On [Not] Writing

It’s been over a month since I sat down with the intention to write seriously. I’ve been overcommitted, struggling to learn the music for my violin recital and for the cantata at church. Instead of writing and publishing my work, I’ve been making art, or crocheting, or even cleaning the house.

I feel empty and dry. This morning I tried to read a poem by Louise Glück, but it was too subtle for a quick reading and I’m tired. Oh God, I am so tired. I’ve been sleeping at least six hours a night – which is a lot for me – but for some reason it isn’t enough.

Today I brought my coffee upstairs, cleaned the glass on the French doors, and wrote about not writing. Because sometimes, what I need most is to see the sky clearly. To be honest with myself. To sit down, pick up a pen, and begin.

Photo: Guian Bolisay  (Instant Vantage)

This was a really fun workshop to teach, so I'm posting my handout and lesson plan here. 

Read the poems and try your hand at writing a bop or a tanka. Or teach the workshop yourself, if you like. The materials are here for you to use.

Link to Handout

Link to Lesson Plan

Crossing the Great Divide

Editing and revision may be the bane of a writer’s existence. Ted Kooser wrote:

“Revision, and I mean extensive revision, is the key to transforming a mediocre poem into a work that can touch and even alter a reader’s heart.  It’s the biggest part of the poet’s job description.  I’ve published hundreds of poems, most of them less than twenty lines in length, and people are always surprised to learn that I might take a single short poem through twenty, or thirty, or even forty versions before I think it’s finished” (The Poetry Home Repair Manual 16).

He reminds us to be patient:

“Don’t worry that the process of revision seems slow.  The writer’s tools were developed early - paper, pen, and ink; a watchful eye; an open heart - and good writing is still the patient handiwork of those simple tools.  A poet who makes only one really fine poem during his life gives far more to the world that the poet who publishes twenty books of mediocre verse” (ibid. 148).

Why should we bother to work so hard, for so little reward? Kenneth Koch in his discussion of “poetry language” concludes by saying:

"The last inclination of the poetry language I'll mention - though there are more - is specifically addressed to making whatever is said into a work of art. Without this one, of course, you may be writing, but you're not writing poetry" (Making Your Own Days 69).

Never Give Me a Security Clearance!

Seriously.

I attempted this writing prompt from Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days:

________________________ but I never told anyone 

[repeat as necessary to create the poem]

The Trade-Offs of Travel

Painted Desert, Arizona
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Last summer I took a 30-day cross-country road trip. Because diesel fuel was so expensive, I left the motor home and took my Toyota van. I stayed mostly in the cheapest Kampgrounds of America cabins - the ones without plumbing - or with relatives. For the cabins, I brought my own bedding, a minimal camp kitchen, a folding table and a chair. To avoid midnight treks across the campground, I bought a portable toilet, complete with plastic bags and chemicals to absorb moisture and odor. 

 I thought that I might miss home-cooked meals, my own bed, or watching TV and crafting in the evenings. I also expected to miss my husband, dogs and friends more than I actually did. Since I had no one to talk to, I listened to music and audio books. However, I soon discovered that I needed to be careful because I was liable to miss my exit while listening to exciting passages. After getting lost in a wilderness area with no cell signal and no GPS, I decided to hit the pause button more often. 

Garden of the Gods, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

 My father always told me, “Look out the window. You don’t know if you’ll ever come this way again.” So I planned my itinerary to include points of interest, knowing that every day could be my last chance to see them. I loved meeting new people and seeing new places every day. 

 Unfortunately, my husband grew up with a different kind of father, a pedal-to-the-metal driver who wanted to reach his final destination as soon as possible. They cannot see the journey as its own reward, and it’s difficult to persuade my DH to pull over for an unplanned stop. 

 My solo travel is leisurely and more spontaneous. Perhaps that's why I didn't long to be with my husband while on the road. 

