The Living Poetry Project: Part Eight
This Living Poetry Project is a bit involved. I’d like to title it:
Sex, Death, and The Natural History Museum
(or the lessons our children ask for, but no one really knows how to teach)
The short of it is:
JJ and I intended to give out poetry presents at the L.A. Zoo, but the weather redirected us to the Natural History Museum. We gave out sections of the book ROAR! by Margaret Mayo and Alex Ayliffe. This book is full of alliteration, which made me think of Robert Hass’s lecture On Teaching Poetry.
If you are interested in reading, (and in my heart, I hope you are) the longer meditation unravels in the sections below:
Robert Hass in his Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture On Teaching Poetry says, “…the first thing poetry is: the physical structure of the actual breath of a given utterance and its emotion.” Hass’s example of “utterance” is from John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” where a young knight describes his seduction as:
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.
Hass asks his audience to say the phrase again:
And made sweet moan.
He explains, “What you will notice, if you articulate just the sequence of vowel sounds—ahhh, aayyy, eeeee, ooooh—is that they begin in the far back of the throat, move to the mid-back, to the mouth, and then breathe out through the lips, in a perfectly modulated and progressive release of breath.”
And made sweet moan
By having his audience repeat the phrase, Mr. Hass has brilliantly lead his audience into an utterance orgy. This is amazing to me.
I love how Robert Hass first teaches to put “that breath [of poetry] into people’s bodies—either by having them say a poem aloud, or by saying it to them.”
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The linkage of breath to poetry is why I love poems: with poetry, it seems words might have the ability to reincarnate something (like another’s life) within us.
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It was cold yesterday, in Southern California cold is always abnormal. The weather redirected J.J. and I from the L.A. Zoo to the Natural History Museum—we went from visiting live animals to taxidermy specimens of life. Normally, this wouldn’t be a hard transition for us (we regularly go to one of these two places) but this trip to the museum was different.
It finally occurred to JJ that the animals at the Natural History Museum are dead.
Why did they have to die mommy? JJ repeated again and again. The parents around us were snatching their children away from the contagion of his questions, Why death? Our dear friend Melanie and her daughter had to leave the litany of JJ’s questioning.
Melanie’s three year old daughter is like a sister to JJ. Melanie offered, You handle death and I’ll handle sex. I quickly agreed; I got the death part handled—a collection of pat answers about stories morphing into other stories, the concept of transitioning. Sex, on the other hand, terrifies me. (JJ can have sex when he’s forty, maybe.)
It was a little overwhelming to witness how childen inherit their parents’ interest. Melanie’s daughter was drawn to the exhibit on bird’s mating rituals—the process of an egg becoming a bird. J.J. was obsessed with how the seagull was unable to move—That bird is dead mommy. Why?
Why?
Ironically, the day of our NHM adventure was also the birthday of my cousin Nicholas, who died of cancer last year. Nicholas taught us all how to live with his fight with cancer. An avid member and councilor with First Descents, his story is a great triumph for hope and love. http://firstdescents.org/programs
Again, why?
I don’t know…because, JJ, because…
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In his lecture On Teaching Poetry, Robert Hass admits to not having the full truth about poetry, but he possesses a whole desire for the investigation of why poetry.
Hass makes reference to a book of essays by W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand. Auden borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare to conjure the notion of someone so immersed in his trade that he is permanently colored by it.
The Dyer’s Hand—the idea of blood-guilt. (I know what book I’ll be ordering next.) ______________________________________________________________________________
There is something about a poem that reminds me of taxidermy—the artifice of life giving access to life. My fear of death is so persistent that it seems like a dear friend. Why? I ask death. Because times infinity, death teases.
Why, mommy? Why are these animals dead? JJ asks again.
Because life is our greatest riddle JJ. Because I love you more than can be expressed in words.
Because once upon a time there was a parent, who in desperation, posed the dead corpse of a coyote near her cubs, so the world might retain how a mother loves her son.
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