Michael J Hoover

Thieves show up fairly often in poetry. The experience of being robbed is a useful metaphor because the implications are broad and readers can always relate to robbery on some level. From Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Burglar of Babylon” to Emily Dickinson’s Luke-referencing “’Remember me,’ implored the Thief’ –” to John Milton’s sonnet about his own birthday, beginning “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth” we find these likenesses. Poet Penelope Shuttle personifies her own depression by naming it a thief who takes her real self away “He will steal it, whatever you possess.”

Having something taken away, not just missing, but actively taken is jarring. Memory, health, relationships, potential futures, home-countries, so much can disappear, whether the thing is concretely stolen, or perceived to have been stolen. I remember the odd, alarming quality of being robbed at a bank machine near my office in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, or discovering the radio had been pried out of my old Honda in Durham, North Carolina while crunching through the sparkly dread of safety glass in the parking lot. From a small inconvenience to a tragic and life-altering experience, the nature of these losses has a particular character that an accident does not.

When the loss is extreme, being robbed of something or someone can bring us into other territory as well. Where is God? Why is human behavior sometimes so unfair? And then there is the question we ask ourselves less often, “what do I take from others unfairly?”

Here’s one poem where robbery is the actual experience. It resonates in a different way than telling the story through straight narration would. The English poet Philip Gross includes this in his most recent collection The Egg of Zero. I like the echoes of “why” and “how would you know” because it is impossible to keep the question marks out of your own head those first moments when you realize something is gone. A subtle poem, it has an aftertaste, which is something else such experiences have very much in common. Loss lingers. In this case, even a brush with loss lingers.

Unburglars

When we came down and found the back door open
first it was the dash from room to room – video?

stereo? TV? then the private hiding places. All
intact: relief, laced with a rather eager gratitude

like being let off with a caution. Till that night,
tucked down again, every catch and bolt piously

checked, that’s when it came in with the calm assurance
of a curse. They had been. Come and seen, moved through

the house, hardly stirring the dust on the carpet, taking
it all in. Peeling gloves on like a surgeon’s: to them,

a fingerprint would be as gross as skid-marks. And
no need to take a thing – why, when they have it all

and need so little? Little breaths: if they’d bent over you
sleeping (when you could still sleep) how would you know?
- Philip Gross

“Unburglars” reprinted with permission from the author.

Inevitably when I am at the playground with my son, some overly eager Mom/Barbie wanna-be, with perfect hair and nails, will bounce over, and after launching into a full rendition of how hard it is to find a good preschool around here and isn’t it terrible what “they’ve” done to the public school system, will then provide me with an (unsolicited) alphabetical list of all her spa, hair and tanning appointments for this week, and ask, “So what do you do for “me time?” I brace myself as I reply, “I write poetry.” I anticipate the eye glazing, the slack mouth stare, the conversation stopping “Oh, how….NICE,” as Barbie slowly backs away from me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted two heads. I know she would really like to ask, “Why poetry?” And, if she would stick around long enough, this is what I would tell her.

I came to poetry early, with parents who believed in reading aloud to their children; Emerson, Longfellow, Stevenson. I cut my eye teeth on language. Marveled at its density. Tried Frost then cummings and later the contemporaries, language poets and the beats. I’m not picky about my (literary) bedfellows. Why should I have to choose a country when the world is so wide? I just want a day pass to cross the border.

I write poetry because it is powerful. As poets, we name things. There is power in naming. It is creation. The ability to recover the sacred, to elevate the mundane and hold to the light whatever catches your eye. Blink and you’ll miss it. When we as poets name things, we have the power to call into being, to create presence, to change the story, to shape the narrative arc. Yesterday my three year old son was jumping on the couch. When I told him, in my best “this is serious” voice, to stop jumping on the furniture he replied, “I’m not jumping, I’m hopping.” This is power.

