"I hope that the final lines of today’s poem made you do something with your chest or your mouth or your heart. By that I mean — gasp, or skip a beat, or suck in a bunch of air and hold it in your body before letting it out slowly, shaking your head, smiling, and looking up at the stars a little differently."
Your whole post did that for me.
And reminded me of December 1970 just after my beloved had returned from a year in Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic. We were 21 years old. He bought us tickets to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. I can't be sure if it was included in that traveling exhibit but we may have stood in front of "Starry Night" all those years ago. All of Van Gogh's paintings looked as if they had just been painted. I do remember thinking as I looked at Van Gogh's paintings that I was standing where he had once stood with his paintbrush in hand. I felt his presence. My beloved was an artist. He was never the same after his experience with war. Haunted by war until his death at age 58 in 2008. Nevertheless, he had a mind like Tom Snarsky, a way of seeing the world that surprises and delights me to this day when I think of him.
Wow. I've been looking for a framework to spur how I'm feeling and want to approach this Christmas, and this poem and your articulation hit it spot on.
Wonderful and amazing. Thank you! I love how you acknowledged my feeling of inadequacy when reading Snarsky's poetry, marveling at his clever way of seeing. How does he do that? You wrote: I wish I could say there was some kind of prescription for writing a poem like this, for writing a poem that scatters lottery tickets across a battlefield or turns the stars into little lights that do the work of holding the night on their backs. But there isn’t. And I don’t wish that at all, to be honest. Because, in the end, no matter the craft, a poem is a way of seeing. And that’s part of the joy of reading — that encounter, and how it offers such rich intimacy, a companionship with someone else’s way of seeing. Like trying on their surprise and allowing it to be yours, both of yours, for life." Brilliant.
"I love that feeling. Of needing to proclaim the power of a thing. Of, in the moments after encountering such a thing, needing to just say how good it is."
When I went to see "Sorry to Bother You" in a theatre in Brooklyn, one of the trailers before the film was for "The Hate U Give." After the trailer, there was a magnanimous hush across the whole crowd. And then, from the middle of the theatre, someone let out a resounding "*Day-umn.*" I think about this moment a lot. Thank you for pointing out the beauty of recognition, of celebration, of pausing to take it all in.
"I hope that the final lines of today’s poem made you do something with your chest or your mouth or your heart. By that I mean — gasp, or skip a beat, or suck in a bunch of air and hold it in your body before letting it out slowly, shaking your head, smiling, and looking up at the stars a little differently."
Your whole post did that for me.
And reminded me of December 1970 just after my beloved had returned from a year in Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic. We were 21 years old. He bought us tickets to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. I can't be sure if it was included in that traveling exhibit but we may have stood in front of "Starry Night" all those years ago. All of Van Gogh's paintings looked as if they had just been painted. I do remember thinking as I looked at Van Gogh's paintings that I was standing where he had once stood with his paintbrush in hand. I felt his presence. My beloved was an artist. He was never the same after his experience with war. Haunted by war until his death at age 58 in 2008. Nevertheless, he had a mind like Tom Snarsky, a way of seeing the world that surprises and delights me to this day when I think of him.
Thank you so much for this Christmas Eve post.
Wow. I've been looking for a framework to spur how I'm feeling and want to approach this Christmas, and this poem and your articulation hit it spot on.
this is wonderful
I like how you mention that mistakes can not only be OK, but beautiful. Merry Christmas, Devin.
Wonderful and amazing. Thank you! I love how you acknowledged my feeling of inadequacy when reading Snarsky's poetry, marveling at his clever way of seeing. How does he do that? You wrote: I wish I could say there was some kind of prescription for writing a poem like this, for writing a poem that scatters lottery tickets across a battlefield or turns the stars into little lights that do the work of holding the night on their backs. But there isn’t. And I don’t wish that at all, to be honest. Because, in the end, no matter the craft, a poem is a way of seeing. And that’s part of the joy of reading — that encounter, and how it offers such rich intimacy, a companionship with someone else’s way of seeing. Like trying on their surprise and allowing it to be yours, both of yours, for life." Brilliant.
This was so lovely to read! Thank you. To continue this homage to the celestial bodies I leave you with Robert Frost’s poem:
A Star in a Stone-Boat
(For Lincoln MacVeagh)
Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.
Some laborer found one faded and stone cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold,
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,
He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.
He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.
He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant-eggs, and had one large wing,
One not so large for flying in a ring,
And a long Bird of Paradise’s tail,
(Though these when not in use to fly and trail
It drew back in its body like a snail);
Nor know that he might move it from the spot
The harm was done; from having been star-shot
The very nature of the soil was hot
And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,
Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.
He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stone-boat with the star
And not, as you might think, a flying car,
Such as even poets would admit perforce
More practical than Pegasus the horse
If it could put a star back in its course.
He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a pace
But faintly reminiscent of the race
Of jostling rock in interstellar space.
It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.
Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,
I do not know—I cannot stop to tell:
He might have left it lying where it fell.
From following walls I never lift my eye
Except at night to places in the sky
Where showers of charted meteors let fly.
Some may know what they seek in school and church,
And why they seek it there; for what I search
I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;
Sure that though not a star of death and birth,
So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth
To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,
Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,
It yet has poles, and only needs a spin
To show its worldly nature and begin
To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm
And run off in strange tangents with my arm
As fish do with the line in first alarm.
Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.
"I love that feeling. Of needing to proclaim the power of a thing. Of, in the moments after encountering such a thing, needing to just say how good it is."
When I went to see "Sorry to Bother You" in a theatre in Brooklyn, one of the trailers before the film was for "The Hate U Give." After the trailer, there was a magnanimous hush across the whole crowd. And then, from the middle of the theatre, someone let out a resounding "*Day-umn.*" I think about this moment a lot. Thank you for pointing out the beauty of recognition, of celebration, of pausing to take it all in.