Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Hello, my friends!  Below I have posted the transcript of a talk I gave this past weekend at a celebration of Emily Dickinson's poetry and gardens.  The event was hosted by the Powow River Poets at the beautiful Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  At the end of the day, some folks asked if I'd be willing to share the transcript, and I thought posting it here on the blog might be the easiest way to do just that.  Those of you who read my blog regularly may recognize a few lines here from a post I wrote over the summer as I was drafting this talk.  I've included a few of my photos from past posts here with the talk, too.  Again, if you've read my blog for a while, and you know about my passion for gardens, fields, and woods, you'll immediately understand my love for Emily Dickinson.


Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Thank you so much.  I want to say a special word of thanks to the Powow River Poets for this wonderful celebration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and gardens.   I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday--especially an October Saturday--and you’ll see why in just a bit.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an Emily Dickinson expert.  I’m simply a devoted fan, and I have been ever since I was a kid in the 1970’s.  Back when I was about 9 or 10, I had two summertime obsessions.  They weren’t obsessions that I shared with my friends or anyone else.  These were mine alone.

The first was one that I’m guessing many of you also had and probably still have; I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Magazines, books, cereal boxes—if it had words, I read it.  And somewhere in all that reading, I stumbled upon a collection of verse among my dad’s old college poetry textbooks that included some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And among those poems I discovered the first verse beyond the nursery rhymes of my early childhood that I knew I had to memorize.  It seemed to me so clever and true that I wanted to put it in my pocket and keep it for myself always.  So I did:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A clover anytime to Him
Is aristocracy.”

These lines embody much that I loved then and still love now about Dickinson’s poetry—economy of line, frankness, and a knack for telling the small but significant truth.  In these four lines she captures the perfect symbiosis between blossom and bee—one of the world’s most essential relationships.  This tiny poem has always stayed with me.  When I was learning calligraphy as a teenager, it was one of the sentences I would write again and again, decorating it with flourishes in the curlicued shape of a bee’s flight pattern.  In the years since then, it’s been a mantra, a touchstone that even now I repeat when I’m working in my garden: “The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,” I murmur as I trellis the sweet peas or weed among the thyme and rosemary, and again at night as I drift off to sleep, knees aching, hair still smelling of mud and leaves . . . “a clover anytime to him is aristocracy . . . .”

But getting back to my childhood summertime obsessions.  The first was reading, and as you might have already guessed, the second was gardening. I loved spending hours in my mother’s flower garden with my face as close to the peonies, the phlox, and the tiger lilies as possible.  In the garden, my senses were heightened, things seemed more real, and I felt more connected to all the thousands of lives around me than I did anywhere else—connected to the worms in the soil, the butterflies careening among the cosmos, the cardinals calling one another from the branches of our white lilac tree.  I wanted to be near enough to spy on the bees working their dizzy magic, near enough so that the flowers would, as Dickinson writes, “make me regret / I am not a bee” (808).  Beyond the garden was noise and flash and distraction, the next-door neighbors arguing, planes roaring overhead, and the distant wash of cars on the highway—people rushing off to a world that seemed preoccupied with less vital things--at least to me.  There in the garden was the much smaller, more vibrant world that Dickinson describes in Poem 1746:

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
’Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

The garden to me, as a kid, felt like existence at its most essential.  While I reveled in its beauty, I don’t really think I held a romanticized notion about the pretty flowers, because, I saw life and death quite clearly for what they were when I was in the garden.  In fact, I think if you want a child to understand death, you give her a hoe, a spade, and a pair of shears, and you send her out to vanquish the weeds, turn the compost, and deadhead the roses.  Much as Emily Dickinson did in her own mother’s garden when she was growing up, I saw death all around me in the garden—and in some cases, I was even the cause of it, whether I wanted to be or not.  I quickly learned that this was an unavoidable part of being a gardener.

I also witnessed intimately how everything that dies helps to bring new life into the world.  And that many of the plants that died each year had ingenious ways of coming back to life the following spring.  As Dickinson asks, “If a pod die, shall it not live again?” (Prose fragment 18)  Over time as I continued to garden, continued to watch pods die each season and then live again, and continued to read Dickinson’s poems about the gardens, orchards, and fields surrounding her home in Amherst, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit—and isn’t this one of the key reasons that we read (and write) poetry?  Dickinson herself called the poets she read “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul.”

As a girl, I couldn’t put into words what I was discovering about the interconnectedness of life and death in the garden.  In fact, I don’t even think I can now, really.  As Dickinson writes,  “Nature is what we know— /Yet have no art to say" (668).

