the times they are a changin'

I may have watched “No Direction Home” on PBS too many times but so what.

To use my trip back in time I would go to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It would be amazing to see Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Odetta, and all of the other incredible artists there, but I have to admit I would be there for one person: Bob.

At his performance in the festival that year Bob Dylan revolutionized music. He changed the very idea of what a folk song could be. As he rolled into an electrified version of “Maggie’s Farm” many people in the audience and other performers saw it as a slap in the face to traditional folk music. They showed their displeasure by booing and jeering him, shouting at him to get rid of the electric guitar, or even to get rid of Dylan all together and bring back the act before him. Dylan continued to play two more electric songs, including one of his most famous, “Like a Rolling Stone”, and the crowd continued to boo. They were only silenced when reappeared with his acoustic guitar and harmonica and played “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the angry crowd.

Although his performance was short, it was enough to shake the music world. From that point on there was no turning back. Even the most die-hard folk purist had to admit that rock and roll was a legitimate art form and that Bob Dylan was the best person to prove it.

So, in short, if I went back in time I would cheer for Bob Dylan when he plugged in his electric guitar and changed music forever.

I saw Paul McCartney play Live and Let Die live.

When I first thought about what my parents and I share I thought about music. But then I thought about it more and realized that it was mostly me playing the Beatles way too much and irritating my dad because I've only heard "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" 1,000 times and he's heard it 10,000 times. Just so you all know... My dad was "too cool to listen to The Beatles" in high school. But thankfully he likes their music today. My mom and I agree more, right down to our favorite Beatle, George. While I love music from my parent's (and grandparent's) generation we don't always agree on what the best is.

I didn't really want to write about music but I suppose it really is the thing that stands out most at least with my dad and me. The summer after my freshman year in high school my dad and I went to a Paul McCartney concert. At the time I was just really freaking excited to see Paul. Now I can look back on that though as not only a great concert but also a great experience with my dad. I have shared music with him too. I love the band the Barenaked Ladies. My dad has gone to two of their concerts with me. One of them I had asked a male friend to go to with me… and then my whole family came, but that’s another story. He now likes their music, and loves that they put on a great live show too.

I think that music is one of the easiest things that can transcend generations. The best reason I can think of for this is that a great band is just a great band. Even if a band’s look or music is a tad bit dated if the music is great people will continue listening to it for many years to come.

The thing that my mom has shared with me from her generation is…. clothes. My mom saved many of her clothes from college and from when she first started teaching. I love the look of many of them. In fact, I have stolen a few from her. Mostly blouses with ruffled collars and sleeves. My grandpa used to do leather tooling and made my mom belts, wallets, and key chains. I also have two belts that my mom once wore. On one the buckle broke and I haven’t been able to find one that will work with it. Needless to say, this is a tragedy. My mom thinks it’s hysterical that I love the clothes she has that she saw fade in and out of style.

It’s a lot harder to think of something that I have shared with my mom from my generation. I think the biggest thing is the freedoms that I experience that she didn’t. When my mom was in high school most of her female classmates aspired to be homemakers, teachers, or nurses. Although she technically could have done anything she wanted to, it was expected that she would do one of those things. Through having me as a daughter and watching me grow up I have been able to share with her the things that I can do that she could not. She always tells me how “things were so different when I was in college.”

Most of the things that connect me to my parents are the things from their pasts, literally. Over the years I have found remnants of my parents' youths; on shelves, in the basement, in trunks. These objects are many different kinds of things; pictures, boxes of records, clothing, yearbooks, photo albums, May Angels, newspaper clippings. I think I am fortunate that both of my parents are fairly sentimental and have kept so many of the objects from their pasts.

George Harrison: Distinguished-Like

I never met George Harrison, but he taught me a lot of what I know about living. The lyrics to his songs are intelligent, moving, critical, loving. I’m not the type of person to be obsessed with a celebrity, and I hate the way this country idolizes them. There was just something about George that was sincere.

Since I picked out my first Beatles album (The Magical Mystery Tour) at Costco in fourth grade I have loved George Harrison. After studying his life a little more I realized that this man was more than just an amazing writer and a fabulous guitar player. This was a man who had figured out how to live life and be happy. What I figured out with some help from George was that much of being happy in life has to do with not being afraid of death. What is the point of being scared of something you can’t see, touch, or even know about without experiencing?