Cave-In-Rock State Park, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

What I missed most, to my surprise, was my comfy chair. My lower back had quite a few complaints about long days of driving, despite the memory-foam cushion I bought for the trip. At the end of the day, I wanted to lean back in my recliner in front of the TV. Sitting in a camp chair wasn't the same, even if I could pop open a cold soda or a craft beer and watch YouTubes on my tablet, and my body knew the difference. 

 The other thing I really missed was having a refrigerator like the one in the motorhome. It was annoying to drain the cooler and buy ice every morning. Also, I couldn't shop ahead and keep the food cold for several days. Instead, I had to find a grocery store, and neighborhood grocery stores are rarely close to the interstate. Walmart Supercenters and small-town grocers became my go-to's, but sometimes all I could find was a convenience store, aisle after aisle of processed snack foods with not a fruit or vegetable in sight. 

 Have you ever taken a long trip? What was the most unexpected thing you missed when you were away from home?

The Open Road
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Precariously Perched But Holding

Chiricahua National Monument

Travel opens the heart, invites one to take photos and write a travelogue. So recently we loaded up the motorhome and drove to the Chiricahua National Monument. It's supposed to be a wonderland of rocks and I had never been there. Surely this novel landscape would inspire me to write something interesting.

Well, the Chiricahua Mountains are indeed a wonderland of rocks, but I found myself staring, wondering what to say about a static, rocky landscape so hot that even the insects were silent. It didn't inspire me the way lakes and rivers do; it didn't steal my heart and invite me in as the ocean does. So what could I write about this forbidding, ancient place?

Yes, once there was movement and great upheaval – a volcano so hot it created rhyolite tuff, a fine-grained rock composed of quartz and potassium feldspar, lava flung up from a twelve-mile caldera in a vast pyroclastic eruption. Even today, Hollywood with all its special effects could not begin to re-imagine the magnificence of that cataclysm. 

The lava hardened as it cooled and twenty-seven million years later, the stone has weathered and fissured. Water, wind and time have sculpted a land of spectacular towers. Massive and angular, undoubtedly holy, they are so completely themselves that I have nothing to add.

This is slot canyon country, with slumps and a natural bridge that no human can cross. The mountains are fancifully adorned with pinnacles and spires and perfectly balanced rocks that someday must fall to the power of water and wind and time.

If elements of this landscape were to move real-time, I would not want to see it. I need those rocks to stay there, balanced just so on their impossibly tiny bases, believing that if I were to come back in another twenty-seven million years, there'd still be something to see.

Musing on Truth and Lying

The task of the poet is to invent lies in the service of speaking truth, which is of course, deeply paradoxical. However, this is the fate, not just of poets, but of every human alive: to attempt to articulate that which cannot be fully known or articulated. 

Kenneth Koch understood this tendency of poets to "have the feeling of knowing things that may be unknowable" and as a consequence, to "make grand pronouncements." He wrote: 

Something close to lying is pretending to know more than one does know, or possibly could know, and/or pretending to have more power than one has or could possibly have. The impulse to so pretend may be highly emotional (Making Your Own Days 66).

Job caught a glimpse of the Infinite when God appeared to him in the whirlwind. He cried out, "I declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know"(NASB). His immediate response was to repent in dust and ashes, and ask God for instruction.

The character of Job may have repented of his words, but the author of the book did not. Confronted by an existential crisis, the author created a masterful series of poems exploring the causes of horrific, seemingly random events and our responses to them.

Thus we see that the poet's response is almost always to write another poem. That works for us as poets, perhaps because our work is tied to strong, genuine emotions and because we are trying to discover the truth, not obscure it.

In contrast, language used to deceive and manipulate others is the bread and butter of politicians, what George Orwell called "doublespeak" in 1984. Men and women addicted to power cannot perceive or speak truth; instead, they engineer photo ops and sound-bytes for the poisonous theater of the absurd.