But she doth protest too much, because she did have the art to say it: When Roses cease to bloom, Sir, /And Violets are done,” she writes,

When Bumblebees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the Sun —
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this Summer's day Will idle lie — in Auburn —
Then take my flowers — pray!”

Or in “A Bird came down the walk," where she describes the bird that bit an angle worm in halves, “ate the fellow raw,” drank some dew from the grass, and then “hopped sidewise to let a beetle pass.”  She intimately captures in her poems Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”  (“In Memoriam A.H. H.") with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensibility.  At the same time, she also explores the sacred in the everyday.  “I hope you love birds too,” she wrote to her cousin Eugenia Hall. “It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”  And in “Some Keep the Sabbath” (236) that great old chestnut taught in Introduction to Literature courses everywhere, she eschews conventional religion, finding her spirituality in the family orchard:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

For Dickinson the garden embodied immortality. As a girl, she describes heaven in a letter to a friend as “the garden we have not seen.”  And many years later, just before her death, she asked to have her casket carried—by the workmen who tended the family’s grounds—in a circle around her garden, through the barn, and then up through the field of buttercups to the Western Cemetery in the center of Amherst.  Heaven was inseparable from the flowers, the birds, and the bees, which were all parallels to and metaphors for her own life—for our own lives.  That is not to say that she didn’t see them as ends in themselves, but that by seeing and valuing them for their own sake, she came to understand her own existence all the better.  In the garden she found a way to comprehend mortality—and proof of immortality.

When I was a little girl in the garden with my shears and my spade, Emily Dickinson taught me something that I would later come to feel in my bones as true, and it’s that at root, a gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the spring garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.  She must also accept its necessity when that iris blossom dies.

It’s a Saturday in October, and the garden is dying.  But it will live again—improbably, miraculously, this coming spring.  Even as it dies, it is living, and it will always live on, as will the iris, the rose, and the jasmine, the Indian Pipe and the clover, in Emily Dickinson’s words.

And so, because she had the art to say it, as well as anyone ever has, and as reverently, too:

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!” (21)

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to poem numbers in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, 1999.

Picture This

Special thanks to Shutter Sisters for featuring this photo on their Instagram Feed last week!

Picture This

You live in a foreign country,

except to you

it isn't foreign

because it's where

you were born

in this, a different life--

imagine--

pears grow there

on your very 

own tree,

or maybe--get wild--

they're figs,

and you can use

the word pluck

for the first time

in your whole life,

at least this life,

but in that one

you pluck practically

every day:

harp strings, heart 

strings, whole mornings,

and the figs, of course--

but only what you need.

You never horde.

Imagine--

each fig is the first,

the last--

pollinated by the tiny moth

that has climbed inside

the fruit's tiny mouth,

laid her eggs

and waited 

for her prince to pluck

her out.

Imagine--

inside your mouth

for one moment

you hold seed

and flower

and egg,

all that you 

could ever want,

the world--

its birth,

its death 

inside

your mouth.

Copyright 2009 Gigi Thibodeau

Today I have reposted a poem I wrote back in 2009.  My life was headed in a very different direction then.  I was the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; I'd just had a collection of poetry published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and had just won a couple national writing awards; I was preparing for a more permanent position teaching poetry writing and children's literature at UML after having taught these and other classes there for nearly a decade as an adjunct professor.  I knew who I was, where I was going, what I would do when I arrived there.

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain / For promised joy" (Robert Burns, "To a Mouse"). 

And then, everything that was supposed to happen did not.  Namely, I lost the newly created position at UML--in the most spectacular and ugly way--due to hideous campus politics.  I lost many friends and colleagues.  I lost all belief in myself.  Every last bit of it.  And I lost all sense of who I was.  I had been a teacher for a very long time, not just at UML, but before that, too, in many other places.  Suddenly, I felt like that life had been a lie.  

This lie brings me full circle back to the poem.  I'd crafted it while I was writing my Kerouac lecture and poetry reading.  It was full of hope and excitement about the future.  When I read it now, I feel empathy for the woman who wrote this, for what she was about to experience.  I also feel a small sense of relief that nothing I hoped for came true.

Instead, with the support of my husband, I picked up the shards and shattered bits, and I began again.  We moved back to Maine, the place we both loved.  I started working one-on-one with writers, helping them shape their work and their words into stronger and stronger finished drafts.  I began selling more and more photographs.  My own writing grew richer.  The whole world split open.  Isn't that always the way when we keep our commitment to the muse, even in the midst of despair?      

