The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Watch this blog for more information

* * * *

News from the Muse of the Double-headed Axe*

*The Double-Headed Axe or labrys was sacred as a tool and a weapon. It belonged to the Minoan
Goddess. It is associated with the labyrinth—“house of the double axe.”

Roi Faineant

an online literary publication

has published four of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s recent poems.

It is difficult to find literary magazines which will publish long poems, and/or poems that take on the difficult issues of our terrible times. Hats off to the editors of this brave publication. You can find all four poems here:

The Muse of the Double-headed Axe

insists on sharing Her poem, below.

Labyrinth

Pilgrimage in the Shape of a Prayer

I.
You never know    where    you’re going
                                                until you get there
You never know    what    you’ll stumble into
                                                until you’re in it
so said the Labyrinth       one afternoon
                                                in late November
as your feet faltered     round the sudden     twists and turns
                                                 of the double-headed ax
When at last    you emerged    from that pilgrimage
                                            in the shape of a prayer
ruby red and gold trees    flared up    into a glory
                                            and you suddenly remembered    the Dream


II.
The Dream knows you    are a wandering Jew
whose bones ache    with the agony weight
of the world    forever    seeking sanctuary
forever    on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer
you stumble    into    a small    Black Hole    A temple?
A trap?    A desecration of the Holy Land?    Can’t see a thing
but the bony labyrinth    of your ear hears    demonic chanting
bibinetanyahubibinetanyahubibnetanyahu
The One and the Only    Mr Security
The One and the Only    Judge and Jury
rousing your ancestors    to warn you
This double-headed ax blow    to the stomach
this manic metronome    with its hypnotic spell
means to render you    powerless    or is it
a call to witness    how swiftly sanctuary
                                                can turn    treacherous?

Nova Music Festival

Hostages

III.
The Dream knows you    will stumble
    into this damp and gloomy     spider web of tunnels
        a double-headed ax    a labyrinth of passageways
            You walk    with the walkers    who can’t see
                                                    you    seem to be    a spirit    in this underworld
                You come at last    to a well-lit room
                    a group of young people    wounded    bandaged
                        dazed    confused    held prisoner
                            Are you called to witness    the abducted?
                        Are you called to hear    what they remember?
                     Just yesterday    they were ecstatic    trance dancers
                a synchronized flow    of mandalas    within mandalas
            spheres beyond spheres    in the company    of Great Buddha
        on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    for peace    for joy
    between Jews and Muslims    loving the land they share    all day
all night    in the desert    until suddenly    at sunrise    Nirvana cracks

    gun shots    hand grenades    terrorists are hunting them    running
        running    weeping     shrieking    corpses scattered    everywhere
            and they    the survivors    abducted
                Where was the army?    We served our time
                    We would have saved us    Now we’re stuck
                        in this hell hole    without our phones
                            How can we text    our terrified mothers?
                                What would Buddha say?

Destruction in Gaza

Eye and Child

IV.
The Dream transports you stumbling    into a temple    or is it a mosque by the sea?    The Dream
shows you    the spirit of a girl who reveals    I am the “Unknown Trauma Child” of Gaza
Did anyone survive under the rubble that terrible night   when the bomb crashed into our home
like a double-headed ax?    All I could hear was    shrieking    shrieking    Then nothing a tunnel
of darkness    a sudden bright light    as the ancestors gathered    fragments of my soul
so I can visit with you    in your dream    so you can see me whole    a radiant loving child
of radiant loving people    May they come to me    as ghosts who walk the labyrinth
a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    May you greet them    here in this sanctuary
made sacred by your sorrow    Sit with us    Meet my mother who was tender    Meet my father
who was playful    Meet my older brother    the joker    Meet my younger sister    the dreamer
and that unknown unborn one  in mother’s womb  who never will see   the light  of the new day
This is my family   broken pottery  shattered lineage  cast away flesh and bones  No one is left
to identify   our bodies   No one is left   to grieve   May you be our witness   our weeper
                                                                                     May you gather  and treasure  our souls

Underworld

V.

