"Praise the Mutilated World"

“Trying to Praise the Mutilated World”

Read: 13 Ways, Chapter 8, "Odes and Praise Songs." Also, see praise poems in SM. New!: In Karenne Wood's book, Markings on Earth, read "Celebrating Corn," (15), and "Making Apple Butter," (61).

For the past few years, I've been working on a poetry manuscript of praise poems. In some ways, it started soon after my last book was published. I always give a copy of my books to my children (they’ve always asked for one – they see me signing copies for other people and want one of their own). I don’t think either one of them read the poems immediately, but over the years, I’d see Indian Cartography sitting around their rooms, and as my children grew older, eventually we’d talk about one poem or another; it was the same with The Zen of La Llorona. In fact, soon after Zen came out, my son Danny (then about 15) asked me, “Mom, why do you always write such sad poems?”

Zen is full of poems about the loss of a childhood, loss of my mother, and loss of a beloved. Indian Cartography explores the mutilated world of post-missionized California Indians, mourns loss of relatives, language, religion, culture, land, freedom. How could such poems not be sad?! Yet somehow my usual reply, “Well, a lot of sad things have happened in the world,” was not enough for Danny this time. He said, “But you’re happier now!” and I realized, with a shock, that I am. It was a revelation. Yes, my tribe was nearly colonized out of existence, and we will never be the same. Yes, my life has been “mutilated” by alcoholism, abandonment, fear, poverty. Yes, poetry is a fine instrument for making music out of pain. But I am no longer living each day with the absolute goal of simply staying alive another 24 hours. I am no longer living by the skin of my teeth, as my mother used to say. Although I still battle fears engrained in me by the past, those fears do not guide my every move, or word. For the first time in my life I have room to breathe, time to give thanks, and the energy to accommodate gratitude. And, I decided, this survival requires - deserves - intentional praise of the same world that has given me so much grief.

About the time my son made his remarks, I was teaching a beginning poetry writing class here at Washington and Lee, and using, as I always do, some of Pablo Neruda’s odes. Edward Hirsch writes of Neruda’s praise poems,

The list of their subjects is dizzying. Nothing ordinary was alien to Neruda,
or, for that matter, ordinary -- everything was magical. He wrote separate odes
to tomatoes and wine, to an artichoke and a dead carob tree, to conger chowder,
to a large tuna in the market, to his socks and his suit, to his native birds,
to light on the sea, to the dictionary, to a village movie theater. He wrote an
ode to time and another to the Earth, an [ode entitled] "Ode for Everything." .
. . The first poem, "The Invisible Man," is explicit in its sense of the poet's
urgency: "what can I do,/everything asks me/to speak,/everything asks me/to
sing, sing forever." . . . The odes are funny, fiery and exultant, savagely new
and profoundly ancient.

This time, I read Neruda’s odes with completely new eyes. I’d always been aware of the praise poem tradition in Western literature – "Ode to an Athlete Dying Young," "Ode on a Grecian Urn." And I’d read about the African tribal tradition of praise poems, with their powerful animal and elemental imagery. I’d even named my beginning poetry workshop after a poem by contemporary poet Al Zolynas, because his line “ah, gray sacrament of the mundane!” gave me the perfect theme for young writers: learn to see the sacred in our everyday lives. The moment Zolynas describes glancing down as he washes dishes had always illuminated for me a way of seeing, an attitude, a shift of perspective, but in light of Danny’s comment and Neruda’s odes, I actually understood that seeing as praise in a completely new way. Here’s Al Zolynas’ poem:

THE ZEN OF HOUSEWORK

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the gray wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam --each a tiny spectrum --rising
from my goblet of gray wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly--like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, gray sacrament of the mundane!

So I resolved to practice writing praise poems.

First I played around with the usual praise topics – praise of a lover, of a child, of a beautiful flower – and of course, thanks to Neruda and Zolynas, praise of “mundane” beauty too easily overlooked, as with the jewel-like flesh of watermelon, the pleasure of salt, or the perfect steel edge of a pair of scissors.

