Lewis Carroll

Learn well your grammar,
And never stammar,
Write well and neatly,
And sing most sweetly,
Be enterprising,
Love early rising,
Go walk six miles,
Have ready smiles,
With lightsome laughter,
Soft flowing after.

I teach students that if they can say something in English that sounds smooth than most likely it is correct; but if their sentence is choppy there is a good likihood it is wrong. Of course, it is a generalization but I have found it to be correct. Lewis Carroll had trouble with a stammer and so was acutely aware how difficult it was to speak without one. Luckily, none of my students have one. I love this poem as a good example of what it is to speak any language especially the part about laughter.

"PITY THE NATION(After Khalil Gibran)"by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"PITY THE NATION"(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919)is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for " A Coney Island of the Mind" (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies.

I have associated him with the Beat Generation of poets and writers and were both a friend and supporter of those associated with that movement and the publishing wing of City Lights that he owned published many of the writers and poests. Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list.

This is one of Ferlinghetti's recent poems and reminds me of what is happening in the current political climate in the United States today especially those activities of the so-called Tea Party. Many people feel pride in their intellectual isolation from facts and their removal from the educational foundations in the universities and colleges of the country. This radical element has always been present in this country, but with the advent of President Obama, it seems to be more active and filled with the fear of change that the president seems to represents to many people.

Dogen, Yuan Mei

Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師; also Dōgen Kigen 道元希玄, or Eihei Dōgen 永平道元, or Koso Joyo Daishi) (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto, and the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan after travelling to China and training under the Chinese Caodong lineage there. Dōgen is known for his extensive writing including the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Shōbōgenzō, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment. His poems are translated by many people.

He is a favorite of mine and the following are two of my favorite poems.:



Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is refelected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.



Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma
See no Dharma in everyday actions.
They not yet discovered that
There are no everyday actions outside Dharma.



The Dharma for me is the teachings of the Buddha Gautma. I am of no particular school of Buddhism. I take a little here and a little there. I do have a fondness for Zen. I will not try and define Zen for no one can. It would be the same as trying to define what the Tao is.

Many people believe that the truth resides in all of us and that the Dharma is the same for all of us but each truth is uniquely our own. It does not lie outside ourselves but within. We just need to trust what is there and not to look for answers in other people, books unless the books speaks to what is within. It is not a Western way of looking at things. I know when I became acquainted with Buddhism, it felt like I found a glove that fit just right and the older I get the more I don't need Buddhism. I just need the inner self that is there when I meditate.

All of us are on a pathway to God or whatever one defines as God. It does not have to be a god at all as it is not for Buddhists. For the Taoists, it is primarily nature. I know a park where people go to watch the sun come up as it is a very holy place for them. They are Taoists. They recognize everyplace is holy but they can really see it there.

Just Done By Yuan Mei

A month alone behind closed doors
forgotten books, remembered, clear again.
Poems come, like water to the pool
Welling,
up and out,
from perfect silence

Climbing the Mountain by Yuan Mei

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come...

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.

How I'd love to be a master
of the blue sky's art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he's brushed in so far today.

Yuan Mei (袁枚 pinyin: Yuán Méi, 1716 – 1797) was a well-known poet, scholar and artist of the Qing Dynasty. Yuan Mei was born in Qiantang (錢塘, in modern Hangzhou), Zhejiang province, to a cultured family who had never before attained high office. He achieved the degree of jinshi in 1739 at the young age of 23, was immediately appointed to the Hanlin Academy (翰林院) in order to learn the Manchu language. However, he proved unable to do so and failed the language exam. Therefore, he received appointment instead as a provincial magistrate. From 1742 to 1748, Yuan Mei served in four different provinces in Jiangsu. However, in 1748, shortly after being assigned to administer part of Nanjing, he resigned his post and returned to his hometown to pursue his literary interest.

He is pictured with women as he believed in women being poets and took them as students. I included him so I could have a Taoist poet and because I wanted to include such an open- minded man.

"If You Forget Me" by Pablo Neruda

If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
of the heart where I have roots,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine





To me, this is a wonderful poem about loving someone and it does not necessarily means romantic love. For instance, every parent experiences the day when our children who we love more than life itself, who we gladily will give up our lives, our breath and they look back at us like we are strangers and strangers. The pain lies like daggers within.