Paul, in 1 Timothy, complained about men who wanted to be teachers of the law yet who "did not understand either what they were saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions" (NASB). Caught up in their own rhetoric, these men - like some modern teachers and politicians - had forgotten that their proper goal was teaching people to "love from a pure heart." Lying to themselves and others, they lost their way, and the result then (as now) was divisiveness and hatred.

Proverbs 15:33 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (NASB). Whatever your concept of God and the universe, it's good to begin by acknowledging that you are small and the world around you immense, astonishing, and too wonderful for any of us to fully categorize, define or explain. Kafka said it beautifully:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet (Goodreads)

Thus we come to the writing of poetry, and the articulation of impossible truth.

My Current Writing Routine

If you’re a writer, you know that your writing routines and schedule change over time. What works for you today may not work tomorrow. Or you come across an idea in a book about writing, or a friend mentions what she does, and you think, “Hey, I ought to try that.” If the experiment helps, you incorporate that new thing into your writing life.

Last January, Melissa and Dave of Journey Sixty6 hosted an online writing workshop about writing rituals, which got me thinking about how I might make my writing time more creative and more productive. Their idea was to use something sensory, rewarding, specific and repetitive to get your writer brain started every day.

"Coffee related (Free stock photo)" by trophygeek 

is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My rewarding sensory cue is to bring my tablet and my cup of coffee to a comfy chair where I can see trees and the sky. Then I start my daily writing routine:

1. Copy three quotes or interesting phrases onto small pieces of cardstock and put them in the “Magic Cauldron” (an old metal box with astonishing powers) as inspiration for future poems.
2. Read a poem. At the moment, I’m reading The Best American Poetry 2022, but it could be any book or magazine with poems in it. Alberto Rios always told us to “prime the pump” and he was right - when I’m not reading poetry, I’m not writing poetry either.
3. Attempt to respond to the poem in some way. If I’m still feeling uninspired, I read from a book on the writer’s craft. At the moment, it’s Kennth Koch’s Making Your Own Days.
4. Attempt to write a poem. If I’m still uninspired, I shake up the Magic Cauldron, pick three random quotes and try again.
5. If I still can’t write a poem, I free write for ten minutes or go to my desk to revise something. Generally, at this point, I have generated some text of some sort, and feel pretty good about my morning, but if the Muse was elsewhere, that’s okay too. I’ve enjoyed my coffee and fired up lots of neurons. My soul has been nourished on sky and leaves moving in the wind. 

Nobody can write a good poem every day. Heck, no one can even write a mediocre poem every day. But writing isn’t just about publication. It’s also a spiritual practice.

The important thing is to show up, and listen.

To show up.

So that’s what I do.

Words of Encouragement to Read During Hard Times

 I wrote this for me, but maybe these words will encourage you too.

You really are smart and capable, even when you don’t feel that this is true. And people are capable of changing. If you don’t like the way something is going, it’s okay to try something different. 

This may sound counter-intuitive, but you don’t have to like something to get it done or to like the end result. Being unhappy or tired or bored in the middle is often part of the process. Suck it up and deal with it.

Finally, be kind to yourself in hard times. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has bad moods and bad days, everyone experiences failures on the way to success. It’s okay not to know how to do something and it’s okay to mess up while you’re figuring it out.

The wonderful thing is that we get through hard times. Hard times don’t last forever. 

In the end, everything will be okay. Really.

Looking for that silver lining—Creativity during a global pandemic

What was it like being creative during the last two years, as COVID-19 upended our lives?

Clouds over Miami by Lonny Paul

Being creative was easy at first. With the lockdowns, my schedule opened up and I finally had time to work on some projects.

Then I had to go out to shop and be back in the world, before vaccines were available. Stress! Just getting groceries exhausted me so much that I could do nothing else for the rest of the day.

"Stressed College 
Student" by CollegeDegrees360

My mother used to say, when she had to do something hard or that she really hated, “I just kept slogging away at it.” That’s how life has felt recently. Every day has been like slogging through mud, pulling one foot out and taking everything one miserable step at a time.

