Getting Back Our Vocal Chords

I recently heard a fascinating quote by the band director and composter, John Phillip Sousa. He was testifying before Congress in 1906 about the new recording industry. Apparently he wasn't much of a fan. This is what he said:

"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

What Sousa predicted is exactly what happened. We have learned to be entertained, but for the most part we have stopped making music, we have stopped singing. We have stopped telling stories. We have stopped making art. We have stopped making much of anything.

I love to listen to recorded music by the best musicians and to watch movies with the most accomplished actors and directors and to read books by the greatest writers I can find. But the truth is, I have learned how to consume and I haven't forced myself to learn how to create.

And even the creating I do, I spend a lot of time comparing, unfavorably, to the professionals.

Did you know there's a wonderfully vibrant and rich and varied poetry community in the Sacramento area? There are regular poetry readings, poetry workshops, several print and online publications all full of poetry by local area poets.

I am, in fits and starts, and in a very limited degree, a new member of that community.

Sometimes, though, I can get a little jaded attitude about these endeavours. Because the truth is, none of us are Billy Collins or Emily Dickinson. Actually, most of us are amateurs. I certainly am. And most of the writing that comes out of this community is not something that is going to amaze or entertain or impress the rest of the world.

When I'm in my rather pride-filled, ego obsessed state of mind, I think this way. I can feel a sort of cynical contempt about what we are doing.

I'm afraid this elitist or consumeristic point of view is not that uncommon. I wonder if it's another symptom of the destructive edge to our entertainment culture. We have become used to the professionals entertaining us--through their poetry, their movies, their music, their art. Our art doesn't measure up, and it's easier just to be a consumer anyway.

If you read a local poetry journal, or go to a local poetry reading, or a local concert, play, or art show, you will have endure a few more sour notes than if you went to a professional gig. I personally don't like sour notes as much as sweet ones. I like making sour notes, (or mediocre poetry) even less.

But if you go to a local poetry reading or a local concert or play, you will have a chance to know something beautiful and mostly secret about your neighbors and the way they see this world. If you make art and then share it, you will have a chance to know something sacred about yourself. The artist and the audience have a little chance together to think about what is beautiful and what is true.

My deep hope and prayer is that our community could move away from the couch potato mentality. We could turn off the cd player and the dvd and sing to our children. We could make our friends a book of our stories. We could hang a picture we made on the wall.

We are the people that actually exist in our community, after all. With the skill level we actually have. And I think it makes our community far more interesting and healthier when we are making art together.

Do you know about Poetry Daily

Some how, my husband-- who is among many more important things both a marvelous combination of someone who knows everything there possibly is to know about computers and someone who wonderously enough seems to like me quite a lot-- anyway, to get back to my point, this aforementioned gentleman friend of mine has managed to put on my web browser "home page" a link to Poetry Daily, and it's really wonderful... I don't know how you do the link thingy, but you can find the site here...

http://www.poems.com/

Check out this marvelous poem by a Spanish poet --http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14187

And may you enjoy your day and the friends that find you in it.

Jenny

I just keep saying the same thing

But here's another poem that helps me say it...

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14186

News From God

I love this children's poem by Robert Louis Stevenson--

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.


I don't believe I'm some naive ingenue--I know the world is also full of a number of things that could and perhaps should make us all despair. But still I love this poem. Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was often tormented by his depression, still he could often see and know that every day had "news from God," even in the clouds, or a little leaf, or in the way the frozen tops of the mud puddles sparkled with intricate beauty.

Today I hope I can give my son and myself a chance to notice and see how wonderfully full this world is of news from God.

All us turkeys

Self portrait: Wild Turkey

In your lumpy brown suit, red necktie dragging,
shuffling, bowing out of sight.
Behind dusty weeds you find a low hill,
under an oak’s broad tent. Stiffly unfold,
slowly turn your full, dark fan—heavy bronzes
fringed with white. Stretch the blue-creped
skeleton of skull and neck to scream out
all you got—one high note gargle—as if to keep
from drowning in that sack of self.
To those that soar, or flit from branch to branch,
I think you’re crying:
Don’t look. See me. Don’t look. Please see.
My something beautiful.



I wrote this poem a few years ago, when I was just beginning to explore writing again. I still feel in captures some of the internal struggle many artists, including myself, go through.

At the time I was leading the creative writers' group at church, and people would approach me with very sincere questions and concerns about the spiritual formation risks of writing done for others to read. I remember one individual sharing with me that the very fact she had a natural talent made her reluctant to begin writing, because, as she explained, it would be so easy to become prideful. Another person questioned the motives, his included, behind writers wanting
their poems or stories to be read by others.

I personally understand all too well their concerns, as the turkey poem tried to express. I can't casually dismiss them. All of us know that love of acceptance, praise or money have snared artists and caused them to lose the core of what made their work unique and beautiful and true. And as Christians, we want to learn to honor God, to live with humility and to pursue his glory and not our own.