I write poetry to hold things that need to be remembered. To hold what vanishes. To freeze the essence of the thing named. And the poem, like a series of still frames, tricks our mind to motion. Ocular reflex. A news reel unwinding. As poets, “we are to notice so that (it) is noticed” (Annie Dillard). We hold things that need to be remembered, like rotary phones, the horrors of war, my mother filing her nails into neat ovals.

I write poetry to connect with others. We often seek to animate the details of our life in order to make connections with others. In many ways we are all strangers on the planet struggling to place ourselves within a context of meaning. For some of us poetry helps to create that sense of meaning, not just the writing itself but also the physical poetry community at large. To find others in orbit with you is comforting.

And if I haven’t scared Barbie off yet, I would add that I write poetry because it makes me happy, because it frustrates me, because it scares me and because I have to.

If Barbie were to reply, “But I don’t understand poetry,” I would say, “Pretend that you are dreaming. Pretend that the poem is a dream and you are caught in it. It is you and you are it. Experience it. Just ride the wave. Dreams don’t need a beginning, an end or for that matter even a middle. They don’t have to make sense, or sometimes they do. That is the beauty of poetry. You just experience it. Sometimes you get a full story. Sometimes all you are left with is a feeling. Just like when you awake from a dream with a strong sense of “something happened” but are not quite able to explain it. So dream a little, Barbie, you might just like it!

Altars

She is lonely and you understand
without taking sides.
She says your hugs are like a
battered woman, bruised and full

of invisible scars.
There is a gust of passion
in your voice but she has
run off with the wind.

She sleeps with steel in her eyes
and you are a mask on the edge
of the bed, worried that love will
never come home to warm its
hands over the tall pale candle

in the parlor.
There is a portrait of love
over the fireplace to remind
you of what happens when couples
save their money and their memories,

bury them deep in mason jars in the backyard.
She lies to you twice a day.
You sleep in the same house but
the relationship is long distance.

You share rations for the long haul
while she sips champagne from your shoe.
The treasured altar of your devotion lies askew
at your feet. And you didn’t know it had gone missing;

the candle, the shoe, the jars, her love.
- Julia Tilley

Julia Tilley is our first poet guest columnist. She hails from Harrisburg and co-hosts Poetry Thursdays at the Crimson Frog Coffee Shop in Camp Hill, PA.

Last month’s guest writer, Julia Tilley, marvelously explained why she writes poetry and she speaks for many of us. Although I spend a great deal of my free time writing poetry, I’d like to explain why I read poetry. Almost no day passes without my reading several poems. Yes, I am the stereotypical English major, and being the editor and publisher of Iris G. Press which publishes poetry books in addition to the poetry journal Fledgling Rag, I am frequently offered poems to review and comment on. However, even if I had ended my education after 12 years at a typical public high school in Central Pennsylvania and put food on my family’s table by working with chocolate in one of Hershey’s factories, I would still read poetry every day. I love what it does.

What it does is to make me think, laugh, cry, become angry, or feel joy. Poetry can also set a mood. Like most of us, I have the need to get away from my daily grind, and I read poetry in order to do just that. Good poets can create an atmosphere and a private world with their words. There are three poets whom I am currently reading who are excellent at producing this kind of atmosphere.

Sonata for Rain and Basso InContinuo

View from broken window panes
through shades drawn long ago:
sheet covered shapes and dust —
the tone arm still suspended.

In a corner, the cracked cello loses its timbre.
Squirrels scatter through splintered wood.
Branches, abandoned by leaves, fall from the sky.
No birds to sing the morning.