He knew that the important things in life are your family, your friends, the things you believe in, and your principles, not trends, not things that other people tell you are important. One of my favorite quotes from George is one that was printed in “Rolling Stone Magazine” after he died. “I’m not much of a career person,” he said, “I’m more of a gardener.” That said to me that he knew that his fame wasn’t that important in the long run of things. What was important is that he enjoyed living, he enjoyed his wife and son, he enjoyed working in his garden, and so that’s what he did. I cut this quote out of the magazine and taped it to my wall. I saw it everyday and it told me that I need to do what I love. Maybe I’d make the most money working in some cube, but if being a gardener makes me happy, that’s what I’ll do.

George saw the horrible hypocrisies in the world and hated them. Instead of just being angry he did something about it. One of the most notable was the Concert for Bangladesh. It is immortalized in the song “Bangladesh.”

“My friend came to me with sadness in his eyes / he told me that he wanted help before his country dies / although I could not feel the pain I knew I had to try / now I’m asking all of you to help us save some lives.”

Although this song wasn’t the only inspiration for me, the spirit of activism has been important in my life. There are many homeless people in Portland, so my family volunteered to feed them at the church I grew up in. When I couldn’t vote I registered people who could.

The only time I can remember crying in the morning is when I woke up to hear the morning news report that George Harrison had died of lung cancer. I had known he was sick, but everyone said he’d get better. One of my mothers cousins whom we were very close to had died of lung cancer the year before, so seeing another one of my heroes succumb to the disease was almost as painful, almost like reliving the same situation. To most people it was the death of a Beatle. The death of any hope of a “reunion.” To me it was the death of someone I looked up to as an incredible model of how to live one’s life.


"George was a giant, a great, great soul with all the humanity, all the wit and humor, all the wisdom the spirituality, the common sense of a man and compassion for people. He inspired love and had the strength of a hundred men. He was like the sun, the flowers, and the moon, and we will miss him enormously. The world is a profoundly emptier place without him." –Bob Dylan

Mi Familia

I always feel weird writing about my family. It's hard to think of something unique to write about, it all seems mundane to me; I've lived with them for 18 years. I always end up coming back to one thing though, my parents professions.



In my family my parent's jobs might be seen as a reversal of the “traditional” family roles. Although my mom is in education, which would be traditional for many women of her generation, she is in more of an executive role. My dad is self-employed and builds and repairs stained glass windows. He used to sell things that he made at the Saturday Market, and work on big projects in churches, but now he mainly repairs windows of homeowners in Portland. One of the reasons he cut back his business was getting married and having kids. Cutting back the business meant that he made a lot less money. Growing up my mom was the one who worked, and my dad was home most of the time. This was different than almost all of my peers, so different that I noticed starting when I was very young. I remember asking my mom why everyone else’s dad had “a big job” but in our family she did.

My dad works out of our home so he can make his own hours and chose the days he works. This was really beneficial when my brother and I were young. I have great memories of going to parks and going on hikes and bike rides. One of our favorite things to do was go to a board walk a few miles from our house (although it felt much farther) and play Pooh Sticks on a bridge there. For those of you who don’t know what Pooh Sticks are I am sorry. It is one of the most fun games you can have with any natural materials (sticks are best), a bridge, and a stream.

It might sound like my mom was gone all the time, but this is not true. Although it was my dad who was home when I got home from school, and my dad who got me up in the mornings in grade school I have always had a wonderful relationship with my mom. I think that her not being the typical “mom” helped me see her as a person rather than “just a mom,” something I think a lot of people don’t realize until well into their adult years. My mom and I are also a lot alike which has also helped with our relationship.

Having a family that is not quite typical has helped me see the world from a different point of view than most of my friends. It has also given me unique relationships with both of my parents, and helped me to be more open in how I view family units.

outrage? i guess...

This is going to be sort of hard because I'm not really in an outraged or even remotely angry mood right now. In fact, I'm pretty happy. There's nothing though, that can change my mood from pleasant to outraged like apathy. Most of the time I get outraged over political apathy. Last fall I volunteered for John Kerry's campaign at a phone bank in my area. Imagine how heartbreaking, and outraging it was for me, not yet 18 to have to call people who told me they were not voting, even though I was holding a piece of paper that proved that they were registered to. It outrages me that only half of this country votes. I agonize at the thought that elections are won and lost over who has the better TV commercial or who spends more money on lawn signs. It has helped me to be less outraged by the political apathy in our country by actually working against it. It's so rewarding to help register someone to vote or talk to a woman in Hawai'i over the phone and tell her, to her surprise that she still has an hour to get to her precinct and vote, and hear the relief in her voice that she hasn't missed her chance.