A couple years ago I felt compelled to start writing again, and to bit by bit face a bit of the risk of being known in that writing. And so, I've had a chance to explore some of these issues first hand--and I have found that in fact, though my pride and self-absorption and vainglorious heart are raging monsters--they seem to have almost no relationship to my writing. I have found that my writing, usually, is just something small, really, something like a little beautiful leaf or rock I've found or a sunset that I've seen and want to show others. Usually, it feels very disconnected to this broken hearted, greedy dragon I carry around, the one demanding approval and attention.

I recently read something in Dallas Willard's MARVELOUS book The Divine Conspiracy that seemed to explain this, a bit. He makes a distinction between a God-given drive for significance expressed in our creative impulses and an egotistical, pathological self-obsession born of our broken, lost state. I'll quote it at length below. C.S. Lewis' Weight of Glory also speaks of these things with amazing insight.

I have to confess that I actually deeply dislike writing and speaking about spiritual formation issues. I really understand almost nothing about this stuff. But still, I want to encourage those would-be artists afraid of their own pride to take this risk. In my experience, it could, at the very least teach you a lot about yourself, and even better, give the rest of us some beautiful writing, or art, or music to enrich our lives.

Here's the Willard quote.

"The drive to signficance that first appears as a vital need in the tiny child,a nd later as its clamorous desire for attention, is not egotism. Egotistical individuals see everything through themselves. They are always the dominant figures in their own field of vision.

Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute self-consciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is indeed, a desperate response to the frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone's hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. .....

In the last couple years, I have met my self-obsession and even egotism. I have behaved more foolishly than any turkey. But I have also discovered that this is not the final word on my life, or on anyone's life.

And I have also come to feel that my writing is, like I said, just not a big deal. I hope I do get published and read by others, because I think it's fun. I enjoy letting others know this part of me that brings me such joy.

I don't feel like a turkey singing anymore... (at least, not right now).

But I think it was ok, even very good, to go through that time when I did feel so much like a turkey, hoping people saw me and also fearing them seeing me. Though the experience was horribly painful, I had the chance to know myself and my dragons a little more, and even better, I have learned to believe that God can defeat even this oldest and most tenacious monster in me. (I also suspect there will be plenty of chances for me to feel like a turkey again...but I hope I will trust a little faster and easier next time I feel that way!)

I would so love to hear from any artists--to know if you have struggled with these issues at all, and how you have met God in the struggle.

Some Like Poetry

I recently checked out a book of poetry by the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I'm quite smitten.

Here's a lovely one that speaks deeply to me about what poetry --to say it more broadly-- art-- to say it more broadly again--beauty serves for so many of us.

I also have to say, I just love the simplicity and almost humility inherent in her language. This is the kind of writing my soul wants to clutch on again.

Some like poetry

Some--
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting the schools, where one must,
and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like--
but one also likes chicken noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

More about "THE DANCING"

I didn't want to just leave that poem, "The Dancing," by Gerald Stern without any more comments. So I thought I'd say a bit of what I find so powerful in that poem...

It starts us out in some kind of nostagalic reminscing--the way people get in flea markets and antique shops--"look at this old pickle fork just like the one Grandpa sent flying at that picnic in '59" -- but then the nostalgia turns so precise--"Ravel's Bolero," and every word has so much precise, powerful intent. We are suddenly in a "tiny living room," we are cramped in there and now a family is dancing, which is unusual and evocative as it is, but then, this kind of dancing: with "knives all flashing, my hair all streaming." It's a passion we rarely witness, maybe can never speak about except with distance and by sneaking up on it. The mother is red with her laughter and the father is making that farting noise in his delight, and then these lines:

"the world at last a meadow//the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us//screaming and falling, as if were were dying."

There's this incredible tension in the rhythym of the lines, they have a momentum to them when you say them.

We're here in Pittsburgh and it's 1945, and we're a little immigrant family in a tiny living room. It's nothing too beautiful, by any standards, except these. That it's 1945, and 5,000 miles away our people have been rescued. So we've been rescued. This world has become a meadow again.

Then this last line-- it just makes me tremble.

Think about this history. About the utter unexplainable horror of the Holocaust, and then to know it's over. Somehow this last line perfectly, to me, captures what it is to live in a world where the evil is desperate and yet, finally the evil is conquered. This kind of evil can't be defeated simply by the military power. The God who has seemed so distant and hidden while evil occurred has now said it will end.

So they dance. I love this dancing. I think Miriam and the other Israelites danced like this when they found they were at last free of Egypt... and the people of the Exile danced like this when they were at last home--This wild dancing that is a prayer and a cry:

"oh God of mercy, oh wild God."