What did I do during the pandemic when we couldn’t have live music rehearsals? I was cut off from my musical friends and from my violin teacher. My early music group, the Strong Oak Consort, tried rehearsing on Skype, but we couldn’t play as an ensemble. One person would play their part, everyone else would mute and try to play along. It didn’t work very well.

Then we decided to record a Christmas album using free software on the Internet. With soundtrap.com, we were able to do multi-track recording remotely. Being able to complete that project felt great.

I also attempted NaNoWriMo, and started writing a horror novel set in a fictionalized version of Bisbee, Arizona. Maybe writing horror was a way of getting out all that negativity.

The last two years have been a time of lower productivity for me, but I did my best to stay connected with my creative community and kept going as well as I could. Overall, it wasn’t a bad time in terms of creativity. I learned that I could function with fewer commitments and demands on my time. I learned to use my time at home more efficiently. I’ve found inner resources I didn’t realize I had.

I wouldn’t go through this again voluntarily, and I can’t wait for it to be “over” (whatever that may mean). People used to say, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” and “Every cloud has a silver lining.” That may be a bit clichéd, but in my case, it has been true. I’m glad that I had some positive outcomes in what has been a very difficult time for the world.

"Happy Ending" by Chrismatos

Swedish Death-Cleaning End-of-Year Update

This was on my closet door for 16 months!!!

Reading 50 books didn't go so well. I only managed to finish 18 books during 2021. Some of them were library books or ebooks, and I think I only gave away one or two of the books that I owned.

On the other hand, I finally discarded or donated 1,000 things. After listening to a TED Talk in July of 2020, I was inspired to get rid of 1,000 things because, as Liz Wright said, it would change my life.

Click here to watch Liz Wright's TED Talk.

I am happy to report that it actually did change my life significantly for the better.

I didn't put a lot of energy into Marie-Kondo-style tidying and decluttering, but one of the surprising benefits of having this goal was that I bought way less stuff because, you know, it would be more work to discard or donate it later on. Every purchase became more deliberate and I ended up with fewer projects to complete and fewer books to read someday.

A second surprising benefit was less stress, because the pile of things I needed to do or deal with wasn't constantly growing/growing exponentially.

Liz Wright was correct: Get rid of 1,000 things, and you will change your life for the better!

Swedish Death Cleaning Begins

Lately, I've become more aware of my own mortality. Maybe it's COVID, maybe it's the birth year on the driver's license. Whatever the cause, I've realized that it's time to start my Swedish Death Cleaning. Last July, I set the ambitious goal of getting rid of 1,000 items by December 31st (it didn't happen), and this year, my first-quarter Game Changer is to finish getting rid of 1,000 objects.

That means I need to discard, donate or give away six items every single day for three months. Yikes!

In order to facilitate the Death Cleaning Process, I've decided to read a book every week for the entire year. Maybe I'll keep a few books, if they're extraordinary. More likely, they will begin their one-way journey to a new home via Bookman's or the local library bookstore.

Link to Little, Brown

LET'S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS by David Sedaris

It's the first book on my 50-book list. In 2013, I heard an interview with David Sedaris on NPR and knew then that I wanted to read Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. But you know how it is when you're driving – you think you'll remember; you always forget. A few years later, I was on an Aggressor liveaboard, shuffling through the cabinet of ragged bodice-rippers and nearly new bestsellers when I discovered Sedaris's book. 

If you're a scuba diver, you know that a liveaboard vacation consists of three activities: you dive, you eat and you sleep. Any spare moments are spent at the laptop poring over underwater photos or sunning yourself sleepily on the deck. Before bed, maybe you'll spend a few minutes sipping wine and marveling at the stars while moonlit waves lap gently against the side of the boat. Reading is reserved for tedious hours in the cramped little island terminal or for the long flight home.