As much as political apathy outrages me, the apathy that many people have for those worse off than them outrages me more. I don’t just mean economically, although that of course is an awful problem. It outrages me that there are still children who are passed through school who can’t read because no one cared enough, or felt compelled to take the time to sit down with them and teach them. It outrages me that I know a person who’s extended family took turns taking advantage of his social security number instead of taking turns caring for him.

Although many of the things that outrage me come from someone being taken advantage of, this comes from apathy. Someone doesn’t care enough to even treat their fellow human with as much respect and dignity as they do themselves. Many times rather than feeling outraged, this kind of thing depresses me. I can’t comprehend how many people can just not care. Often after the feeling of depression I also feel hope. I feel that, as long as I am still paying attention, still caring enough to pay attention, that other people probably are too. It also helps me focus and figure out what I truly want to do with my life.

Please be careful when you say, “I don’t care” around me. I can probably think of a few reasons why you should.

Personal Essay?

I'm not sure if this counts as a personal essay. I read it soon after Hurrican Katrina and it moved me and made me think about what I would feel like if I lost the city I call home.

slate

Mourning My New Orleans
Our family has lived there for a century. Where will we go now?
By Josh Levin
Updated Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 1:23 PM PT


What will be left when the residents return?


I have to keep reminding myself that this is the same patch of land where I went to school and played baseball and had dinner with my grandparents every Friday night. Every time some new, awful report bubbles up—of prisoners rioting, of looters menacing Children's Hospital, of water so high there aren't roofs to wave a white flag from, of people lying on the interstate waiting for someone to tell them where to go and what to do—New Orleans seems more like a scene out of 28 Days Later than a place where people ever lived and worked and raised their families.

A little more than 48 hours after Katrina strafed the city, I'm starting to mourn a place that's not quite dead but seems too stricken to go on living. The promises early yesterday that breached levees would be patched with airlifted sandbags came to nothing. The exhausted-looking mayor reported last night that the sandbag-dropping helicopters didn't show up. So much for deus ex machina.

Local television stations, now streaming their broadcasts online, plead with people who aren't watching: You will be arrested if you're found on the street in Plaquemines Parish. Don't drink the water in St. Tammany until you've boiled it for a good long while. On the Times-Picayune's message boards, supplications stack up unanswered: "Looking for Gary," "Looking for Teldrich," "Carole & Monte DAVIS???" I search for the names of friends who stayed behind and don't find them. I'm sure they're riding it out somewhere, on a second floor without electricity or water to drink or in a shelter with thousands of others, but it's impossible to reach them. The cell phones are dead and all the circuits are busy anyway.

As the endlessly looping aerial footage shows little more than a giant lake with highway overpasses peeking out, I'm glad I wasn't there and terrified I never will be again. A friend from high school told me he took the scenic route out of town on Sunday morning so he could remember the places he needed to remember: Molly's at the Market, the Warehouse District, the Uptown JCC, the corner of St. Charles Avenue where he drank his first beer. I squint at the screen, searching for some kind of landmark to say goodbye to, but the only thing that's recognizable is the Superdome, which now looks like a potato with the skin peeled off to reveal the rotten insides.

As I watch my hometown slowly drown on CNN, it's hard to keep track of all the things to feel guilty about. I'm ashamed that my family has lived in New Orleans for 100 years yet I don't know the city well enough to figure out what they're showing on the helicopter flybys. There are so many canonical things—eating at Galatoire's, listening to traditional jazz at Preservation Hall, visiting the Cabildo—that I somehow never got around to doing. Even with the cracked levees threatening to spill Lake Pontchartrain over the entire East Bank of New Orleans, the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Uptown (where my parents live) will most likely survive because they're on relatively high ground. The poorest neighborhoods, though, are the lowest-lying ones. Places like Treme and the Lower Ninth Ward are full of people without the means to have gotten themselves out; the ones left behind had the least to lose but lost whatever they had.

