Rick Benjamin, my mentor, beloved friend, and current poet laureate of Rhode Island, gets everything he wants. But that's because what he wants is to circulate the wisdom that words, and maybe words alone, can carry. His preferred medium is poetry, which calls words back to their sharpened purpose. In the everyday, words are such common currency that we can easily waste them or use them cheaply (ever done that?)-- the way we can waste our breath, or even waste our lives, given to us so freely. Wise words beckon us, AGAIN, to pay attention to what we are really saying, being, doing. I am on this topic now because there is so much WANTING bound up with the college application process: the schools we want to attend or want our children to attend, the status or recognition we want (very much) to gain or not to lose-- and the want to be Wanted. The process can be overwhelming and leave little room for breathing, for common sense, or for just plain joy in what is. On New Years Day, a day that can be auspicious or a Big Headache or both, Rick and I chewed over ideas for his monthly column for the Providence Journal (which you can and should read regularly here)-- something about change, what else? The poem "Oceans" I have long cherished popped up as fitting-- do we get what we expect? Do we even know what we already have? Are we closed or opened to change? o c e a n s I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing … Silence … Waves … —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? ~Juan Ramon Jimenez, trans. by Robert Bly This simple poem teaches me at every rereading. If you want to get everything you want, it's easy enough: adjust your wants. Jimenez, perhaps not even meaning to, teaches us to feel and listen and be brave enough to notice that we may already be standing in the new life, the next "great Continue Reading …
Destiny
A Writer’s Inheritance: Fake it, then make it
Free-write Faker I follow my own rules for creativity when I’m with my students. When we free write, the law of the land is don’t stop writing no matter what. Because I am used to this physical commitment, rarely does nothing come out. So when my mind careened into a non-verbal ditch at an inopportune moment, in order to stay with the game, I kept on by fake writing. Not faking writing, but writing fake words. Pen still in motion. Rule not broken. Continue Reading …
Grammar As Game-Changer
Risky Statements Supposedly, Martin Luther King Jr. began his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on bits of toilet paper—the only paper he could get in confinement. His need to express his position on peaceful protest, like the need to use the bathroom, was that urgent. This was a personal statement, impeccable in its grammar, that risked his personhood in order to stand up for non-violent resistance as a radical act of love. This mission was why he was alive, and also why he would not be alive for very long. Continue Reading …
On Destiny and Saying YES in Your Essay
In Taoist philosophy, it is understood that each of us is born into the world with a curriculum. This curriculum is a set of challenges and themes and things our souls are here to learn. We do this kind of learning simply by moving through our lives. Just being yourself is following this curriculum. It is said that our souls are a piece of the sky scooped out by the big dipper. Continue Reading …