There is no one here,
just the sound of stillness
bouncing off the clouds,
wanting to force out the thunder.
- Rebecca Gonzalez

In this poem, from the highly regarded York County poet’s newly-released book, Sonata for Rain, a moment is frozen. From the very first line, a mood is captured, not through specific physical descriptions but through the use of glancing references to the senses. Sight is used first to set the stage, but we quickly become aware that this moment is dominated by sound, or rather lack of sound. She moves us from the visual of broken windowpanes and a cracked cello in the corner to the contemplation of its lost timbre. However, in this work, it is the absence of sound, (”No birds to sing the morning” and “just the sound of stillness/bouncing off the clouds”) which is most predominant. We are left with a sense of melancholy, silence, and loss without using those specific words. A lesser poet would show us the loss or would use the word melancholy, but a greater poet sets the tone and lets us experience it. This is the craft of a poet.

I want to feel you closer than breath
whispering across fine hairs
a wave of warmth unevidenced
by any entered boundary
slipping through like light,
moving in the direction of my heart.
- Deanna Nikaido

In this poem, Ms. Nikaido doesn’t take us to a specific, physical place but creates a mood, one of love. Many poems of affection provide details of the object of that affection. The face of the loved one or the smile of a child may provide the focus for a verse. However, this poem withholds details in favor of painting a delicate, impressionistic picture of a tender moment of reverie. Again it is the senses, the sense of touch (“I want to feel you closer than breath/whispering across fine hairs”) and sight (“slipping like light/moving in the direction of my heart”) that paint the scene. This poem perfectly describes the moment of reflection when we know we have connected with another soul.

Interlude

she counts what cannot be measured:
the years since a gentle touch
or notes of a lament

the raindrops compose
against the pane

outside her window the world swirls
with the exquisite passion of possibility
barely audible at the frequency of fear

and regret

deaf to the tympani of heart and hope
she presses her lips against
the cool clear glass and pauses

as she waits for the world to kiss her back
- Marissa Allen

The title of Ms. Allen’s poem sends the signal the poem is about a reflective moment and much like Ms. Gonzalez’s poem above, about melancholy. Here, too, she uses the senses, predominately those of sound (“notes of a lament,”) and touch (“she presses her lips against/the cool clear glass and pauses/as she waits for the world to kiss her back”) to create the atmosphere. There is no clear, narrative description of the moment. However, after reading it, we are filled with the sense of isolation and again, loss.

The best poets among us use their craft to set a mood. In the same way that a film director is concerned about lighting and sound, poets create atmosphere by using the senses as their creative instruments, particularly sound, touch, and sight. All three poets, Rebecca Gonzalez, Deanna Nikaido, and Marissa Allen set the scene, create a mood, and illuminate the moment as well as any Broadway director. They are not heavy-handed and obvious in their approaches. They compose their scenes, get out of the way, and allow us to inhabit the experience.

This is what poetry does.

Thanksgiving weekend seems a most appropriate time to express my profound appreciation for all I am forever grateful. Faith, family, and friends. Without this trinity, there can be no foundation upon which to build and sustain our lives.

Belief and trust are tricky concerns. They require admitting to our vulnerability and therefore opening our human weaknesses before the world. They demand that we surrender to humility and potential indignation.

Ironically, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is a strength. Placing faith in something or someone other than ourselves demonstrates the very fortitude of dependence. Occasional dependence on others fulfills our contribution to any meaningful relationship.

During the past five months, I have been reminded of my human vulnerability by learning that I have cancer, not an easy thing to experience. I have had to be humble enough to accept my predicament because I am not more special than any other person who acquires a life threatening or life altering condition.

Humility is not an easy virtue. But, granting others the opportunity to treat us with dignity is the greatest grace we can offer as human beings. I have been at the mercy of others who have extended me the utmost dignity, as I have experienced the cliché of entirely “losing one’s dignity.”

Placing one’s fate in the hands of our Creator seems foolhardy to some. They may see it as giving up or giving in, the antithesis of self-reliance. But yielding to the power of some entity greater than we are allows the perfect freedom from concern and worry that enables us to focus totally on the task at hand.

Turning things over permits self-determination to waken and strengthen in a serene aura of confidence and faith that is unwavering. I am ever thankful for my relationship with God in this life.

