montana writer

“Mountain Remembering” can be found in Montana Poems. The introduction to this poem, but not the poem itself, was previously published here. 

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Fly-fishing and Montana are two things that I return to often in my poems. The poem “Mountain Remembering” was written more than 20 years ago. It is not a poem that needs “explanation” but I will say a few words about it and about the style it is written in.

My brothers (Paul and Jon) and I were in the East Pioneer Mountains (near Dillon, Montana, in the Beaverhead National Forest) camping and fishing. One morning we got up just after sunrise to fish a mountain lake. If you are lucky enough to have stood on the shore of a mountain lake in the early morning or in the dying light of evening when there is no wind and the water is like glass and trout are rising and sky is so blue you cannot tell it from the blue of the lake, you never forget it.

I have experimented over the years with how to lay a poem out on the page so that there is little or no punctuation marks to fumble with and so that line endings are the natural places to pause. I do not always write the poems this way, it is only when the poem is done or nearly done that I start to lay it out that way. I like the way the poems look without punctuation marks cluttering up the page and I like space and distance acting as a natural pauses. It is closer to the way I speak.

Again, “Mountain Remembering” is available in my volume of poems called Montana Poems.

Enjoy!

Mountain Remembering
  for Paul

twilight morning
a mountain lake
ridge and trees bent
only by the rising-rings of trout
Paul is already there
fishing
wishing I were a camera
I watch him
arm extended he moves the stillness
it gathers around him like a light
the rod bends
I hear him laugh
fish
brother
mountains
and lake are one
he looks toward me
smiling
I see it all
already remembering

____

“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” ~Edith Sitwell

Stone Stairs (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

The most important thing to a writer is time. Time to write, time to read, time to meditate and ruminate, and time to let things sit. With two jobs and all the busyness of middle-age, there is these days in my life little time for writing or reading, or meditation and rumination… but there is plenty of time for letting things just sit and wait.

My wife is fond of quoting Stephen King who calls that kind of writing-time, “letting the boys in the basement do their work.” And so in the silences between postings here, and in the more pregnant silences between working on poetry and fiction, I am trying to do just what King suggests.

That kind of silence, however, requires patience. Patience is something I have struggled with all my life… just as it is for many I know.

Patience is, of course, one of the seven great virtues:

• Patience
• Chastity
• Temperance
• Charity
• Diligence
• Kindness
• Humility

Some of these come more “easily” to me. Some seem impossible. Patience is one of these.

St. Paul wrote of suffering that:

…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)

In the end, I think we fully learn a virtue only through suffering. Success and ease-of-life by definition make it more difficult to learn the most important lessons of life. We learn through failure not through success. That is why Jesus said, “For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

This idea is not consistent with the Gospel of Wealth that neo-pagans like Joel Osteen and Norman Vincent Peale preach. It is not consistent the anti-Christian paganism of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. It is however totally consistent with the faith witnessed to us by Paul and Peter, St. Francis and St. Claire, St. Thomas and John Paul II. It is in a word, true.

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” ~A.A. Milne

____

As an avid collector of quotes and lines of poetry, I often find myself with unattributed lines and mis-attributed quotes. The internet, though efficient in locating and aggregating information, is not, of course, of much help in clearing up issues of accurate attribution.

But to be honest with you, if the quote is good, I really do not care. What matters to me is that the line is good. And so on hump-day of the first full week of May, here are some quotes I have collected from various sources over the years.

Let me know if there are any you especially like… or that you know are indeed misattributed. Thanks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

“Know what you are talking about.”  ~John Paul II

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” ~P.B. Shelley

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same” ~Thomas Merton

“The desire to write grows with writing.” ~Erasmus

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  ~John Paul II

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”  ~Samuel Johnson

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”  ~Amy Lowell

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Your library is your paradise.”  ~Erasmus

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” ~Seamus Heaney

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ~Henry James

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~Marcel Proust

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope…. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.” ~Seamus Heaney

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~Henry James

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”  ~W.H. Auden

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ~Marcel Proust

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”  ~T.S. Eliot

“Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”  ~John Paul II

____

Here in the North Country, like the country at large, the “Rational-Middle” are being held hostage by the small, but quite vocal, partisan minorities that inhabit the polar ends of reason. Ideological madness rules the day, the common good is trampled under the feet of Democratic and Republican flag wavers.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.  ~W.B. Yeats

While MontanaWriter usually tries to hold up and celebrate the best that language and reason can achieve – poetry, fiction, art, theology – today we highlight the lowest level that language can reach: political double-speak.

