loose, and trust me, you won't take a breath until you reach the last page. This book has something for every reader.

You might even catch Tayari on tour, if she is in your part of the country don't miss the chance to attend a great reading. Or listen to her interviewed here.

The Chapel of Angels and Bones

Hanging from a cliff at Sitio, is a beautiful and tiny chapel (the ceiling featured here). I've visited this chapel on every trip to Nazaré, and the place (rich in it's own legend and origin connected to the appearance of the Blessed Mother) holds a kind of mystique for me that I am yet to unravel. Aside from  its absolute and obvious beauty there remains in this place a  physical symbol of an aesthetic state of being, a transcendence, as if the chapel is a doorway to another doorway.  I copied these lines from Fernando Pessoa in the notes from my journal documenting the day: My dreaming of you will be my strength, and when my sentences tell of your Beauty they will have melodies of form, curves of stanza, and the sudden splendors of immortal verse.

This day left an whisper in my ear, but memory continually eluded my conscious mind over the week since I left Portugal. Until yesterday, when a friend said he believed angels often inhabit tangible substances and give those places life. His words made me think that angels, as he described them, become the sign pointing to the next sign. The "presence", if you will, that brings inspiration/creativity  into the bloodstream. 

By chance today, I picked up two books that I have had on my shelf for awhile, George Steiner's Real Presences, and Real Presence by Nathan Mitchell. * Steiner, a linguist and cultural critic, poses questions towards transcendence (or divine presence) in modern culture, while Mitchell, a theologian, is speaking more directly the the concept of the eucharist as it exists in the Roman Catholic faith (note: this is a gross simplification of both of their works, please read them, and forgive me the understatements).

What struck me was that both "presences" were host in this chapel at one time or another, and still reside on some level side by side. Steiner argues in his work that a covenant exists between language and the world, that "whereever and whenever human beings experience meaning, they implicitly affirm the presence of Ultimate Meaning..." and asserts that this meaning can be understood as God, as Plato's "Ideas", as Descartes' self-consciousness, as Kant's transcendent logic, or as Heidegger's "Being" - that "it" remains the center to which all of these roads lead (Steiner 121). 

The chapel has convinced me: certain ideas, like certain books are as bone, and the responsibility of the artist is to  chew them carefully,  to suck their marrow, or swallow them whole, whatever means necessary to obtain their meaning in the fullest measure, to intuit the Source that grew the bones in the first place; the body where Art lives.

Tonight I Can Write...

When writing in Nazaré, the sea is a prescence that expands anything near it, creativity, poetry, even Neruda seems more beautiful with the waves roaring in the background. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXHPk-ctoYY

Bats, Books, and Saramago

A tour of the National Palace-monastery at Mafra was on the agenda today. This location, aside from being a fascinating and important piece of Portuguese history, is also the literary location of Jose Saramago novel, Baltazar and Blimunda. I'm re-reading this novel, but to actually be in the place he was writing about changes the whole game. Mafra has a magnificent library where Saramago did his research. The library has resident bats who are very popular with the librarians as the bats consume the bugs intent on eating the rare books - 40, 000 rare books to be exact.

In this photo, I am in small alcove above the church where the Franciscan monks practiced playing the pipe-organ, where the servants passed through, and parts of the aparatus to ring 16 tons of bells were stored. Here's a shout out to our own Father Dominic of the St. Louis Priory whose namesake I happened across today cast in marble. Father Dominic teaches history and would have been delighted at every crevice and cornerstone of this beautiful place.

And since today was very hot in Portugal, I leave you with this:

The day was already hot, with a dark-blue sky and one of those shining festival suns that inflame the stones in the street, gild the dull dust in the air, throw mirror-like sparkles on to windows and give to all the city that white, chalk-like glitter, monotonously alive and implacable, that tires and somewhat saddens the soul in the slow summer hours. —Eça de Queirós, The Maias

The House of Stories

Stop what you are doing and learn about this artist, Paula Rego. Right now.

Today we visited the Casa das Historias (the House of Stories) in Cascais (a lovely seaside town outside Lisboa). The Casa das Historias is a museum to the work of Portuguese artist, Paula Rego. The museum itself is art. Her work and her aesthetic is absolutely original and fierce. We were able to view a short documentary of her work, and then have a guided tour of her work. We also received a walking tour of the city by a dear friend of hers. It was an incredible day. Her work is the kind that shakes something loose in you as an artist, that says are you feasting from your heart everyday, are you breathing from every pore in your body - if not, what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?

So ends the day.