I'm grateful that my parents and grandparents and aunt and uncles and cousins got out in time, but I'm worried about what they'll go back to once the water recedes and the fallen oaks get cleared. I'm more worried that they won't go back at all.

My father and his father and his father all grew up in New Orleans and went to medical school there and stayed in town to practice medicine. But for all its multigenerational families, New Orleans is—or maybe was—a place where a third of the people live below the poverty line and where the job market has been stagnant for decades. The gentrification of Marigny and Bywater in the last few years brought hope that the urban renewal that had come to so many other cities might not pass by New Orleans entirely. Those neighborhoods are now underwater. The city will get rebuilt no matter what, if only for the oil and gas industries. But who all is going to be there?

I don't remember much of what I did when I went down to visit my folks a few months ago: ate some fried seafood at some hole in the wall, went to my grandparents' house, probably walked under the canopy of oak trees in Audubon Park. Maybe it's a heartless thing to say when there are still people down there in the muck, but it's tragic to think of all those beautiful trees, in the park and on the Uptown streets that I drove through every day, toppled and on the ground, waiting to be chopped into bits and trucked away. There are friends' houses that will no doubt be so much flotsam, neighborhood restaurants that won't serve another oyster po' boy, bars where the jukebox won't ever play Allen Toussaint or Ernie K-Doe again.

With the water in the city still rising, there are rumors floating that they might have to dynamite the levees to get the water flowing back to Lake Pontchartrain. Maybe the only way to save it is to blow part of it up and start over. Next time, I'll make sure to remember everything.

-------------------
This essay really made me feel for the author. I could feel all the emotions he was feeling: sorrow, guilt, frustration, anger, disbelief. Although this essay was probably very cathartic for the author, his describing the different parts of New Orleans and how they'll never be the same made me able to feel more empathetic. I've never been to New Orleans and I barely know where anything is there so his descriptions of the places he remembers really helped me understand his loss.

The author really understood what was going on in New Orleans. He says, " The ones left behind had the least to lose but lost whatever they had." He knew that there were many poor people there who couldn't get out, even when ordered to evacuate. Although many people saw this on the news I feel like I could trust him more because he is from there. He has seen these people with his own eyes.

I think the saddest part is that although he is from New Orleans he feels disconnected from it. From the writing it seemed to me that he almost felt left out, like he felt guilty for not being there and experiencing the tragedy with his former neighbors.

At the end of the piece he says, "Maybe the only way to save it is to blow part of it up and start over." At that point it seems like he's given up. That sentence really emphasizes the seriousness of the situation at that point. Many people, including the author believed that the city they loved was gone for good. Now we see that some of it can be salvaged, although as they said, it will never be the same.

The last line of the essay is also very strong. It is very sad, yet it also has hope. The fact that the author was able to say "next time" shows that he believes that New Orleans will be able to pick itself up and start over. Having this hope will be the first step in healing.

The Things I Carry

The Things I Carry

Thought process in class when Rachel said, “Write about the things you carry:”
Crap. Ok… the things I carry. Things… I carry… What do I carry? Do I carry anything? Oh no… I don’t think I carry anything. This is going to be awful. How could I carry anything that’s remotely as meaningful as this? Why is everyone else writing? Everyone else has meaningful things to say? Maybe they’re faking. Maybe I should just make something up. …… Crap I can’t even make things up to carry… Ok… here…”

From that point I wrote down a few things. I figured from my thought process there that I carry some self-doubt about things I write or think are important. I also thought about how there were probably lots of things that I could think of that I am carrying but am afraid to say them, or I don’t want to write them down because I don’t want to share them. I carry a need for privacy.

I thought about the other things I carry Friday and Saturday and still wasn’t coming up with much. I had an idea that if I made a list of the actual physical things that I carried with me here, (non-necessary things) that I would get a better idea of the intangible things I carry. (Some of this stuff has to mean something. Right? I hope.)

Things I brought with me:
My camera, 2
Jar of sand.
Existential Dilemmas jar.
Address book.
Stationary.
Book of pictures of friends.
Artwork: silk screens of Shakespeare quotes from Newport, OR, Rudy Harrel’s “Popstars,” Framed photo of the “Imagine” mosaic in Strawberry Fields photo from New York.
Posters: Jude, George Harrison, Yellow Submarine, Help, and World Map.
Comics: Put a dollar in the “end a sentence in a preposition” jar, look another uncooked bird, trade you these grub worms for your silly hats and high-heeled girly boots.
Binder of poetry, letters, and cards from friends.
Lots and Lots of music
Books (not text books): Sophie’s World, A History of Philosophy, “A Problem From Hell” American and the Age of Genocide, “A People’s History of the United States,” “The Bad Day Book.”
Decorations: butterfly lights, metal face from Saturday Market, sparkly “A” from Seattle, ugly but wonderful “Love” necklace bought at Goodwill in Yakima.