It has been said that in a democracy we get the politicians we deserve. And in 2012, the Great State of Minnesota has the House Speaker we richly deserve. We also have the governor we deserve (Mark Dayton, Democrat), an United States Senator we deserve (Al Franken, Democrat), and not one, but two United States Congresspersons we richly deserve (Keith Ellison, Democrat & Michelle Bachman, Republican). But for today we are concentrating on our Republican Speaker of the House, the “Honorable” though addled Kurt Zellers.

During the current debate over whether taxpayers should build a stadium for the Vikings to play 10 games a year in, Zellers has pushed double-speak and b.s. to a new level. Whether you are pro-stadium in this kind of debate or anti-stadium, you will be equally confused and angered by the pure, unadulterated b.s. coming out of this “leader’s” mouth.

Enjoy!

____

For the last couple of “Music Mondays“, MontanaWriter has been featuring the poetry of W.B. Yeats set to music. For other Yeats poems set to music, click here.

Van Morrison has long been one of my favorite singers. Born in Northern Ireland, he brings an authentic sound and voice to Yeats’ words.

“Before the World Was Made” is classic Yeats in sound and tone and diction. Van Morrison’s version of the poem diminishes nothing of Yeats’ power while at the same time bringing an accessibility to a poet who can admittedly be quite intimidating.

Enjoy!

Before the World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark 
And the eyes more bright 
And the lips more scarlet, 
Or ask if all be right 
From mirror after mirror, 
No vanity’s displayed: 
I’m looking for the face I had 
Before the world was made. 

What if I look upon a man 
As though on my beloved, 
And my blood be cold the while 
And my heart unmoved? 
Why should he think me cruel 
Or that he is betrayed? 
I’d have him love the thing that was 
Before the world was made. 

____

The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here most Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Today’s selection from Hugh’s notebooks is an excerpt from a Christian Century interview from 1959 with Archibald MacLeish about his play J.B. For those unfamiliar with J.B., it is a modern retelling of the biblical story of Job. Hugh was a voracious reader and encyclopedist: books of theology, biblical scholarship, sacred arts, and literature. There are in the few notebooks of his that I have, a number of references to MacLeish’s fine play and the book of Job.

Job is one of the most “modern” books of the bible… and along with Ecclesiastes the most “philosophical” and “human.” It’s central question of how a “good and just” God could allow good and just people to suffer has plagued the faithful and the philosophical for millennia. In the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, during the height of the Cold War, MacLeish wrestles poetically and artistically with the problem of evil creating a modern classic.

____

During the month of May, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about flowers… and a few photos I have taken over the years of flowers and plants. For more poems about flowers, click here.

In the North Country, tulips are among the first flowers of spring. In the brown and green days of early spring, they represent some of the first real color of the year… making their essential beauty even more luminous. They are harbingers of better days to come.

Amy Lowell was, of course, an Imagist.  The term Imagist was originally coined by Ezra Pound to describe the kind of poetry that Richard Aldington, his more famous wife, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell among others were writing. The kind of poetry Pound was exploring himself.

I have posted the Imagist creed at MontanaWriter a number of times, including here.  Lowell and her fellow Imagists were looking for language and images in poetry that were more direct and precise than that of the Victorians (or Romantics), as well a poetic style that was more… un-sentimental.

On a May morning, an Amy Lowell poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

A Tulip Garden
Guarded within the old red wall’s embrace,
Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,
The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!
Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,
With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of purple batteries, every gun in place.
Forward they come, with flaunting colours spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our utmost powers
We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

                                           Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our utmost powers
We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.

 

There is much to love in this poem: the extended metaphor, the loose rhyme, the sense of alienation from nature. I have noticed over the years that Lowell is the kind of poet that even people who do not particularly like or read poetry that much enjoy reading. She is at once “good to great”, “accessible”, and “interesting”.  That trifecta may be the most difficult to achieve in poetry. Most of the poets I love best fail miserably in the area of “accessibility.” Yet Lowell achieves it  regularly.

 

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

 

 

____

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

After a dry winter here in the North Country, April brought the kind of moisture we have been needing. Whether it was wet enough to off-set the dry autumn and winter, I do not know. But I do know that lawns are green again, and in the shady areas of the little woods behind our neighborhood the ground is rich brown and muddy again.