Today, putting one’s future in the hands of professionals seems a great risk also. Our skepticism, even cynicism, with respect (great pun) to the medical, legal, teaching, government, military, religious, and corporate professions seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

My encounters over the past few months with every facet of the medical profession, from surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses to physicians’ assistants, technicians and pathologists, from paraprofessionals and medical students to hospital staff and volunteers, has been nothing short of absolutely positive. I am thankful to so many friendly, compassionate, and expert human beings. I so appreciate their perseverance in all the education they avail themselves.

Indispensably, I have had the comfort of my family’s support throughout my ordeal. They scheduled then accompanied me to appointments, asked questions and took notes, helped in my decision making process, and actively shared in my first two weeks of 24/7 care. I am so grateful to all my family, immediate and extended, for their concern and prayers, thoughtfulness and presence, whether in person or via phone, gifts, cards or internet.

Most certainly, my friends have come through in helping me recuperate quickly and thoroughly these first six weeks. I am indebted to every friend I have, from one who visits or calls daily to those who fill in big time at work, to those who pray and have had others pray for me, to those who manage and write guest columns, to those who have touched base in so many meaningful ways.

I must take the reins of my own wellness. I continue to research and recover. I am committed to living and surviving. But, I cannot be well without daily acknowledgment of, gratitude for, and blessings from the trinity of faith, family and friends in my life.

Happy season of thanks, and blessings to all!

For years I had taken photographs for the sheer pleasure of capturing scenes I wanted to preserve for my continuous enjoyment. It wasn’t until much later that a friend of mine, who went to the Maryland Institute of Art for photography, complimented the perspective and composition in my pictures.

At first I didn’t understand what my friend was talking about. I told him that I just followed whatever attracted my eye and snapped the photo when I determined what seemed to be balanced in the viewfinder. He said I had a natural eye for what most photographers had to learn to apply.

Since then I have taken countless photographs trying to hone my art. Recently, I have been seeing a link between my poetry and my photography. At first I felt they must be related because I love both arts so well, even though I may only be satisfactory at both. But then, a common chord struck as William Wordsworth came to mind.

In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads ” where he offers his ideas about poetry, Wordsworth asserts that poetry is the language of the common man. He insists that poetry should be understandable to anybody living in the world. He espoused that “Humble and rustic life was generally chosen[for the language of poems], because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language . . . and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated . . . more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

Photography is the language of the common person today via even cell phones and You Tube. Photography is understandable to anybody living in the world. The project that a young man outlined last week in an Evening Sun article about his taking cameras to children in other countries proves that the language of imagery is as appreciable as smiling.

But, Wordsworth also cautions poets against the use of lofty, poetic diction, which in his mind is not related to the language of real life. What could be more straight forward and simple than the language of a photograph? Even in abstraction lies simplicity. Extreme close-ups that focus on design and texture, for example.

The English bard sees poetry as acting like Nature, which touches all living things and inspires and delights them. Photography is the freezing of moments that attract us. Wordsworth pens “The principal object . . . was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” As a photographer I know the photos that I make as art fit this definition of poetry. Many of my own pictures come from the oddities I encounter in nature while going for hikes. Dead leaves pierced by fresh Spring shoots. A lone yellow mushroom atop a bed of verdant moss. The rush of water around a stubborn rock.

As any of us who took British Literature probably can recall, Wordsworth points out that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” These two observations form the lynchpin of Wordsworth’s explanation for the process of writing poetry.

First, some experience we have triggers a transcendent moment, an instance of something extraordinary to our everyday encounters. The senses become overwhelmed; the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” leaves us incapable of articulating the true nature and beauty of the event.

It is only when this emotion is “recollected in tranquility” that we, or the poet, as Wordsworth believes, can compose words to communicate the experience we had. A photograph enables us to simultaneously be caught up in the moment and preserve that moment for reflection and memory trigger at some future time.