So when we're packing for our return flight, those of us who love the scent and feel of real paper head for the galley to rummage through the shelf of abandoned books. We unload the edifying classics we meant to read but didn't; we return the trashy novels we borrowed the first day and finished during the week; and we comb through the stacks hoping for an undiscovered gem. I found my treasure wedged between a thick Tom Clancy knock-off and a self-help book, hidden behind an entire first row of more popular tomes: David Sedaris's first edition of Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. Of course I took it with me to read on the airplane.

But you know how it is when you're flying. You'll think you'll read, then decide to watch a movie instead. Or you drift off, book open in your lap, and open your eyes to find the stewardess collecting last-minute trash. You tuck in a corner of a napkin, snap the book shut and stuff it in your carry-on just before landing. Then the book sits unread on your shelf for a few more years.

So it was with David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls.

Just the wind?

 In Colossians 3, Paul admonishes us to set our mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. That's problematic, because no human is able to directly perceive the things above. Our senses are filled with things that are on earth, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to pleasure. Life here consumes our attention and our affections.

But why shouldn't our lives here be worthy of our full attention? We can't see or clearly imagine the things above. We would be hard-pressed to even name them, although if Paul asked me to make a list, Jesus and God the Father would be right at the top, along with angels hovering in a throne room. I can't picture those angels, however. With their bizarre configurations of eyes and wings, Old Testament angels don't resemble humans. Perhaps it would be easier to meditate on abstractions like faith, hope, and love or to visualize the saints who have gone before.

What's here with me now is a cup of steaming coffee, with cream and sugar. A half-eaten bag of Dorito corn chips, irresistibly crunchy and delicious. A fresh breeze lifting the edges of the curtain at my window. The memory of a doe, heavy with this year's unborn fawn, nosing through the grass outside my gate in search of acorns. A nondescript little flycatcher bouncing along cheerily through the weeds. The sound of a dog barking in the distance.

The wind swaying through the limbs of the junipers outside may be reminiscent of the movement of the Holy Ghost (that's how Jesus would have seen it) but as nearly as I can tell for now, the wind is simply the wind.

Photo: "deer - Newport News Va." by watts_photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Can Sophie of the Unsellables Save the World?

Sophie Allsop, Host of the Unsellables

Yesterday was weird because I wanted very much to stay on task and be productive but it was really hard. Every little thing took tremendous effort. 

I suspect this struggle is due to situational depression, caused by the behavior of people who continue to contest the election, the bungled vaccine roll-out, and the general awfulness of life right now. It didn't help that my long-awaited dental appointment was canceled because two people in the office tested positive for COVID.

I had hoped that there would be more people vaccinated by now, and that we'd be progressing towards our new normal, whatever that might be. Instead we're in the middle of a cluster-fuck with more transmissible variants of the virus emerging. Thank you, Donald Trump.

But anger and grief don't actually serve us well in a crisis, do they? On TV, emotions motivate the hero to take decisive and successful action. In real life, emotional turmoil just seems to cause decision paralysis or bad choices. 

Hoarding: Buried Alive disappeared from Prime Video for a few days, and in the time that it was missing, I started watching The Unsellables on YouTube. My husband hates reality TV but I like it – there's a predictable structure which always has a positive outcome (at least in the shows I watch). Sophie the real estate expert looks at the outside of the unsold house, says, "The problem must be inside, and I'm going to find out what it is." She walks through the house and comes up with solutions, which her team then implements, and hey, the house is either sold or they expect it will sell soon. Everyone's happy.

The other thing I love about that show right now is that everybody appears to be doing normal things in a normal economy. Nobody is unemployed, nobody is sick, nobody is wearing masks. It's life the way it used to be, a happy little glimpse of the past where families work together to make change happen and success is possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Pandemic Sophie to guide us to a happier ending? I don't think Joe Biden and his team will be able to function as our guides, not because they are incompetent, but because they will face fierce opposition from people who don't understand science or the necessity of working together to save lives. It's Proud Boys and conspiracy theorists and short-sighted Republicans who stand in the way of the next administration, not peeling wallpaper or purple paint on the walls.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 says that God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy to people who are good in His sight. Right now, we desperately need all three, and perseverance to get us through the next few months.