The old saying came to mind often during National Poetry Month, “April showers bring May flower.” And so for the month of May, MontanaWriter will be featuring poems about flowers… and a few photos I have taken over the years of flowers and plants.

Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about flowers, of course. There are many I could have picked to feature here. Yet since “How Many Flowers  is the one that came first to mind, I will post it here.

I must have first read this poem sometime in my late teens in an Introduction to English Literature class or an American Literature survey class as an undergrad. I suppose I may even have read it earlier in an English text book in high school. It is that familiar to me.

But maybe it is merely her poetry that is familiar to me, her voice. It is as familiar a poetic voice as exists in the English language. The best description of Dickinson’s voice I have read comes from John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation:

Every great poet writes in a voice that is unmistakably his or hers. When we hear the high, tragic diction of Homer or Yeats, or the urgent but colloquial voice of Dante, who speaks to us in The Inferno as if we saw him on the street just yesterday, or the boisterous, almost overly familiar diction of Walt Whitman, we don’t need to know the poet’s name to know who it is speaking. Emily Dickson’s voice is equally unmistakable. We hear it as if it is coming from the next room. It is a contemporary voice—quiet, contemplative, but also passionate. In fact, the voice is slyly provocative. It never plays into our expectations; rather, it uses the unexpected as a principal conversational tactic. The rhymes are there so we know it’s a poem, but they are there sparingly. The rhythms are there, as well, but they are not mechanical, like a metronome. Her poems wear form, but they wear it lightly. They suffer form, but are not beholden to it. ~ John Barr

Barr is right. In English, only Yeats and Whitman (and Frost, perhaps) are as instantly identifiable to our ears as Dickinson… and but neither Yeats nor Whitman is truly  beloved. They are admired, revered, respected, worshipped, studied… but not beloved. Only Frost, I think, is in the same category of Dickinson as being both instantly familiar and beloved.

Dickinson does the small poem better than anyone in English. It is a kind of American haiku. It is language and image and meaning and rhythm as compressed as they can be compressed.

On the first day of May, Dickinson seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

How Many Flowers Fail in Wood
How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze —
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight —
It bear to Other Eyes —

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

As is always the case with a small poem, it is difficult to pick just a few lines to highlight. Yet I choose this first stanza for its familiarity, its tonal-definition, and its beauty. They are quintessential Dickinson lines: the alliteration of “flowers” and “fail”, and “that” and “they”; the vowel pairings of “how” and “flower”, and  ”fail” and “hill”; the complimentarianism of “perish” and “privilege”. All of that culminating in what seems to me to be the most Dickinsonian of all words, “Beautiful.”

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

____

Last Monday we featured Christy Moore singing Yeats’ poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” This week we are going in a completely different musical direction: punk legend Shane MacGowan reciting Yeats’ familiar “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”

For those unfamiliar with MacGowan, he was the front man for Irish punk band The Pogues – one of my all-time favorite groups. He brings a punk energy and most of all a punk anger to his recitation that I love… that I think Yeats would have like as well.

On a rainy Monday morning. The marriage of MacGowan and Yeats seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

____

In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

For April we have featured poems by Wendell Berry, Carl Sandburg, Billy Collins, James Wright, Archibald MacLeish, and a poem by W.H. Auden about W.B. Yeats. It is only fitting for National Poetry Month that we include at least one  poem by Yeats himself… the greatest poet of the 20th Century and one of the a handful of poets that can be considered truly essential.

“Under Ben Bulben” is, of course, one of Yeats’ most famous poems.  It is also the perfect poem for National Poetry Month because its subject is ultimately poetry and poets, a subject Yeats knew more about than any man since… Shelley?

As I have said often here at MontanaWriter, poetry should be read aloud. This is particularly true of Yeats. It is only when you read him aloud that you can fully appreciate his genius.

This poem was one of the last poems Yeats wrote. In his 20s, he was already one of the best poets in the world… yet he only got better. Of what other artist can that be said? More than 50 years of continual artistic growth stopped only by his death. Remarkable!

Enjoy!

Under Ben Bulben
I
Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here’s the gist of what they mean.

II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought,
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there’s a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul’s at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it’s vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.

Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer’s phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

V
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds…

In this poem there are so many fine lines that catch your ear and eye… such as the famous final stanza, of course. But for National Poetry Month, these lines about the responsibilities of the poet stand out. Read out loud you notice what Yeats does with alliterative word-pairing and echoing, “toe to top,” “heart and heads,” and finally “base-born products of base beds.”

____