The Dream knows   you are weary                still stumbling   on difficult terrain
    This pilgrimage  in the shape of a prayer    has not yet revealed the  Temple of your Soul
        The Dream is a labyrinth   in motion            in the shape of a butterfly
            in the shape of a double-headed ax              it cuts through tumult  and you find yourself
                ascending a Rock   given a hand up            by kind people   who know   sorrow
            “This Rock”   they tell you                       “is our Sanctuary   without walls
           where all who love this land                call it Palestine  call it Israel  may gather to pray
        that the Rock will hold us   know us     help us face   the hard truth   of our history
    the hard truth   of our geography           the hard truth   of our kinship   in catastrophe
        We bring prayer rugs   and prayer shawls       We prostrate ourselves   we daven

We’ve come to hear    the Stone speak”

I am the voice    of the land you love

Hear O Israel    Hear O Palestine

I am your Mother

I say    “Enough Already!

Salaam is Sholom    Sholom is Salaam

Make Peace!”

Sacred Rock

The Muse of Deep River

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow

by the Deep River Poets

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)

—C.G. Jung

Cover Art by Kent Butzine

The Muse of Deep River

Our way is the way of the poet, who knows that poems have lives of their own. Poems need us, their poets, to listen to them, see them, feel them, wrestle with them until their hidden natures emerge. In return they reflect us, revise us, refine us, play us like musical instruments; they shape shift our stories and light up dim corners of our souls. The craft of making a poem becomes a craft—a vessel—for knowing ourselves and our world.

from the Introduction

Those of us who are called to write poems often wrestle, especially in terrible times, with the question: What can poetry do? Poetry is a lightweight feather dipped in ink; it cannot put out a wildfire, stop a pandemic, stop police brutality or voter suppression, prevent an authoritarian coup or heal a furious fragmentation of the social contract. But it can, sometimes, shift consciousness, open doors and windows to a wider vision, a deeper wisdom expressed in compelling images which leap out of imagination or come as dream figures to initiate us into the realm of The Mysteries. The question of what poetry can do became a catalyst for change in the Deep River Poetry Circle—a workshop that meets monthly at the Jung Institute of San Francisco—when the 2016 election shocked us out of our comfortable faith in American democracy.

"Red Fishes" by Marianna Ochyra

Deep River has been meeting for over fifteen years. It emerged out of a mountain spring in my soul, when my Muse, better known as The Sister from Below, informed me that writing poetry was my spiritual practice. We write under the influence of great poets and have explored poetries from many cultures all over the world and all over America. But when the Spirit of Our Times took such a frightening turn in 2016 we realized we needed each other and poetry for support and it was essential that we ‘get political.’ We could no longer indulge the luxury of exploring for the sake of broadening cultural horizons. Poetry doesn’t boast a big bully pulpit in America. It speaks from the margins, from the depths of the river, from night terrors, about the state of our world. Making a poem is wrestling with the angel: it is shaping a vessel to hold what we fear. We understood that we need our poetry to address the attacks on our democracy by callous, greedy politicians, out for their own aggrandizement and immune to the suffering of ordinary people in a terrible pandemic. We needed language to tell the dreadful truth revealed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other Black and brown people at the hands of police, and by the growing consciousness of systemic and structural racism. We needed images to express the suffering caused by extreme weather events and wildfires in our own landscapes, the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species all over our earth.

So we studied the poetry of witness and of engagement, wrote under the influence of poets whose work flows between the political and the spiritual—James Baldwin, Carolyn Forché, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Judy Grahn, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón. Our circle became a ritual space, in which great poets guided us into our own poetic expression. They showed us the ways of their soul and gave us permission to try new modes of writing. They helped create that space in which the conscious and the unconscious meet—Winnicott calls it “potential space;” Jung calls it “the transcendent function.” Deep River became a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts.