This is some of what I have figured out from these things:

1. I carry anxiety about being away from the familiar things in my life; my family, my friends, my boyfriend, my backyard, my room, my cats, the MAX Train, the park outside my house, Saturday Market (and Sunday Too!), the bridges…

2. I carry the weight of the world. I have a need to know about what’s going on in the world, especially the bad things that need to be fixed.
a. I feel that I carry the responsibility to fix those problems. If it’s not me personally it should be my generation.
b. I carry the knowledge that we are who we’ve been waiting for and we need to act now.

3. I carry the need to know people intimately. I don’t like having acquaintances. I have always had 3-5 very close friends rather than tons of people who I just hang out with. If I don’t know a person very well I don’t share a lot about myself with them. It can take years for me to really connect with a person. I hardly ever just click with someone.

4. I carry some shyness, more than I’d like to admit. I’ve always been good at meeting people and making friends; I can usually find something to talk about with someone. This new environment however has made this more difficult.




Things that other people carry: postsecret

school lunches...

For the last two years of high school my lunch time was spent between F-Hall and E-Hall. The two coolest halls in the entire school. F-Hall was the English hall. Our favorite teacher Mr. Seibert taught a few doors down from where we ate. And conveniently his class was after lunch on odd period days. E-Hall was the history and social studies hall. Two other favorite teachers Mr. Kobrowski (Kobro for short) and Mr. McGuire (e-Mac for short) taught next to where we ate. Were we supposed to eat in the hallway? No. But we did anyway. We were just too cool for the cafeteria. Common people ate there. People who didn't know how it felt to eat sitting on the floor in the dim light of the hallway. We started eating there for innocent enough reasons. My sophomore year the school remodled the cafeteria and during that time it was about half it's original size. We were allowed to eat anywhere we could find. We found F-Hall. No one really cared what you ate. Unless it looked really weird. But we weren't afraid to ask. That's the best part about eating with your friends, people who care about you. You're not afraid to ask them what the hell that is and they're not afraid to tell you. What you brought it in did matter. If you brought it in a paper bag I would yell at you. As the president of Environmental Club I had an obligation to inform you that fabric lunch bags were far cuter and didn't murder trees. Some people bought lunch. Really the only acceptable things to buy from the school were bento (not actual bento), fries, and cookies. And you had to get an egg role with the bento. The chicken was too questionable. Not quite chicken-looking enough.

Junior year was pretty fabulous. We had the whole hallway to ourselves. Occasionally the vice-principles would remind us that we weren't supposed to eat there. We'd say "ok" and continue eating. Senior year though the juniors moved it. They weren't annoying, in fact many of them were our friends. But this was our hallway. And these people were freshman just two years ago. So we told them they should move and that it was our hallway. They said that they didn't think so. So we just slowly moved the garbage can that seperated our two groups down the hall until they were squished in to the end of the hallway.

The hallway was more than just somewhere to eat lunch. It was a meeting place. if someone said "I looked for you all durning lunch yesterday." You just had to answer "well.. i was in f-hall. like always." It became a place where you knew you had someone to sit with. Someone who you had at least one thing on common with. One of the junior invaders (also a very good friend) wrote in my yearbook that he'd miss all the seniors in f-hall next year. Now he's a senior. So I guess we've passed on our hallway.

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried and How To Tell A True War Story

It's hard to write a reaction to these pieces. Obviously they were powerful and moving, but there's something more there. It's hard to describe what made me want to keep reading The Things They Carried. After all, most of the story is a list of common things that soldiers carried with them. The things that make it compelling are the things that O'Brien mixes in with the lists. He adds in all of the men's personal issues, the emotional weights that they carry. The lieutenant's love of Martha in between the lists also made me not be bored by reading this list that might otherwise be monotonous. O'Brien takes the bare facts of war and adds a very personal touch to it. In both of the chapters he tells and retells the stories adding more information each time, and each time starting at a different time, from a different perspective. This kind of writing can teach us a lot more about a war than a textbook chapter on Vietnam or a documentary showing footage. O’Brien is not embarrassed to admit that he was affected by the war. One of the most moving parts for me was when he talked about the memories that wake him up at night. He says that if a war story matters it doesn’t matter if it actually happened. This was interesting to me. Earlier he said that if a war story left you with a moral or some hope it probably wasn’t true. Now he says that it doesn’t matter if a story is really true or not.

