What I Understood

What I Understood
by Katha Pollitt


When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

"What I Understood" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009

Don't Answer

I don't want answers.

I want to be inspired to the possibilities.
I need a mystery,
A promise of an answer
Skirting softly in flickers of secret glances,
Written in glyphs carved in stone
no one remembers,
Spoken in dead languages,
Indecipherable,
An old key to a lock to no one knows where
found in a box in the back of the closet.
Mysteries open ended where the truth,
if there ever was one,
is whatever story you wove that fit the clues

or simply the question alone,
left unanswered.

When you said no,
that you were leaving,
I couldn't understand.
You spoke too clearly.
What did you mean?

In the stormy east-wind straining

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in its banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower'd Camelot;

Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And round and round the prow she wrote
The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance —
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.

At the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.

Excerpt from Lord Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1833). The painting (also called "The Lady of Shalott") is by John William Waterhouse (1888).

Mere Air, These Words, but Delicious to Hear

Poetry can be intimidating exactly because every word has intent. Extracting the hidden meaning or intent from the poetic is challenging, but it's sort of what the experience of poetry is all about. As Kipling wrote:

Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges-
Something lost behind the Ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go!

An enthusiast of poetry is an explorer of words. Something hidden, go and find it. Go!

To help explorers of poetry, the Poetry Foundation has reprinted the first chapter from the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Its 16 sections provide strategies for reading poems, and each section has plenty of links to example poems to illustrate the points given by the guide.

Robert Hass on the power of poetry

My shorthand goes like this—Wordsworth read a
German philosopher who wrote about mountains,
Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau,
Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and so we got
Yellowstone and Yosemite. It took 100 years—
that’s the cycle of things.

- Robert Hassvia, via Poetry Foundation

To Rosetta

As I was walking through Washington Park in the Over-the-Rhine district of Cincinnati, I saw the following poem written on a sign and jotted it down. Poverty is beautiful.

To Rosetta

I'm not ignoring the bad times we
     spent together,
When I say I love you.
But, the bad times -- I understood them,
The good times -- I cherish them.

And here we are now
thinking what it all means.
Thinking over the years together, years
     of hard struggle.
And in some ways we reach this
     point, you and me,
in the same way we began a few
     years ago,
struggling to survive,
looking for a home,
learning together a vision of all
     people's struggle.

Your love shown strong, warm in
     a basic way.
Only two bites of food, you'd want
     me to have one.
Two blankets, one was offered me. And
     if only one, over half was mine.
An empty, unheated Vine Street flat,
We scavenged survival necessities
     together.
A roached up stove, an old refrigerator,
a rusty heater,
from missionary centers and abandoned
     buildings.

Lines of swallowed pride
and growing understanding.

Summers watching children growing
     up together
with mothers sitting on front stoops
     and fire escapes
to escape the apartment heat and
     closeness.
The sidewalks a playground until alleys
     and strangers
present a challenge.

Soaking in the deep, solid, pervading
spirit that rises from the street.

Memories of you coming around the
     corner,
or up the street,
or through the door, with love,
with spirit, with a heavy burden,
     with fight.
You put your arm around someone
or lift the group with a fighting song.
Determined not to let the system or
     anyone
Break the bond we have.

Thinking what it all means,
Thinking over the years together,
     determined to carry on.

- Unknown

Turtles maybe, but also a grain of sand

A holarchical view of the web is also...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

Gershwin and I love ourselves

I got an email from someone asking me what the poem I posted yesterday meant. I'll go ahead and explain from my point of view, but seriously, I'm fine with whatever anyone gets out of it.

I came up with the concept for the poem in darker days when I was really fenced in, but it's not a dark poem. It's based on a pastime of mine where I like to lay on my back in fields and stare up at the sky and imagine that I'm really looking down on an ocean that I can just fall into. It's something I've always remembered doing. I also wanted to play with the idea that up is sometimes down and blah, blah, literary crap.

Talking about oneself is always a little awkward. You either sell yourself short or come off sounding like a raging egomaniac. It's also not very honest — I'm both self-deprecating and a raging egomaniac. So I probably won't explain things very much in the future, just put them out there.

Plus, if I stop to think about anything I have to say, I'm running a real risk. Oscar Levant once said to George Gershwin: "Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?"

Yes, yes I would (egomaniac). The only problem is that I'm a neglectful lover (self-deprecating).

Falling over fences

Lying with my back to the soft grass looking Up at the blue dome of sky;
Lying with my back to the absent stars looking Down on the blue deep of oceans.
Fenced in and finding there's no fences to Jump above.
You don't jump into the sky — you Fall.