Ferlinghetti's Changing Light During a Pandemic

So already, when you walk along a beach very early in the morning, how can you not think about light* and the way that it changes? And that's what got me thinking this morning about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "The Changing Light," one of the poems read on April 30, 2020 during the American Academy of Poets' "Shelter in Poems" virtual reading. You can hear composer-musician Stephin Merritt read it at Minute 56:45 of the reading video. 

I first met Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry--and through it, Goya's paintings--as a high school junior. The poem was "In Goya's Greatest Scenes," and it stayed with me, this depiction of war-time and "peace"-time suffering. Frankly, I think it was the line "groaning with babies and bayonets" that tattooed itself upon me. So visual and so audible, especially with the Vietnam War ongoing. Babies and bayonets: not two things I wanted to think about together, wanted anybody to think about together.

Ferlinghetti's "The Changing Light" is about San Francisco's light. It would have been easy to find a beautiful picture of San Francisco awash in beautiful light and post it here, but I didn't do that deliberately. Reader, you don't need any pictures of San Francisco's light. You only need Ferlinghetti's words and the blank space around them to get you to see and feel that light, to know what it is and isn't.

Ferlinghetti uses the word "light" ten times, usually with an adjective or prepositional phrase to modify it: we're asked to envision

Don't be deceived: this is a photograph of a floor!

• East Coast light
• pearly light
• sea light (twice!)
• island light
• light of fog
• veil of light
• vale of light

We travel through a day and cross oceans and borders to see and feel that light truly--I can't think of a word other than "truly" since Ferlinghetti goes to such pains to make sure we don't confuse San Francisco light with other kinds of light that it isn't. We need to understand that light truly if we're going to understand its magic. I know that "magic" sounds trite. But the poem isn't trite. And that's the whole point. The poem creates magic out of this routine yet glorious and uplifting daily progression. Really good poetry can and does evoke magic.

And may I share two other parts of the poem that just get to me? 

• First, I love the "sharp clean shadows" that make the sunlit city absolutely pristeen.
• Second, I love the stanza "And in that vale of light/the city drifts/anchorless/upon the ocean": I know that stanza is reminding me of another poem--I think it might be a French poem--in which the city moves like a ship or a vessel. But it also has me mesmerized by the idea of a big, sprawling, complex, ocean-liner-like place moving "anchorless," and thus on some level, free. Maybe I'm drawn to this stanza because I frequently feel myself drifting aimlessly and unmoored during this COVID-19 pandemic; or maybe it's because "anchorless" connotes the freedom to move anywhere, not an easy thing to do in these pandemic times.

It's interesting to note that Ferlinghetti is still alive--he turned 101 years old in March, which means he was born at the tail-end of the last pandemic. As a centenarian, he knows something about needing to shelter at home: According to the NPR Morning Edition reporters who did a feature on him when he turned 100, 

For Lawrence Ferlinghetti, living to be 100 is no fun. Speaking from his home in San Francisco recently, Ferlinghetti said he's practically blind now — he can't read, and he's skipping his big birthday bash at the bookstore he co-founded, City Lights in San Francisco.***

There is that city light again--this time in the name of the bookshop.**** And of course, the irony here is that this poet who could evoke such light can no longer see it. Some say sunlight kills the COVID-19 virus, but that's not why we crave light during times of darkness. Ferlinghetti's poem is there for us, ready to immerse us in light. I hope it works the same magic on him.