Most poetry centers around a single occasion communicated by a speaker. The poet has had an experience, a photographic moment if you will, and by the filter of time and reflection, composes words which most concisely convey the emotion of said moment. It is the sharing of the emotion that links the poet and audience and it is through the use of vivid imagery that the poet attracts us and shares the transcendence he feels, too.

Lately I’ve been focusing upon the answers to three questions: Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going? I’ve borrowed these questions from Ronald Wright who got them from Paul Gauguin, who inscribed the three queries in French upon a painting he did in Tahiti at the end of the 19th century.

Wright used them to open his lecture series in Canada, based upon his book length essay entitled The Short History of Progress, which also has been published as a book with CD’s in accompaniment. In it, Wright traces and details our whole history as human beings with an eye ever on the present and with glimpses into the near future. His work begs investigation, procurement, and enjoyment.

The questions are really where do we come from? what are we? and where are we going? I brought these questions before my seniors last week and framed them a bit differently in their extensions. I told my students to fill in the blank as often as necessary or desired, using as many roles played in their lives, real or imagined.

For example, where have I been as a brother or sister? what am I as a brother or sister? where am I going as a brother or sister? Where have I been as a mother or father? What am I as a mother or father? Where am I going as a mother or father? Where have I been as a friend? What am I as a friend? Where am I going as a friend? Where have I been as a writer? What am I as a writer? Where am I going as a writer? Where have I been as an employee? What am I as an employee? Where am I going as an employee? You get the idea. Fill in the blank and go for it!

I guess the pursuit is rhetorical and highly introspective, something we do as we grow older. The questions serve as guideposts and checkpoints, propelling us forward and outward. The persistent examination can be singular, for each of us, or multitudinous, as we consider ourselves parts of larger and larger wholes. Where do we come from as a family, a town, a state, a nation? What are we as a family, a town, a state, a nation? Where are we going as a family, a town, a state, a nation?

This past week we marked the seventh anniversary of September 11. Oh, had there only been buildings involved, empty of humanity!

Because women and men, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, family and friends, acquaintances and associates, heroes and strangers, Americans and aliens had perished and survived that day, we must ask ourselves on all levels: where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going, as human beings?

For five years I could not assimilate as a poet the magnitude of what transpired in September 2001, so that I could write at least a response to the catastrophe. I am of the generation still reeling from the triple assassinations of our nation’s leadership in the 1960’s. I didn’t really write the following poem with 9/11 in mind at all. It was only in retrospect that I saw the imagery become poignant, meaningful, and provocative commentary on our recent and distant history, and possibly a harbinger of things to come, as it rose from the page after many readings in public places.

Chains of Change

Years disappear faster than they occur
while skin-whitening rages in Asia.

Progress no longer outpaces extinction
as babies forge chains of apocalypse.

The world encourages virtual lust:
games of conquest and possession.

Links of stone and bone and hate
interface with weeping born of change.

Televised, laser-guided surgical strikes;
religiously solicited, Semitic self-sacrifice.

Richest land bears no distinctive scent:
antiseptic laws and executive ablution.

Tunnel vision requires global anesthesia
as cities sift human dust for humanity.

- Michael J Hoover

On my way to Lowe’s last Sunday, thinking about the love in my life, it struck me suddenly: it’s not about what we have or don’t have, what we want or don’t want, what we do or don’t do, what we say or don’t say, what we feel, think or don’t. It’s all about the paradox of balance.

Balance is a stable psychological or emotional state. Whether we’re involved in romantic love or parental love or sibling love or love of mankind, is there ever such a thing as stability? Thus, balance remains elusive even though it seems at times to be attainable.

We feel as though there must be balance because harmony is momentarily achieved, but we know most harmony is short-lived. Therefore, balance becomes a paradox in that it seems to be self-contradictory, but it can be understood or explained by some level of our psyches or emotions.