The End of Shelley and "The Indian Serenade"

Seriously, I am done. I have accumulated an embarrassingly large stack of notes about this poem, and have written my own ghazal; it is time to move on. But first, let me share with some highlights about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his famous poem.

Not everybody liked this poem (I wonder why?):

The absence of concrete imagery in 'The Indian Serenade' has been adversely criticized. The poem's natural world verges on the impalpable: the soft winds, vague perfumes, song of the nightingale, the invisible inaudible stream, faint, die, fall, just as the serenader does in his half-waking ecstasy. It is as if he had awakened from dreams of his lady into a world even more dream-like and indistinct (Park 11).

"In certain critical circles, 'The Indian Serenade' seems to have attained an eminence second only to Kilmer's 'Trees' as a favorite whipping poem" (Levin 305). The New Critics in particular condemned the line, "I die, I faint, I fail" for its "vagueness of description and the direct statement of feeling in poetry" (Abrams and Harpham) – they, as Spock himself might have done, much preferred the Vulcan purity of the objective correlative to all that sloppy, vague emotional verbiage.

Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: Cultural Appropriation, or Cross Pollination? (1)

In the 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley found inspiration for his famous poem, “The Indian Serenade,” in Middle Eastern poetry.  There was actually a movement or school of poetry known as the English Orientalists, whose work Shelley greatly admired.

The Turkish Patrol, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436116

To Europeans, the Middle East was a mysterious place.  Until Napoleon’s army occupied Egypt in 1801, not many Europeans had actually been to the Middle East (Meagher). Even after 1801, many creatives were inspired, not by real-life visits to this exotic destination, but by artwork and descriptions provided by others. (Meagher).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artwork created by the Orientalists was biased in favor of European culture and against Middle Eastern peoples and their cultures. In fact, it was so biased that today, some have defined Orientalism as a form of racism:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous (Arab American National Museum).

Given that some artists deliberately created “propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule” (Meagher), it’s not surprising that there were exaggerations and distortions; nor is it surprising that many Europeans readily accepted this interpretation of Middle Eastern culture. It fit handily into their preconceived notions, reinforced their Eurocentric world view and justified the exploitation of those nations.

Nevertheless, many British Orientalists studied Middle Eastern culture with a more open mind, and genuinely admired the literature and artwork of these exciting foreign places.

Works Cited

Meagher, Jennifer. “Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/euor/hd_euor.htm (October 2004).

Arab American National Museum. “What Is Orientalism?” What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, Arab American National Museum, 2011, arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.

A Serenade Inspired by a Song - But Which Song?

You might think that if a famous poem were inspired by a song, literary critics or music historians might have a clue, but in the instance of "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, that is not actually the case.  What we have instead are competing theories. You can pick your favorite.

B.A. Park believes that Shelley was inspired by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (who wrote the lyrics to the now-famous “Minstrel Boy”) to write lyrics for an Indian melody:

“The habit appears to have been introduced by Thomas Moore of composing poems to fit wordless or foreign popular melodies, with his Irish Melodies of 1807-1828, and his National Airs of 1819-1828. Shelley’s poem appears to have been written to such a wordless tune from India, played for him by a friend” (9). 

Chauncey B. Tinker thought that he had discovered a different source for the same poem:

“The love-song is associated with Miss Sophia Stacey, a young lady whose the Shelleys met in the last months of the poet’s life. She used to sing to Shelley, an experience which always moved him to an intensity of passion and not infrequently to the composition of verses.  One recalls Jane Williams and her singing to the accompaniment of a guitar, which awakened sentiments of the most intense delight in the poet’s heart. ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ may very well have come into existence as the text for some air sung to him by Sophia, though of this there is no proof” (71).

 However, Tinker does not believe that “the loved one” of the poem is Miss Stacey (71).