* Adjacent photo is screen shot from the HOW TO TINT YOUR FOG LIGHTS YELLOW video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqeqTxIZOfo. I like it because it looks like an eye, represents a change in light, and has to do with fog.
** Screen shot of Amtico Flooring: https://www.amtico.com/commercial/lvt/product-search/AR0AUA13/

*** Vitale, T. (2019, March 20). A Lost 'Little Boy' Nears 100: Poet And Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2019/03/20/704903571/a-lost-little-boy-nears-100-poet-and-publisher-lawrence-ferlinghetti

**** Photo included in the following blog: Coe, J. (2017, November 16). 24 Hours in San Francisco [Web log post]. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.backroads.com/blog/24-hours-in-san-francisco

Salvation in a Torrent of "Thanks"

So already, poetry as torrent. And thank you as defiance, as refusal. Not a distressed person's search for one small, sweet reason to make it through another difficult day, but an angry person's refusal to let a crazy, callous, sometimes vicious world demean living and people.* Better than that, an angry group's determination to meet a flood of indifferent--or not indifferent--trouble with a torrent of passionate thanks.

That's what we find in W.S. Merwin's "Thanks." I suggest that you read it, then listen to Busy Philipps read it (at Minute 1:01:05), and even talk about it before she reads it (at Minute 55:34): it was one of the final poems read during the American Academy of Poets' "Shelter in Poems" virtual reading event on April 30, 2020.

The poem begins pretty gently, as we each take our places, the vantage points from which we will look and speak:  

Listen
with the night falling we are     saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions**

Wow! W.S. Merwin's not Jewish, but this poem felt so Jewish to me the first time I heard it, and it still does: we--not just "I," but "we"--say thank you, we praise together, again and again and again, even, or maybe especially, when we are grieving or otherwise losing heart. It's a group effort to keep it real--that is, feel the terrible loss--and to assert thank you to God or the universe--or even simply to one another--as our response, to be undeterred in our stance of thankfulness for being alive and together. The poem begins with the word "Listen"; by the end of the poem we are still saying thank you to those others who ignored us when we entreated them to listen at the beginning of the poem, and who are not listening:

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

We say "thank you" no less than fourteen times in this poem, even if we're the only ones listening to ourselves say it. Even though terrible things keep happening. Whether our repetitions have any ability to restore to us our lost feelings--the ones we once could feel that have been somehow trampled into actual or seeming non-existence--I don't know.

The combination of our group effort and the music of our chant empowers us. And what starts as a trickle of thank yous becomes a torrent, a cascade. We don't say thank you because we got something--like justice or a better world,*** or any kind of reward for saying thank you. We say thank you because we refuse not to say it. Because we mean it, and aim to mean it even more. Because we mean to live and affirm life no matter how thick the darkness is.

I've been paying attention to repetition in poetry. Sometimes it calms and lulls us; sometimes it galvanizes us; and sometimes it chips away at something in us that needs transformation. The world resists changing, Merwin tells us; we can count on it only to serve up its same old menu of ignorance and pain. But we can refuse to be defined and undone by the featured items on the menu, pandemics included.

* https://www.merrimentdesign.com/image/chicago_avenue_bridge_graffiti_thank_you_card_6.jpg

** Adjacent photo is the photo in this blog post: Hill, R. (2017, October 1). A childhood prayer [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://russellhillwriter.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/a-childhood-prayer/

*** Post-Apocalyptic City Scene 4 - DreamScene [Live Wallpaper ... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i1NvgAy3uSA/maxresdefault.jpg

Social Distancing Poem

"I think; therefore iamb."
 -- René Descartes-Before-the-Horse 

"Old Nag" by Vincent Van Gogh

I know
     I am--
     (iamb)
     (iamb)
     (iamb)
     (iamb)
     (iamb)--

I'm a nag
     an' a pest--
     (anapest)
     (anapest)
     (anapest)
     (anapest)
     (anapest)

Six Feet--
     Small Feat--
     (trochee) 
     (trochee)
     (trochee) 
     (trochee)  
     (trochee) 

Between lines
     (or is it
     when we 
     stan-
     z'in lines
     or meet(er)
     on streets?)

Mask on face,
     snug and
     tactile
     (dactyl)
     (dactyl)
     (dactyl)
     (dactyl)  

May mean things do not get worse
     (Hope in
     four feet--
     that's sublime!--
     still reason
     has the right
     to rhyme)

Except perhaps for poets' verse.