But I soon realized that the world is too complicated for these to be the only praise poems I needed to write. The world is simply not constructed of inoffensive, neutral beauty – especially not for a Native woman in a colonized culture – and not for anyone who admits honestly to the brutality of being sentient. Beauty is not created out of a lack of pain, the absence of grief, the denial of ugliness. The triumph of beauty is when we take the destruction we are dealt, recognize its transformative power, and then – if we are brave, and lucky, and persistent – choose to push that transformation into praise rather than grief. At least, this is what I thought I had finally begun to learn.

This isn’t a new thought, nor is it a foreign thought: most indigenous peoples hold the belief that we are surrounded by power all our lives, but that since power is neither good or evil, but simply is, it must be treated respectfully and responsibly, and we must realize that power exists in all things – both the palatable and the poisonous, visually pleasing and the visually repulsive, the perfumed and the stinking. Respect is closely related to praise. Eagle, for example, is the most highly revered spirit for most North and South American tribes. As a powerful bird of prey, and as the hero of many myths and stories, Eagle commands great respect. Yet, Eagle is also a scavenger, closely related to Vulture, and certainly is not above taking advantage of carrion, eating dead or decaying animals, fish, even other birds. In a whole-world view, scavengers are not seen as ugly or disgusting; they are necessary, efficient, desirable and in fact a vital link to allowing life to flourish. Native peoples know this, and many tribes have songs that praise such unlikely candidates as Fly, Louse or Vulture for their crucial role in the cycle of our existence.

And so I began to write lists of those things we don’t usually think to praise, things we don’t want to praise, but to which we owe our identities, the evolution of our souls. And during freewrites in the poetry workshop, during hours in my office at home when I should have been grading, during journaling sessions with myself, I took up whichever topic was closest to me at the moment, and I explored it with praise as my template.

During this initial writing period, I started collecting praise poems by other poets that seemed to echo what I was trying to write, and I found a few that have caused me to shout bingo! For example:

poem in praise of menstruation

by Lucille Clifton

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon if
there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta if there

is a river braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel if there is in

the universe such a river if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water

pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave

Clifton's poem reminds me of Anne Sexton's, "In Praise of My Uterus," and another Clifton poem, "Homage to My Hips," both of which praise parts of women's bodies (and lives) that are frequently blamed for much trouble, or which negatively affect self-esteem.


Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Listen to Clifton belt this one out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMChVe6IKsw

But by far, my favorite is this poem by Komunyakaa, which feels deeply indigenous, and at the same time, completely inclusive. (Note: there isn't a video of Komuyakaa reading this poem online, but several other poems ARE available; if you're still looking for a presentation poem, try listening to them - he's amazing.)

Ode To The Maggot

By Yusef Komunyakaa


Brother of the blowfly
And godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork

And flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus Christ, you're merciless

With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.

No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart.
Little Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.

This was exactly the kind of transformative moment I sought to articulate: the way the boundary between ugly and beautiful shifts when you hold the wholeness of the world in your mind. We cannot have life without death, even if it is the little death of a woman’s unfertilized egg each month; we cannot have death without decomposition, and we cannot have decomposition without those like Komunyakaa’s maggot, which does the work of decomposition which is, by definition, the work of re-creating life. If life is beautiful and praiseworthy, then so it are the many thousands of small acts that culminate in life, and later take it apart for recycling. Like Eagle, the power of life and death exists as one. For another great poem about vermin, see Muriel Rukeyser's "St. Roach" at http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/rukeyser.html

In her article, "What Praise Poems are For," Susan Stewart writes that Pablo Neruda purposely experimented with the ode as a new form not just because the newspaper columns dictated short line breaks, but because the

short metre and a pleasing colloquial tone … were meant for collective public
readings, hence the simplicity of language and the expression of solidarity with
the pain and suffering of the collective. The individual is subsumed in the
collective . . . This distinction helped Neruda understand that poetry by nature
cannot be a private act, being a form of speech meant that it belonged to the
public domain.