“Women Bathing” by Lionel Walden

When Covid hit we retreated to our individual homes, like cloistered contemplatives in the Dark Ages. Deep River met on Zoom. Surprisingly, the ritual of our meetings seemed to deepen, despite its virtual nature. We found ourselves writing “pandemic poems.” Someone suggested we make a collection of them. Someone else said, let’s make it broader, more inclusive of our writings. We wanted to speak to our Jungian community about what we were learning—that in bad times, the inner work of poetry is a way to tend the soul, to bring together the realms of spirit and the world. It is healing for the poet, healing for the reader; a practice which reminds us that there is a greater reality in which soul and polis, soul and nature, soul and word, mingle.

And so it was that we began gathering this harvest of our recent years together, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. We give it as a gift to the Jung Institute of San Francisco in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, and as an expression of deep gratitude to Extended Education, which has given Deep River support, visibility and a place to gather for so many years. We offer it as a manifestation of the Jungian belief in the creative arts as a way of healing psyche and culture. We offer it as a gift to you, dear reader. May it help you remember ‘what happened.’ May it help you find your way through The Valley of the Shadow and The Realm of the Dead, to The Tree of Life, The Living Symbol and The Way of the Soul.

A dream showed me a deeper meaning for this gift of Soul Making: In the dark, by the sea, there is a “Jungian Grave—” a white, glowing monument commemorating our dead. It is the only bright spot in this moonless, starless scene, providing a bit of light by which we see a gathering of living Jungians, sitting on logs on the beach. There is feeling of excitement and of awe. We are doing a ritual to honor our ancestors.

“Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” by William Blake

Soul Making follows the mythopoetic path of the soul’s progress from the realms of shadow and death to rebirth into embodied life through the magic of the symbolic process and the awakening of the Self. When I was editing this book I followed an intuitive structure, dividing the anthology into five sections separated by quotes from Jung’s Red Book. These epigraphs set the themes of the sections. But until the dream, I was in the dark about the collective ritual significance of the book’s arrangement as our community moves from our beautiful old home in the Presidio to a very different beautiful new home in the Mission. We are in the dark about how it will be. For many of us this move signifies an interest in engaging with our new neighborhood, as part of a growing feeling that our psychology needs to be more attuned to the outer world, though we are in the dark about how this might manifest. However, we carry a structure within us that I associate with the work of Joe Henderson—one of our founding analysts—an understanding of the initiatory path in which “to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (The Wisdom of the Serpent p. 48)

What follows is a sketch of Soul Making, illuminated by quotes from some of the poems. Forgive me, dear reader and dear contributing poets, if I offer slight fragments from the work. Truth be told, we’re hoping you’ll buy the book, enjoy the poems, and the collection, whole.

* * * * *

Godville Game

The Valley of the Shadow

Section I

And so we had to taste hell… 

– C.G. Jung

Anita Cadena Sánchez opens our anthology with a short essay, “Why Poetry?” (p. 5) in which she writes that the 2016 election “revealed this country’s steady descent into the valley of its historically unrecognized shadow” and hopes her poems will “weave a medicine basket” (p. 5). Now there’s something poetry can do. Her first poem, “Will This Ever End,” (pp. 6–7) does it elegantly, naming our trauma, which is the beginning of healing. Here are the opening and ending lines. 

Without notice the White House grows whiter still
invisible swastikas slide off the frozen walls…

The president conflates
Black Lives Matter with hate

So I draw in breath to settle and center
Yes, I can breathe but I witness who can’t

Another black man dies
again                   and again                   and again


Kent Butzine’s poem, “In the Soup” (p. 8), places us in the messy, befuddled, ‘fine kettle of fish’ we know all too well from our recent past:

I am walking through soup
a thick heavy soup that slows
me down    makes it hard to see…

Don’t know if the soup is hot
or my soul is burning…

In a few short lines the poem takes us to the possibility of new life:

Don’t know if I’m ready to die
Or to live at last in aliveness

He brings together the opposites of death and life as they so often appear at the crossroads of our journeys.