Balance is the precarious middle of the road we pretend to pursue in our pendulum journey to extremes. Balance is like meniscus, the crescent shape of surface tension between fluid and air. Balance becomes uncertain certainty, hopeful faith.

To add to the paradox of balance, consider the following quotation by Frank Herbert in which he expresses initially that balance is easily grasped, but then he equates its understanding to that of riding waves by sensation and not by intellect. We intuitively understand what he is trying to say but cannot put our proverbial fingers quite on the explanation with precision.

“There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.”

Balance also carries the definition of weighing mentally, making comparisons. Balance seeks a stabilizing influence. We try to make sense of our relationships by finding a sense of balance in them because maybe that’s as good as it gets. When we take stock, we realize that relationships are in flux, and the flux is ironically in balance. There seems to be a cyclic effect, as though we are a part of something larger than we can know until we recognize that there is a larger sense of balance ruling our relationships though we may not be able to see this except in retrospect.

Consider the poem by Anne Sexton. In it she achieves not only a perfect balance in her lines and parallel imagery, but also a balance in seasons and migration–all becoming symbolic of the speaker’s journey in taking stock, doing a balance sheet for a relationship she has experienced. She even represents balance in making distinctions, as between innocence and experience, between ease and mania, between intimacy and distance.

The Balance Wheel

Where I waved at the sky
And waited your love through a February sleep,
I saw birds swinging in, watched them multiply
Into a tree, weaving on a branch, cradling a keep
In the arms of April sprung from the south to occupy
This slow lap of land, like cogs of some balance wheel.
I saw them build the air, with that motion birds feel.

Where I wave at the sky
And understand love, knowing our August heat,
I see birds pulling past the dim frosted thigh
Of Autumn, unlatched from the nest, and wing-beat
For the south, making their high dots across the sky,
Like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek.
I see them bend the air, slipping away, for what birds seek.

- Anne Sexton

Sexton has her speaker imitate what is natural, i.e., waving like a bird, to sense what it is to be a part of the flow of existence, to feel in the wave of her hand a sense of balance that the elusive birds seem to have mastered without striving. They do not waste time trying to understand their world as they are too involved in living in it. They are the beauty and the joy of the world and the balance between earth and sky.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, held in even-numbered years since 1986, is the largest poetry event in North America. Nearly sixty internationally acclaimed poets read and discuss their own poetry and lead conversations focusing on various topics concerning poets and poetry. The mix of poets varies greatly from biennial to biennial, yet many of the best beloved poets in America participate.

Events are held all day and evening in performance tents accommodating anywhere from 100 to over 2,000 people. During each day of the festival, ten or more separate stages offer different activities simultaneously. In 2006 nearly 17,000 people attended.

Each festival has special programs for high school students and for teachers of all levels, elementary through college. More than 4,500 students and 2,000 teachers from throughout the country participate in conversations and readings designed specifically for them during the first couple days of the festival.

This year’s festival was held this past weekend at the newly renovated Village of Waterloo in New Jersey. Waterloo is a restored symbol of nineteenth century existence. Many of the village’s buildings, including a blacksmith shop, apothecary, grist mill, saw mill, gunsmith, and pottery barn provide the perfect settings for the exchange of literary art and ideas.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the Sunday morning reading of Rumi and like minded international poets by Coleman Barks and Jane Hirshfield, infused with the improvisation of the jazz ensemble The Paul Winter Consort. At one point Hirshfield rendered the best reading of Emily Dickinson I’ve ever heard.

Barks is considered the pre-eminent translator of the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. Rumi is one of the great spiritual masters and poetical geniuses of humankind who founded the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. He was an accomplished scholar in religious and positive sciences. If there is any underlying theme in his poetry, it is his relentless and devoted love of his Beloved, God.

Consider the following poem by Rumi. In it on the literal level, there is the speaker’s implied quest to find the answer to a perennial question, what is love? Though the poem uses words which imply that he is talking about the intimate love between two people, the speaker actually implies that the same intimacy applies on a spiritual plane. The first obvious hint comes with the capitalization of Love.

