Edward Harkness: The Law of the Unforeseen

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Our reading at Elliott Bay Books is only one week away! Here’s a poem from Ed’s newest book. I’ve discovered that you can find him all over the web, including Verse Daily and Terrain.

 

One of the things (or two) that I love about Ed’s poems is their range. He strikes me as a thoroughly Pacific Northwest poet, and yet he weaves in  his international rovings, musings about historical and fictional characters, and observations of natural phenomenon from all over the globe, and he does so in such a way that I feel as though I am there, too.

Here is a short poem that gives me that sense of a wholly unfamiliar place (to me), now made knowable.

 

Ed Harkness

 

ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

 

from The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2018)

Should I, should I not?

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I am challenging myself to create a small, private class this fall. I promised myself that I would begin planning it this week.

When I wanted to learn to play the piano, I bought a “teach yourself” book–but after the first time sitting down with it, I…basically…never again opened it. I needed a teacher, and that wise move was what helped me to create a practice that transformed forty years of avoiding the piano (I had lessons as a child), into being able to sit down and play without angst and with pleasure. I may never be a concert pianist (mad laughter here), but I play every day and consider it part of my spiritual practice. Worth it.

If you follow my blog, I’m guessing that there is something you’d like to write. (If you’re writing it, then carry on!) This class could be a wise step in your journey. And no matter where you find yourself–conceptualizing, constructing, completing–it would be a privilege to help you make forward progress.

I’m thinking that it will be 5 90-minute sessions, on Thursday evenings– beginning September 26. (Though nothing, as yet, is certain.)

If it sounds interesting, please drop me a line.

Bethany

p.s. Don’t forget my reading at Elliott Bay Books — coming up August 16!

 

Where You’ll Find Me

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On Friday, August 16, at 7 p.m.,
I will be reading from Body My House at Elliott Bay Book Company.
I’m thrilled (of course) and very very grateful to poet Ed Harkness and Elliott Bay Books for inviting me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely
if about 50 of my nearest and dearest friends could join us?

(Yes, it would!)

Bethany

 

Luminous and Compassionate: Good Goals

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How did my daughters get so old?

Today my twins–Pearl and Annie–those tiny babies that we brought home in 1993–turn 26.

I have been reading old notebooks that I scribbled in when they were much younger (playing soccer, needing rides to friends’ houses and to the swimming pool), and I found this passage from the introduction to Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop:

Poetry, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small-minded. To write poetry is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s poems are full of rage, lamentation and despair. To write poetry of a higher order demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our art with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute parenting–and though I wish I could deny the moments of rage, lamentation and despair, there they are, inked across the pages of my notebooks. So, with my apologies to Kowit:

Parenting, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small minded. To be a mother or a father is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s family life is sometimes buffeted by rage, lamentation and despair. To parent in this higher way demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our interactions with our children with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute teaching, or…anything. How can we, today, imbue our lives with a luminous and compassionate spirit?

My friend Louise says to her sons (and sometimes to me), “I’ve really enjoyed being on this bus ride with you.”

They are 26 now, and their baby sister will be 20 in 10 days. I can see them, still trying to figure out their lives, to become who they are. But I’m also a work in progress–still learning how to parent them. And I’m still working at that “luminous and compassionate” thing.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

-Stanley Kunitz