I think both of these chapters will help me think about the things that I carry through life.

Some Pablo Neruda Poetry

I Like For You To Be Still

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word: Melancholy

I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would've died
One word then, One smile is enough
And I'm happy;
Happy that it's not true
--------------------

Puedo Escribir in Spanish:

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos."

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche esta estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa,
y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.
----------------------

and in English:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
------------------

this is probably the saddest poem I've ever read.

A Song of Despair

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
-------------------
And another one I like that's not out of Twenty Love Poems:

Love Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain dark things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
the light of those flowers hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love, the tight aroma that rose
from the earth lives in my body in darkness.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
-------

I just got a really big book "The Poetry of Pablo Neruda" that has exerps from all of his books and there's all kinds of poems, protest, patriotic, historical, and lots of odes like "Ode To My Suit," and "Ode to Laziness," and "Ode to the Atom." So I'm excited to read all of them.
-Alison

The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda wrote the kind of poetry that all poets hope to some day write. He captured the excitement of falling in love, the raw emotion of a passion that lasts many years and the devastating tragedy of love lost. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte Poemas De Amor Y Una Cancion Desesperada) is a collection of poems chronicling two of Neruda’s relationships when he was a young man and ends with a poem describing the anger and desperation of losing a woman he loved.

The first time I heard Neruda’s poetry was in a song. The band had put the words to the twentieth poem in the book, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” to music. The first line of the song was “El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.” which translates to “The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.” These words intrigued me. I looked up the entire poem and saw that it was about a poet who had decided that tonight he would write the last poem about the woman who had left him, and that writing the poem would also be the last pain she ever caused him.

This is the kind of poem that made me love Pablo Neruda. The other poems in the book are incredibly moving, each more so than the last. Neruda achieves this deep emotion by sometimes coming right out and saying what he means, such as in the fifteenth poem when we writes “I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent, distant and full of sorrow as though you had died. One word then, one smile is enough. And I am happy, happy that it is not true.” Other times he uses metaphors that show us exactly how he feels towards the woman, as in the same poem when he writes “And let me talk to you with your silence that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring. You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations. Your silence is like that of a star, remote and candid.”

Neruda’s poetry is filled with details of everyday life that with his descriptive language and unique word choices are made beautiful. In poem ten Neruda recalls thinking about his love when she is not with him, “Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away? The book fell that is always turned to at twilight and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.” Like most translated works, the poems flow more in their original Spanish, but even when translated to English are felt with full force.

The last poem in the book, the Song of Despair, is possibly the most moving, and certainly the most heartbreaking. At the beginning Neruda writes that the memory of the woman “emerges from the night around me” and then laments that he feels “Deserted like the wharves at dawn.” His passion seems to be exploding in this final poem, the final chapter of his love with this woman. He seems to be screaming at her, or possibly at himself, when he says “Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank!” The poem is finished with Neruda feeling lost and deserted and he says “It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.”

In today’s world of fast food, instant messaging, and instant gratification, poetry stands out as one thing that isn’t afraid to take a long time to explain something. The author uses rich details and description to describe not only actions but also the emotions that go along with these actions.

Despite my attempt at explaining just some of the things that make Pablo Neruda’s poetry worth reading, it is hard to describe exactly why people should read his Twenty Love Poems And A Song Of Despair, perhaps it is something you can only understand from reading them yourself.

Annie Lamott's School Lunches

I liked reading this piece, though, it didn't have as many helpful writing tips as the other two. I can see how her method would be really helpful for creative writers. Writing about something completely unrelated to writing can give you a lot of ideas and maybe take you somewhere you didn't think you'd be going. I like how she wrote the whole description and then at the end decided to concentrate on the one part of her initial story that was least favorable, the boy aginst the fence. The School Lunch idea is a good writing tool if you are trying to start a short story or even a book and just don't know where to start.