A third theory is that the poem may have originated during a contest between two now-famous poets:

...perhaps (as Trelawny testified in a manuscript now at John Murray's) to use in a competition with Byron, in which each was to compose lyrics to be sung to an Indian or Arabic melody. But whether Shelley recomposed from memory--or else pretended to compose for the first time--a poem that he had already used to impress Stacey, either to demonstrate his poetic facility vis-a-vis Byron, or to express his feelings for Jane Williams, we are faced with judgments of his motives (Reiman).

Judgments aside, Jessica K. Quillin gives us the most Romantic and compelling narrative:

“…the prosodic arrangement of ‘An Indian Serenade’ fits into the general scheme of Mozart’s music for ‘Ah perdona, al primo affetto,’ revealing the possibility that Shelley wrote the lyric with the melody or at least the words of the aria in mind. In any event, the correspondences between ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ and Mozart’s aria reveal the extent to which music formed part of Shelley’s conception of poetic form toward the end of his life. This theory is lent further support in light of Reiman and O’Neill’s hypothesis that Shelley had the fair copy manuscript of ‘An Indian Serenade’ containing the lines from Mozart with him when his boat, the Don Juan, sank off the coast of Viargeggio” (NP).

What could be more appropriate than a Romantic poet dying with both Mozart and a fair copy of a love poem in his possession during a fatal storm that sinks his boat and takes his life? Even if this turns out not to be true, it's a great origin myth and I want the movie rights!

WORKS CITED

Park, B.A. “The Indian Elements of the ’Indian Serenade.’ Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol 10, Winter 1961.  pp. 8-12. [JSTOR]

Quillin, Jessica K.  Sheely and the Music-Poetics of Romanticism. Abingdon-on_Thames, UK: Routledge, 2016.

Reiman, Donald H.  “Shelley Comes of Age: His Early Poems as an Editorial Experience,” Romantic Circles. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/earlyshelley/reiman/reiman.html

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. pp. 70-72 (JSTOR).

Reflections on "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1)

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale’s complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must on thine,

Oh! beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1817

 

My initial impulse was to dismiss this poem as overwrought and ridiculous.  However, after completing some research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem, I realized there was more to it than I had initially thought.

I discovered that the poem had a history, not merely as a Romantic love poem, but also as song lyrics. Arthur Farwell published a setting of this poem in 1899 (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186954/).  Apparently, there were many versions of this poem set to music: one author remarked: “Mid-Victorian composers tumbled over one another to set Shelley to music…. Choral settings are abundant...” (Evans 594).

Curiously enough, it was once even popular among college students at Yale: “ “The final splendour of Shelley’s serenade is that it easily wedded to music, and serves the purpose of expressing and releasing the passion in a lover’s heart.  So far as I am aware, it is the only poem of Shelley’s that ever became a well-known song.  I recall its popularity in the singing at the fence on the old campus, when boys in their early twenties sang it with an emotion which could hardly have arisen from the beauty of the poetry in which is is couched, and who dis- / covered to their surprise that it was the production one of the greatest lyricists in English or any other language.  The air sung at the fence was written by F.B. Tourtellot….” (Tinker 71,72).

Even today, there are versions of it on YouTube, such as this contemporary one:

Works Cited

Evans, Edwin, ed. Musical News and Herald. London: Publishing Office, 1992.

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. Pp. 70-72 (JSTOR),

Make It Your Personal Destiny

Hannah Arendt, the philisopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, survived Nazism primarily because she fled to Czechoslovakia in 1933. She was a woman who knew how to read the handwriting on the wall.

After WWII, she "told a television interviewer... that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into 'personal destiny' was another" (Bakewell 95).

Today, most of us know that the coronavirus is dangerous, yet whenever I go into town, I see people not wearing masks. They haven't yet made protecting themselves and others part of their own "personal destiny."

https://ensia.com/features/flood-survivors-victims-organize-for-change/

Similarly, people living near coastlines are generally aware of sea level rise, yet many have chosen to stay in these areas, raising their houses a dozen feet without realizing that someday flooded streets and dysfunctional sewers may make their homes uninhabitable. Perhaps, like the citizens of Tokyo once did, they plan to use a boat to travel to work, school, and shopping. Or perhaps they believe that their local government's mitigation efforts will be enough. A strategic response to climate change is not yet part of their personal destinies either.