The Meaning of Love

Both light and shadow
are the dance of Love.
Love has no cause;
it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets.
Lover and Loving are inseparable
and timeless.

Although I may try to describe Love
when I experience it I am speechless.
Although I may try to write about Love
I am rendered helpless;
my pen breaks and the paper slips away
at the ineffable place
where Lover, Loving and Loved are one.

Every moment is made glorious
by the light of Love.

- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)

Boldly the speaker proclaims that we love God as intimately as we ever have loved a human being. This act is not perverse; rather, it is expressed to indicate the level of desire we can have even on the spiritual plane. Since we as humans can barely understand our physical lives, it seems logical that the feeblest and noblest attempt at having and explaining a relationship on a spiritual plane be described in physical terms.

The perfect metaphor for spiritual love, then, becomes the words we use for physical love in its most exquisite and purest expression. If we remember the passion we feel when we first fall in love, a passion sustained in all its dizziness and utter devotion to our beloved, we can identify with the intensity of the speaker’s attraction to his beloved, who is God.

As the speaker as poet continues to pursue his relationship with his Beloved, he gives attribution for his inspiration to his only muse, his Beloved. He can express his best testimony and art when said in terms of his and our strongest emotion, i.e., love.

Art as Flirtation and Surrender

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)

As you read this, I will be three days on the other side of a robotic assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. It hurts just even to say aloud. Taking my cue from columnist Cubby Conrad, and hopefully tapping into her courage and wisdom, I will take a hiatus from writing to devote my energy to healing. Esteemed area poets will write guest columns during my time away. I welcome their wisdom as broader dialogue in our conversation about poetry. Please enjoy their contributions.

The brief journey I’ve taken since late July, though it has had its eternal episodes, has required local and interstate doctors’ and hospitals’ visits, examinations, consultations, scans, and tests. It has heavily taxed my family and friends with worry and concern. It has placed additional stress on my colleagues’ and students’ lives. It has taken me through all the stages of potential loss. It has confronted me with the most essential questions about faith and survival.

When I had been referred to my soon-to-be urologist by my primary physician after she encountered my high PSA reading and abnormal physical exam, I found myself at a local coffee establishment sitting outside, under a simply gorgeous, cloud laden, summer day, mulling over my immediate and long-term prospects. Being a Gemini, I tend to think a lot, which is of course an understatement.

While I was sipping at my lightly-topped-off-in-milk bold roast, my photographic eye was drawn to the cross bar of a telephone pole. There sat a big crow seemingly looking my way. Being a literature teacher and writer, the symbolism did not escape me. Before I could mutter, “Just what I need—,” two smaller birds appeared out of nowhere and began pommeling their larger relative until the biggish creature rose, then plummeted and swooped, trying to avoid the onslaught. The two brothers-in-arms, or should I say wings, continued their pursuit like fighter planes fending off a bomber.

Having witnessed every detail from my quiet place, I was encouraged by the reversal of the symbolism suggested just moments before. The scenario prompted some hasty notes and, later, the following poem that I knew was about cancer. To aid in a quicker appreciation of my poem, its title is derived from combining two phrases labeling a gathering of birds, i.e., a murder of crows and a charm of finches.

Charming Murder

A dark thought crouches like a crow,
potent, folded wings poised,
the prospect of carrion
gnawing at its brain.

Silence shouts he’s not
sentinel but scout, sent
to find some weakness
for the flock to unfold
its furtive business upon.

From nowhere, a pair of finches
squawk and dive, caroming off
black sides until the inky blot
careens from its quiet perch.

The ebon menace lurches
into free fall, as tiny specks
peck at the erratic, flapping
jet kerchief shrieking west
ever away from yellow.