I'm glad I didn't go to as much of a cut throat elementry school as she did. At my school it was cool to get hot lunch. unless of course you were like me and were just too cool for hot lunches so you brought your lunch from home.

Annie Lamott's Short Assignments

This piece was also easy to relate to. It helped a lot to know that professional writers get the same kind of instant writers block that comes when you first sit down to write an assignment. Almost every time I sit down to write something I end of sitting at the computer for a few minutes staring at the screen trying to figure out what the first thing I say should be. Lamott's advice is a really good idea. It is a lot easier to concentrate on one simple part of a story or character than to try to figure out how to tell the whole story at once.

I really like the way Lamott uses her own experiences and humor to help people become better writers. Instead of being really serious and talking... or writing down to people reading her book she lets her readers know that novice writers have the same problems that experienced writers have.

Annie Lamott's Shitty First Drafts

I really loved this chapter. I completely relate to what Lamott is talking about. Last year while writing English and history essays and articles for yearbook I would do nearly the same thing.... Sit down and try to think of something, anything, to write and nothing would come. Then I'd freak out a little bit and wander around the house, distract myself with my cats or instant messaging friends who were trying to write the same paper, grab some crackers, jump up and down, breath deeply and then sit down again and start the process over. My mom told me basically the same thing that Lamott is saying we should do. Just get something down; start writing and see what happens. (Did I use that semicolon right...?) A lot of the time I just skip the first paragraph completely and start writing somewhere in the middle. A lot of the time I find that I know what I want to say, just not how to express myself, so I find it helpful to just write it in the plainest way possible and fix it later, in to what I was truly trying to say.


I think the method she got from the hypnotist could be really helpful. I don't usually experience voices in my head whilst writing, but it is easy to start thinking about other things I have to do or things I am worrying about. I bet I could put those in a jar just as easily as her voices. I am definitely going to try it. I think turning down the volume is a better choice than shooting them in the head as well.

Lewis Thomas Notes on Punctuation

Lewis Thomas explains very well how to use basic punctuation that people often use incorrectly. In some cases he gives the history of the use of that punctuation mark and then he also shows ways to use it correctly and incorrectly. This is a really effective way to explain things.

Despite how well he explained things, I couldn't help being annoyed by Thomas. Even when he said things in a joking way it stuck me as condescending and made him come off as pretty pretentious. The way he wrote the piece was pretty elitist and just annoyed me. It’s hard to explain. (Maybe I am easily annoyed?)

I don't think I agree that exclamation points are always a bad thing, although they should definitely be used sparingly. He makes a good point when he says that adding an exclamation point to a banal sentence makes it more banal! They shouldn't be used in formal writing, but in creative writing (especially in dialogue) they could help get your point or a character's point across. I disagree that they ruin poetry....

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
-Emily Dickinson

one of my favorite poems.

My sophomore year in high school we read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. One of the main things we talked about was his use of punctuation. At the beginning, when the main character is very young, he hardly uses any formal punctuation or capitalization. As the character gets older, the punctuation is more sophisticated.

Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

The letter Martin Luther King wrote from the jail in Birmingham is such a moving and powerful piece. It seems at first that King simply poured out his heart and wrote what he was feeling in response to the letter from the clergymen. After reading it more deeply it becomes obvious that King has written one of the best persuasive responses ever.

I think the best parts of the letter are where he agrees with what the other clergymen were saying that was supposed to be against him, and turns it around to say exactly what he wanted it to. He agrees with them and tells them that they are right to ask why they need to demonstrate, and then explains exactly why they need to, noting of course, that they should not have to demonstrate in the first place. King repeats this again when he talks about breaking unjust laws. “You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern,” he says. He then skillfully explains that the anti-segregationists will obey just laws. He is effective when because he uses examples that the clergymen could identify with to show them than an unjust law is no law at all.

My favorite part of the letter is the long list of reasons that we must not “wait” to act against segregation anymore. (“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darkness of segregation to say, ‘Wait’…”) This is the most emotional part of the letter. It is so powerful because each of the things that he lists are poignant, and are real life experiences that it seems like King himself went through. Although he uses all kinds of modes of persuasion I think his emotional appeals are the most effective.


I did a little more research on the letter and found this website that I thought was kind of cool:

http://www.millikin.edu/wcenter/king1a.html

they broke down the entire letter by form of argument used and color coded it.