Research has shown us that humans are terrible at calculating long-term risks. We really, really want rewards now, even if we'd get better outcomes by being patient or denying ourselves in the short term. We overestimate immediate threats and underestimate less obvious dangers. We trust our anecdotal accounts and our friends' experiences over statistics.

The United States is at a crossroads. We can choose to rush into re-opening the economy without sufficient coronavirus testing for a short-term benefit of getting people back to work more quickly at the risk of long-term detriments:

• new waves of the disease
• widespread illness
• prolonged recovery and post-infection quarantines that reduce productivity
• high numbers of deaths
• unpredictable, prolonged school and business closures when employees become infected
• high cost of cleaning and disinfecting before re-opening every time someone gets sick

Likewise, we can continue to emit greenhouse gases, and gain the short-term benefits of continuing to live comfortably for a while as:

• our cities flood
• our homes become worthless
• farm land turns to salt marsh
• hurricanes and tornadoes destroy homes and lives
• floods cause late planting and crop failure
• fires ravage the hotter, drier regions of every continent

Or we can choose to plan for a future in which cities and farms continue to thrive, sustainable economies expand instead of contracting, and we do not die in great numbers from political upheaval, famine, or disease.

It's one thing to know what's dangerous. It's another to act before it's too late.

What's your personal destiny? What's the destiny of your nation?

WORKS CITED

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Cafe. New York: Other Press, 2016.

Foy, George Michaelsen. "Humans Can't Plan Long-Term and Here's Why." Psychology Today. 25 June 2018. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shut-and-listen/201806/humans-cant-plan-long-term-and-heres-why>

King, Dr. Matthew Wilburn. "How Brain Biases Prevent Climate Action." BBC. <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change>

One Bit at a Time: My Isolated Brain!

My volunteer potato plant

Yesterday I spent most of the day working in the yard.  I was actually planted something - a potato that came up volunteer in the compost. I had intended to plant a sweet potato from the grocery store, but when I started to screen the compost, I found this guy.  Sometime last year, I tossed an old potato into the bin and buried it.  Over the winter, that forgotten potato sprouted and struggled up through several inches of dirt to reach the light.  

In the midst of a global pandemic, it seems wrong to kill anything so determined to make a life for itself.  So I planted it instead.

It’s obvious, BTW, that we are going to run out of garden soil rather quickly.  No way is there enough compost to start a large garden.  But that is definitely not today’s issue.  My real problem is my distracted brain.

Every day,  I’m scatterbrained and emotional, and I struggle to complete any task.  Admittedly, there would be something truly wrong with me if I felt happy right now in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak.  The U.S. if facing a highly contagious pandemic with inadequate medical supplies, no known treatments, thousands of deaths and a global recession –  I’d be a monster if I were fine with all that.  Nevertheless I would like to be a little more fine than I currently am.

The primary way I’m functioning right now (when I'm not "misery scrolling" on Facebook or reading and re-reading the latest news) is by “bitting.”  A bit is the smallest unit of information processed by a computer, either a zero or a one.  Bits are usually grouped into larger units called bytes.  Bitting is taking things one very tiny piece at a time.

This is how it looks in my life:  People are dying, I’m terrified for everyone around me (including myself). What can I do?  Okay, there's a lot of laundry sitting around. Maybe I can match three pairs of socks.  Great, I did that.  Now I can fold two tee-shirts.  What’s the next little thing I can do? Eventually the stack of laundry disappears.

It would be way more efficient if I could manage larger data packets right now, but my mind is not in the kind of a place.  I’m happy just to be moving forward, a millimeter or two at a time.  And to be healthy, at a moment when so many are literally struggling for their lives.