- Michael J Hoover

I am often surprised how quickly the muse of trauma operates (ew, good pun, for my part). You see, one mustn’t lose one’s sense of humor, eh? Recently, I had only written a couple of poems, but this one came fast and clean in both its imagery and expansiveness. Without its association with me personally, the poem speaks to the broader application of any dark thoughts we may experience and simultaneously to the last vestige we have in keeping us in the light, that being hope. Not faith nor courage nor wisdom nor love will hold on to the bitter end. Rather, hope is our utmost tether to sanity and this life. Check out Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

In addition to artistic and contemplative advantages, having cancer has presented opportunity, enlightenment, and even moments of joy. In addition to the education I am receiving, my empathic sensibility has grown exponentially. Every person without exception whom I have encountered has offered to me the quintessence of what is at our human core. I celebrate their level of professionalism, their courtesies and kindnesses, and their air of compassion and earnestness.

A few years ago I had helped a friend, a dyed-in-the-wool giver, to accept that it is sometimes more blesséd to receive than give. I offered that by graciously accepting others’ gifts, we provide an opportunity for someone to be able to give. We sanction their good will. We become a vehicle of goodness completing their desire to provide.

My friend, in turn, helped me to cope with how to deal with suffering. She said that rather than bemoan our condition, that we should instead embrace our suffering and accept what others offer in consolation. That our suffering yields an opportunity for others to express respect to us, plus granting them a chance to dignify our suffering. We, then, become vehicles for grace.

I have been and remain so blessed in every aspect of my life.

Who would be crazy enough to pick the last weekend in unofficial summer to come to the most toured town in our area to see the very popular, recently reconstructed visitor center? Yep, that’s me. But what an experience I had this past Labor Day weekend, though things did not appear to be so promising upon arrival at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center. First, all the parking lots were brimmed full except for the farthermost which afforded a couple spots near some gravel piles.

The first positive sign was the day itself which was one of those perfect late mornings that inspired the famous, “It’s a beautiful day in Pennsylvania!” We all know these kinds of days. But I’ve be lulled by that false sense of complacency before, having such a day spoiled when I then encounter a throng of humanity shoulder to shoulder jockeying for viewing positions at other museums in both big and small cities where popular exhibits exist.

The biggest surprise was that inside things were so orderly and non-chaotic, so smoothly run and invitingly presented that all my consternation melted away as I surrendered to the moments, one at a time, to have one of the most enjoyable times of my out-and-about life.

Ever since my youth when I lived four plus years in Texas, I have been fascinated with the Civil War. Even as I teach American Literature this week where my students and I have been reading and discussing a book dealing with the major economic cause of the war, the institution of slavery, entitled The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , I remain enthralled by every aspect of this time in our history that changed the direction of our nation forever, in the direction of renewed commitment to possibility and to what freedom and equality can become as we attain our potential as a country.

What I discovered in the words inscribed and preserved throughout the museum, especially of the men and women who actually lived through the five years of horrific turmoil and upheaval in their lives, was so overpowering as to nearly overwhelm my sense of empathy and compassion, even a hundred a fifty years removed. Their words gave a sense of immediacy and relevance to every thought and feeling stimulated.

To give myself a chance to come back to the mundane, I traipsed into the gift shop where instead of a momentary escape from sensory overload, I discovered another gem of intellectual and emotional stimulation. I thought I would retreat into a book of poetry available in the shop and lose myself for a while; however, I only found myself exposed more rawly to the experiences of our ancestors.

Here, in a book on Walt Whitman, who was also a nurse during the Civil War, I found a poem of his that I had not read before. Having first read dozens of journal entries and letters written home to his mother, the poem had a greater impact. He had written especially about how young the boys were who fought in this terrible conflict, how many of them he encountered losing limbs and lives, many with such innocent hopes still remaining amidst such desperation.

In the following poem Whitman celebrates such heroism and elevates the sacrifice made, to equate it with a most divine act rather than relegate such a sense of loss to despair and chaos.

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on the stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair,
and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm,
as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself;
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
- Walt Whitman