We rented an apartment for two years while we saved our pennies.  Then we found a little cottage with enough land for gardens, and we scooped it up as quickly as we could.  We'd learned after many trials and disappointments in life to act quickly when it feels right in our hearts.  Here over the last year we've dug and planted several gardens . . . and have plans for more.

And we bought our first fig tree.  A Brown Turkey, it's called, and it's not cold hardy all the way up here in Maine, so we will have to coddle it, bring it in each winter to go dormant, coax it back to life each spring.  Already it's been fruiting like mad, though, and, yes, that photo above is of our very first ripe fig.  
And, yes, I plucked it myself.

A Year and a Word: My 400th Post

I awoke early with the cats this morning and watched the light outside my kitchen window shift from deep blue to grey-blue to soft white as I ate my steel-cut oats and almond milk.  It was a morning like any other, except this one was the last of its year.  I had some thinking to do.  What would be my word for 2013?  I still hadn't decided.

And then I was smacked by a stomach bug.  It's one that I think I've been fighting since Christmas Eve.  It finally won, and I climbed back in bed, where I was joined by wild dreams of traveling to Paris, only to find that I was in a high school gymnasium and I had to cheerlead again, decades after my cheerleading days.  I had, of course, forgotten all the words and motions, and everyone was furious with me.  Not a promising sign for 2013.

And yet I woke up with the word for the year in my head.  "Persevere."  I've had to persevere through some pretty terrible times over the past several years, and I've managed to do it, but I have been wondering whether I could do it this time.  I must persevere as a writer now more than ever when I have two manuscripts trying to find homes and a whole bag of worries and fears to carry with me as I move forward.  

"Persevere" is not as pretty as "inspire" or "grace," my words from 2012 and 2011, but it is real, and it's what I tell my students to do all the time.  It's also what I need.  Perseverance gets harder for me as I grow older and I fear I won't achieve many of the things of which I've dreamed.  I am not as patient in the face of rejection now, something I see loads and loads of as a writer.  I see successes, too, but I don't linger on those.  I tend to linger on my failures.  "Persevere" will require a whole slew of other words like "hope" and "optimism" and "try" to come along for the ride.  

As Samuel Beckett writes: "Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."

Here's to 2012 and to failing better.  I wish you all love and adventure and a dose of perseverance in the coming year.  

xo Gigi 

The Journey Back to Quebec: Part II, How to Recover Four Years of Forgotten High-School French in Four Days

My last post ended with Monsieur Magpie and me hightailing it for the Canadian border, singing, "We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.  We been talkin' 'bout Jackman ever since the fire went out . . ." at the top of our lungs.  Once we'd made it over the border though, the singing stopped and the serious practice began.  One of the many painful truths we have accepted after twenty years together is that our combined knowledge of the French language puts us at about the level of a five-year-old native speaker.  This isn't such a good thing when one considers that between us we have studied eight years of high-school French.

Interestingly, too, we each have very different sets of skills.  Todd knows his verbs--how to conjugate, how to use tenses, how to string them together to show actions that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow.  I, on the other hand, have managed to maintain a large store of nouns and other vocabulary words in the old metal file drawers of my brain.  I can tell you that la bougie means the candle (or the spark plug), but I can't quickly tell you to blow la bougie out before it catches the curtains on fire.  Needless to say, after two decades of studying, teaching, and making a living as a writer, I know which tools are most important to have at one's disposal when communicating.  It's easy to look up a noun in a dictionary, but the ability to craft a sentence that makes sense is not so simple.  Todd is thus a much faster and more fluent French speaker than I am.  I, with my brain for minutiae and lists, fumble along, spouting nouns and colorful adjectives, and gesticulating wildly.  I do sprinkle in a verb or two from time to time, but my sentences lack any sophistication.

So, what to do about this problem?  

For us the answer was--and is--simple.  Dive right in and talk.  So talk we did.  We had conversations both long and short with locals everywhere we went, and we found that every single person we met was more than happy to talk with us.  Armed with a pocket dictionary and a book of common phrases, we spoke as much French as we possibly could.  We also asked countless questions about words, expressions, and turns of phrase.

I found that the more I spoke, the more I wanted to speak . . . and to listen.  Whether discussing medieval illuminations with the owner of one of the best pen shops I've ever visited, Quebec politics with a fantastic graphic artist, or great local neighborhoods with a man we met on the street, I loved listening and discovering new nuances of this beautiful language along the way.  By our fourth and last night there, we didn't need to resort to any English when we chatted with our waitress at Chez Victor (the best burger place ever, including veggie burgers).  It sounds silly to be excited about speaking very basic French at a restaurant, but the fact that she didn't automatically switch to English as soon as she heard our American accents was heartening for us.  Many folks will politely shift over to English if they know that French is hard for you, but we learned that if we asked them to use French with us, most people were happy to help us stumble along.  