I agree. I think that praise poems carry within them that transformative energy that can change the world, charge it with goodness, absorb and reform the mutilations of evil. In his Memoirs, Neruda asserts: "Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature's phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation . . . . Today's social poet is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and now he must interpret the light."

Other praise poems that have encouraged me:

Ferocious Ode

by Steve Scafidi

It tells you the name of the flower you love.
It takes the shape of an old woman working
a pitchfork in the hay of a garden growing
voluptuously every day in your heart; that is
to say it, being mysterious, is difficult to
describe simply and with candor. It grabs
children in their dreams like tigers grab
gazelles. It grabs tigers. It makes me say
the sweet convolutions of poetry are not so
sweet sometimes and my grandfather claws
the red clay walls of hell for what he did to
my father. And I am happy on summer days
when the lily that I love bobs and sways
in wind like fire on a ladder. It matters.
Like a ladder on fire, it is spiritual. Like
the simile in which a house burns down
inside a boy, it is tragic. It turns and turns,
laughing like a nun. It is nonsequential,
baffling, and close to death, like a woman
turning a pitchfork in her garden. Her diary
says, "I loved him." It is one page after
the last page in my grandmother's diary.
It is the afternoon, and the sun is setting
coldly over my father's head - the oval
of which he has passed down to my sisters.
It is a family drama. It breaks dishes. It
runs to me with kisses, soft. And with claws.
It blooms at night also. My Tiger-Lily. Loss.

And of course:

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
- Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

If you like Zagajewski's poem here, read the article "Risk, Try, Revise, Erase" (with links to other poems): http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=178036

Your assignment!

Try one of these prompts as your starting point:

1. Pick something we normally don't praise. Think about unsung heroes. These can be people, objects, events, ideals, concepts, even a certain time of day or year. It could be something we would normally never think of praising, or at least not praising lavishly; it could be something often praised, but for completely different reasons than those you are citing. Maggots? Big hips? How about fruit flies? Sweat? horse manure? oil? Smog? Fear? Ice storms? Janitors? Baggage handlers? Or, as Peter Meinke writes in 13 Ways, "Ode to Good Men Fallen Before Hero Come"?

2. Poems in praise of a mundane person, object, food, or ideal. Pablo Neruda (see SM) has a long series of “Odes” in which he praises common, everyday objects such as a Tuna, Salt, Wine . . . each object is given a voice, a history, a personality, a vision, as when Neruda says salt “sings” in the mines, “with a mouth / smothered / by the earth,” “a / broken / voice, / a mournful / song” (to hear poet Philip Levine read "Ode to Salt" in English, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5038243 ). In 13 Ways, be sure to read "Ode to Okra" (226) and "Praise the Tortilla, Praise the Menudo, Praise the Chorizo," (233).

To start this exercise, you might empty out your backpack, purse, or pockets (fridge, cupboard, or sit in front of the sandwich case in Cafe 77) on the table in front of you. Randomly select one item and display it in front of you. Remember: each object deserves praise. In the style of Neruda, choose an item and freewrite an Ode to that object. Do this several times, each time remembering to turn off your ‘inner editor’ and let the beauty of the object take over. Hyperbole is your friend! Unconditional admiration is an enlightening thing. Recognizing the dignity of an object is an act of gratitude. Also, think about the objects upon which our lives depend, and give them a twist. Faulty kitchen appliance? Rabid animal? Least-favorite relative?

3. Pick a particularly evocative word for your ode, as in "Ferocious Ode" above. "Obsequious Ode"? "Reticulated Ode"? "Vegetarian Ode"? Then try to create a description of that ode based on the word. How many ways can you praise "ferocious" without re-using that word? How can you personify it? How can you make it appealing, admirable, desirable? Obviously you need to stay concrete, use metaphor, sensory images, and allow for leaps of impossible.

Go forth, and praise.