There is the love of someone we cherished as they walked ahead of us and we memorized each turn of their head, each step they took, each way they reacted to the weather, an idea, a book. Then they looked back to us and looked past us as if we did not exist. Ah, the pain of that. We have all felt that

Love comes in many disguises and in many forms. We can love our best friend, the pet who dies under the wheel of a car or truck, the brother who takes too many drugs, the soldier who does not come back from war. There is the love of someone who betrays you to another friend or uses you for a test in school, a job or money. Each one of those hurts are pains that crawl under the skin and end up in the heart and nest there never to leave for the time you spend here on earth.

There is something that is worse and some of us have seen it. There are those who never feel love, never feel the pain of losing that love and who take but never give. That person, and they exist, would not enjoy this poem by Pablo Neruda. He or she would never enjoy and understand the pain through the sorrow. They would not understand that you just go on and the love that you feel for someone never goes away and stays in the heart forever.

I knew a friend that said that one loves through the different lives we live and that we never forget those people we love in past lives. We sometimes yearn and seek them out in our other lives and often find them. I like to think we do. We whirl and live in our lives and then our fingers reach out and find the ones we loved once before and then we connect once more. Sometimes, that connection is brief and sometimes it goes from one life to another.

Another friend says love is the only reality. I like having friends like that. They teach me many things when I am feeling down. Pablo Neruda teaches me too through his poetry.

"Suspense" By D. H. Lawrence

Suspense

The wind comes from the north
Blowing little flocks of birds
Like spray across the town,
And a train roaring forth
Rushes stampeding down
South with flying curds
Of steam, from the darkening north.

Whether I turn and set
Like a needle steadfastly,
Wait ever to get
The news that she is free;
But ever fixed, as yet
To the lode of her agony.

In the first part of the poem, I am reminded of the trip down here because of the use of the train to show the wind from the north that roars. It is blowing little flocks of birds which is interesting to note because it is not the flocks of geese and ducks that usually migrate. The trains in the time that this poem was written were steam and it was a bygone era that seam would rise above the engine locomotive like curds from the darkening north as if a storm was coming or a welcome storm to a dry region.

The voice of the poem is using the compass illusion and that he is waiting for someone to be free to join him and he is tuned into her and of her suffering of being around someone who she does not want to be with. The poet thinks of her and himself as he flows as if he is one with the clouds and the pending dark clouds of the north, yet there is a hint that it is not winter that is coming which is death but spring and growth of rain and the small birds of spring.

"It Isn’t Me" by James Lasdun

It Isn’t Me

by James Lasdun

It isn’t me, he’d say,

stepping out of a landscape

that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop

to a plausible existence

until he entered it; it’s just not me,

he’d murmur, walking away.

It’s not quite me, he’d explain,

apologetic but firm,

leaving some job they’d found him.

They found him others: he’d go,

smiling his smile, putting

his best foot forward, till again

he’d find himself reluctantly concluding

that this, too, wasn’t him.

He wanted to get married, make a home,

unfold a life among his neighbors’ lives,

branching and blossoming like a tree,

but when it came to it, it isn’t me

was all he seemed to learn

from all his diligent forays outward.

And why it should be so hard

for someone not so different from themselves,

to find what they’d found, barely even seeking;

what gift he’d not been given, what forlorn

charm of his they’d had the luck to lack,

puzzled them—though not unduly:

they lived inside their lives so fully

they couldn’t, in the end, believe in him,

except as some half-legendary figure

destined, or doomed, to carry on his back

the weight of their own all-but-weightless, stray

doubts and discomforts. Only sometimes,

alone in offices or living rooms,

they’d hear that phrase again: it isn’t me,

and wonder, briefly, what they were, and where,

and feel the strangeness of being there.

James Lasdun (born 1958 in London) is a English author, poet and academic, who currently lives in upstate New York and is married to writer Pia Davis, with whom he co-authored the travel book Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria. Lasdun was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.



Alienation

One of the things I think about in being a poet is alienation. I think of a poet just standing there outside of the group of human beings, civilization, culture, the group and looking in and seeing what some of us inside don't notice, see or want to see. The poet doesn't have a membership card and doesn't want it or couldn't if he or she wanted one.

I read a while back a study done in the 1970's of who went into anthropology as an occupation. The conclusion was that most people who ended up in the field were those who had one foot in one ethnic culture and a foot in another such as the American who had one parent who was Jewish American and another parent was was not or someone who was of mixed Native American background. That reminded me of the poet who by the very nature of being different could be like the anthropologist outside of the so-called norm could see things, be outside of things so that what was to many people invisible stood out in all of its clarity to the poet.

The artist, poet, writer would wander sometimes alone or in very small groups such as the Beat Generation and know he or she were of a different group and see so much more than the average person of the larger group. They were alienated from the whole. "It Isn’t Me" seems to be about that process and like any good poem about so much more.

The voice in this poem is saying that the norm is not him. He has some choice in the matter or it seems like a choice. Or is it? Later he said he wanted to get married, has some children and lived in the neighborhood like everyone else but it wasn't him. The neighbors just looked at him and wondered why he wasn't like them as they set about in their lives doing what they did, having the children, working their jobs, buying the groceries, the boat, the barbecue in the backyard, going to the PTA, having the mistresses or lovers, the dog in the backyard, the pool, the second mortgage, the television sets, the computers, the new cars and they would hear or see him doing his own think and chuckle and talk about him over get togethers, reunions, parties, whatever maybe seeing him in the paper or not.

His advisers in school, college, at the university would fine him jobs, great jobs in advertising or plastics press cards in his hands and push him towards the doors to those really large companies or corporations. They have futures, ERAs , great savings plans and a chance to be a CEO maybe. No, he would reply. He just can't do it. They look at him, their talents not as great as his and they don't quite understand why he says no. Inside, maybe they feel anger. They would have grabbed such opportunities for they don't come very often.

Later, those same friends, neighbors would wonder why they were so different and why he got away from sitting in front of the television day in and day out, seeing the page rip off the wall month after month, year after year, and grey line added to grey line and lawn mowed after lawn mowed and kids yelling and screaming and leaving and doing drugs and saying fuck you and telling you that you don't matter anymore. He got out of that. He doesn't have to see his wife grown old and fat, see the supposedly permanent job show you out the door and you sit there collecting Social Security not having anything to do and festering in the lemons that seem to surround you now. What the fuck happened? Was he so wrong as supposed?

The poem talks about what others feels towards him. What does he feel about himself? It does not address that. That is what I am most concerned about. The voice of the poem is outside of himself looking in at himself. He sees himself as special when he is really just hiding from the fact that he is in the school yard and none of his playmates want to play with him. I feels alienated, alone and miserable:

"Oh yeah! I am better than you. Look at this poem."

I think this poem is valid and correct, but it is full of pain too. It is full of the pain of the poet who can't get into the marble circles of his friends and sees that he is left out. He is the poet who can't belong anywhere. I remember being in a writer's group in which the most successful poet was one who was just clever with her words, not a good poet, but just clever. She said she was never unhappy as a child and had a great husband and family. It is almost by necessity that poets are unhappy and then take that unhappiness and make something with it. There is that tried old saying of making lemonade from the lemons life gives you. Poets make poetry from the unhappiness that life gives you. There are a lot of unhappy people in the world and they don't always write poetry. Poets do. Lonely poets write great poetry and see things the rest of us don't always see.

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change

is train tracks. She’s sure of it.

The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery

by the side, but not the tracks.

I’ve watched one for three years, she says,

and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track

near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train

is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.

The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street

butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.

The widow in the tilted house

spices her soup with cinnamon.

Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.

The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.

The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound

but when it goes away, shrinking back

from the walls of the brain,

it takes something different with it every time.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Naomi Shihab Nye (born March 12, 1952) is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and American mother. Although she regards herself as a "wandering poet", she lives in San Antonio, Texas.


There are times, I think of life as a train track and we as trains traveling down the track at ever increasing speed. Clickety-Clack the years go by, faster and faster until the train track suddenly stops at least in this life. The scenery goes by at first slowly, so slowly that when you sit in the school yard swing you think it is not moving at all and you ache for it to move because you want things to begin, desperately at least for me, to begin. Then it does at breakneck speed.

Time came after many years when retirement began. The train was still moving, but I could watch the trees, the farm houses, rivers that flowed by so slowly under bridges and sometimes under the train, buildings that had people in the yards but most time no one around. I could even see prisons and I remembered them very clearly because they were the only places where people were crowded in the walled up yards, all wearing the same cotton wide pants and matching shirts and looking at the train as if it was an alien invention because they were not on it.

Then as if life was a trickster hiding around a corner, it springs out and surprises you with options and choices or maybe none at all but changes in which you stand there completely astonished. I actually thought my adventures were over. A smile and a wink and then another adventure begins, even when it seems life is waning.

I chose this poem( with some tribulation as it is copyrighted but I have no readers so it should be alright and if the poet sees this I am sorry but it fit so well. I derive no money for this blog in case that makes a difference.) because it fit the situation so well. I was offered a job to teach at an university in Korea and I accepted at a salary that is not bad. It is a very honorable national university and I was requested there by one important student. I had to wait until all of the paper work went through such as a background check, my transcripts, someone to watch my pets and house, and now the final VISA. I am going for sure now.

Now, for a completely new adventure in another place.