As an American who loves talking with people visiting my country, it was a thrill to meet so many like-minded folks in Quebec.  It was also a thrill to think so hard every day that my head hurt.  Even when Todd and I were just talking to each other, we tried to speak in French as much as possible.  Now that we're back in the U.S. we're still at it, messing around with sentences and looking up words.  

I kick myself for being such a lousy student all those years ago in high school.  I couldn't be bothered to learn the language of my own heritage, my father's first language, and one that carries me back to some of the best memories of my childhood.  The motto of Quebec province, which can be found over the main entrance to the Parliament building and on every Quebec license plate, is something one can't help but feel, especially within the stone walls of Vieux Quebec.  Je me souviens.  The French may have lost to the English on les Plaines d'Abraham in 1759, but this is a deeply French place.  It endures.  Et quand je suis à Québec, je me souviens aussi.

The Magpie's Pen

Okay, my friends, it's up and running!

From now on, The Magpie's Pen will be the new home of Freewrite Fridays . . .

. . . and much, much more,

all designed to keep your pen moving 

and your fingers typing.

I hope you'll fly on over there for a visit.

X

Remember when you were a child reading your ABC books?  The early letters were simple: A is for Apple, D is for Dog, L is for Lollipop or maybe Lemon.  Toward the end of the alphabet, things became more tricky, especially when it came to X.  By default, most books read, “X is for Xylophone," since so few words a child would ever use begin with X.  

In fact, few words an adult ever uses, besides Xanax, begin with X.  A few of my favorites include Xyloid, for something wooden or woody; Xanthine, for something yellowish in color, Xerotic, for something dry (nowhere near as interesting as the word looks or sounds); and Xiphoid for sword-shaped.  

One of the most fascinating X-words is Xanthippe, which means a shrewish nagging woman.  Actually, Xanthippe originally meant a blond horse (In Greek, xanos=blond, [thus xanthine=yellowish] and hippo=horse).  Xanthippe came to mean a shrewish woman because it was also the name of the wife of Socrates.  The Greeks often named people after horses, much like people today sometimes name kids after cars, like Mercedes or Porsche (Porsche, by the way, is a variant of Portia, which in Latin means pig--think porcine).   Socrates apparently adored his wife and praised her for speaking her mind.  Other men, including some of his pupils, weren't quite as fond of her opinions and confidence.  Over time, her assertiveness became labeled shrewishness, and her name became synonymous with what today people might call a bitch.  Hmmmmm . . . where have we heard this story before?

My all-time favorite X-word, though, is, of course, Xanadu, for the "stately pleasure dome" written about by Coleridge in Kubla Khan in 1797, and then re-imagined in the 1980's in that roller-skating disco film  starring Olivia Newton John.  Who could ever forget the Xanadu theme song?  "Now we are here in Xana-du-u-u-u . . . ."

So, it’s true, X doesn’t begin all that many words in English--dozens rather than thousands.  In order for X to have its eks sound in a word, it needs to be preceded by a vowel, like e, for eXample.  Otherwise, X sounds like Z, as in Xylophone, so this is no help to a girl who's just trying to learn her sounds.  In fact, it's positively eXasperating.  

But think of the eXcitement when you slip X inside a word, or how eXceptional it is on its own: L doesn’t mark the spot, or Q, or even D.  No--X, in all its cross-hatched glory, marks the spot.  And for centuries, X has been a legal signature if one couldn't sign one's name.  That's power.  

It's also half the fun of tic tac toe.  And it's the kisses in xoxo.  It's the unknown in the X-Files.  It's the anonymous or unnamable or the missing.  It's the task we complete and X off our list.  And as Simon Cowell can tell you, it's that special talent, that X-factor, that it's difficult to name, but when we see it, we just know. 

And then there’s three in a row: 

Something forbidden or lethal or even enticing, yes, like triple-strength ale or poison or porn.  When I was a girl, we'd visit Chinatown in Boston after trips to the science museum.  Inevitably we'd pass by the old porn clubs and movie houses, like the Naked-i Cabaret.  Those places are gone now, cleared out during the 80's and 90's, but those mysterious signs with all their flashing red X's are burned into my memory.   Who knew how eXtreme, how eXcessive, how seXy a letter could be?

The fact that X is the least common letter in English makes it a perfect eXample of how powerful letters and language are, how they fill our mouths and minds and hearts with meaning.  How rich they are with memory, how replete with possibility, and how much we need them each day from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep.