The Bookshelf in the Garden

A Workshop with Writer-in-Residence Chris Fahrenthold
Thursday, October 12, 2017 from 6:00pm to 8:00 
We live amid a daily flood of sensations—these sights, sounds, and tastes are the material of poetry. Artists take these sensations and then braid them with memory and insight into a poem, or a painting, or a journal, or a memoir, or a…you get the point. Using cookbooks, nature field guides, and seed catalogs, we will look at how to begin following those sensations back into our minds, and how to forge the result into something interesting, even if--especially if—only to ourselves.
 
 
Refreshments will be served, and please RSVP soon if attending, as space for this workshop is limited

At yesterday's meeting of The Green Center Tea Society (Wednesdays at 4:00 pm, all are welcome, btw!), we read and discussed Thomas Centolella's 1990 poem "Lines of Force", an evocation of the experience of encountering a fellow human in the wildness of nature. This put me in mind of a poem from his most recent collection, Almost Human​, specifically in the way he uses the both the natural sciences and the language of culture to speak to their union in the human creature. Here is "Why I'm in Awe of the Spiral":

​​When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview
of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here
(which really ought to be We are here), and see
​that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster
are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other
in circles within milky circles, I can't help but think

​of those ancient paintings and rock engravings,
​discovered all over our celestial body,
of that one line which begins at whatever point
it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing
anyone can define--the oldest shape revered
by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician

and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike,
and even accorded a place of honor among the mess
​of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper.
​But it's already there in the florets of the sunflower
​crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm,
and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell,

and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea
that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old's improvisation.
Call it what you will--"God's fingerprint," "the soul
unfolding through time," "the passageway into the Self"--
I can't help but admire, even fear, something as mundane
​as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation

on our sidereal drift, our existential pain.
​And then there's that famous falcon, "turning and turning
in a widening gyre," a portentous symbol of our own
circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos
we thought we had just escaped, one town burning
a decade behind us, a millennium before that,

​and into next week, next year, next whenever.
And when the two of us took that winding road
​an infinity of others had wound down before us
and would wind down again, our spirits hushed
by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man's curve
​and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other,

​wasn't that a wondrous and terrible turning?

Poet and WUStL professor Mary Jo Bang will be launching her new book, "A Doll for Throwing" at Left Bank Books in the Central West End on Thursday, August 30th, at 7:00pm. Centering on the Bauhaus art community in the years leading up to its elimination by the Nazis in 1933, her groundbreaking work takes a collective movement, a way of understanding the world, a series of art works themselves, as the "voice" of her poems. The title itself refers to the work "Wurfpuppe" by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, which is a "flexible and durable woven doll that, if thrown, would land with grace." The event is free and open to all.

Rachel Hadas' 1998 poem "The End of Summer" speaks to that time when the "sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn" portends an end to August and our confrontation that September--and Fall--are coming. How do we confront the loveliness and the work to be done as winter approaches? Poems like Hadas' remind us that "not light but language shocks us out of sleep" as she urges us to "redeem the time".

The End of Summer

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn--
​An early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone. 

Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, 

we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work, 

redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). 

In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
Summer or winter, country, city, we
are prisoners from the start and automatically,
hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.
​
Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.

Join us at The Green Center this Wednesday at 4:00pm to read and chat about Robin Coste Lewis' poem "Summer". Lewis is the epitome of both the artist as investigator of all things visible and invisible and an American-in-the-World. From the Poetry Foundation:

"Lewis earned her MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing Program where she was a Goldwater fellow in poetry. She also earned a MTS degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard Divinity School. She is a Cave Canem fellow and was awarded a Provost’s fellowship in the Creative Writing & Literature PhD Program at USC...Lewis has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans."

​We hope you'll come by for a cuppa and stay for the beauty and insight of poetry among friends.

Save the date! On Tuesday, September 12th at 6:00pm, St. Louis-based artist and author Sophie Binder will be speaking at The Green Center about her 2001 odyssey around with world with, you guessed it, two wheels and a sketchbook.

​In April 2001, she quit her job and put all her belongings in storage to fulfill a longtime dream to bicycle and sketch her way around the world. What followed was a solo adventure that would take her through 16 countries across Europe, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and the U.S., pedaling 14,000 miles in 14 months. She came back in June 2002 with seven sketchbooks full of watercolors and stories.

​She will share some of her art, several of her stories, and many of the insights she gained about the unity in variety of the human experience, and the beauty and empathy to be seen and shared on this third planet from the sun.

An example of the power of the short poem to rattle around one's head is Randall Jarrell's wonderful 1954 poem "The Meteorite":

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One: and bent and put it to her lips
​And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters--
​Breathe on me still, star, sister.

​While syntactically a simple address and request of a star to do one thing (Star...Breathe on me...), what that star is and does is very complicated. The star "looked", "picked", "bent", "put", "breathed upon" a stone. That stone is itself special (or is it?). It is has been "picked from" others, is "half iron and half dirt", "burn[s] / Uncertainly, among the stars" who have now become "its sisters". In the end, the speaker's request that the star "Breathe on me" is capped with the wonderfully complex "still, star, sister". To ​keep breathing upon the speaker, and to address that to a "star" who is a "sister" in a poem titled "The Meteorite" is to send us back again and again through the short lyric to sort out who begins a star, who becomes a star, and who remains a star.

​That is the point, and that is the beauty of poetry. 

Thank you to the photographers, guests, and community who came out to The Green Center last night to celebrate WGNSS's biannual competition winners. The stunning photos--real natural historical documents--will be on display throughout the downstairs until September 1st, 2017. Please come in and have a look. In fact...

​...today at 4:00pm would be a wonderful opportunity, as The Green Center Tea Society welcomes all to cool off, have a snack and chat about Meena Alexander's poem "Lady Dufferin's Terrace". As always, no poetry experience necessary!