* * * * *

Dante and Virgil in Hell by Crescenzio Onofri

The Realm of the Dead

Section II

Take pains to waken the dead… 

–C.G. Jung

In my short essay, opening this section, I argue that “we owe the dead our poems, and our awe.” This follows Jung’s idea that the dead need our attention so we can help them heal. Raluca Ioanid takes on this task for the living as well as the dead in her “Bucharest 1958 Sestina (p 46).” She gives us a powerful image of intergenerational trauma:

History churns inside the family of ghosts
we cannot forget,
unmoored by our
ancestral loss
unravelling backwards from a nightmare–dream
we search eternally for Anita and Paul, our disappeared parents…


In “Funeral Cot” Daniela Kantorová invites us into a surreal and frightening scene:

I’m rocking a funeral cot
The fire is burning…
I’m singing a lullaby
to the rhythm of bones
cracking in the fire
There is a baby in the funeral cot

What a grim image for our times, for the next generation, for the fate of humans, species and the earth. And yet, Kantorová, through the magic of her poem, finds a way out. The poem’s speaker invites the reader, or perhaps it is the Divine, to “Breath me/Breathe my dust” which would seem to breathe life and hope back into her and the poem.

* * * * *

"Tree of Zhiva" by Marianna Ochyra

The Tree of Life

Section III

I became a greening tree… 

–C.G. Jung

In her opening essay to this section Clare Marcus compares two Saturdays, one at an academic, highly rational workshop, the other, Deep River, where “the psyche was allowed its freedom to soar, explore, pour out its fantasies into the warm receptive ears of fellow poets (p. 59).”

In the drought ridden Sierra foothills Sheila deShields’ poem paints the miracle of an unexpected storm and how it transforms the lives of the “Nine crows in my backyard (pp. 66-67)” who “sway high on the row of towering trees” until the skies clear and they descend to enjoy:

The bounty
worms rise
above the soaked sable soil
while the crows
eat
and eat.


Earth is alive again, wet, full of worms, and the creatures feast on the pleasure of plenty.

* * * * *

“World Creation Music” by Marianna Ochyra

The Living Symbol

Section IV

The Symbol is the word…that rises out of the depths of the self… 

– C.G. Jung

In her essay, “A Way to Love” (p. 77), which opens this section, Connie Hills remarks that it is often an encounter which moves her deeply that sparks a poem’s beginning. She writes: “Poetry is a way back to love.” In her poem, “God of Garbage, (pp. 78-9)” a “tall muscular Jamaican” garbage man fills the poem with life and joy. His magic:


Remover of filth, ferment
Everything that is dying…

His smile, like heliotrope
in warm bloom…
I could have loved him.


Through this beautifully drawn character, we experience again, how death is transfigured by the living symbol of the man’s smile.

In my poem, “Ghazal of the Boy in My Dream,” the encounter is with a dream figure, a black boy, symbolic of the magic of poetry and dream:

After gumbo and jazz after rain on my head you befell me in a dream
Strange boy your spiraling hands your eyes ablaze cast a spell in my dream…

How long have you lived in my heart child    alphabet balm    for sorrow and ache?
You open the door to The Mysteries compel me to enter by way of the dream

The boy shows up in the context of New Orleans, a decade after Katrina. He turns out to be a psychopomp, who initiates the speaker into the mysteries—the magic of language. There are many dream poems in this collection, appropriate to our Jungian context. In “Healing the Wound” (pp. 89-90), Clare Marcus remembers a dream in which a black bird with white beak comes to heal the wound “brought by the surgeon’s knife”:

It is a coot
exploring the unconscious
to retrieve sustenance for life
diving the waters
of the Nile
algae and mollusks morphing
to messages of resurrection

What a succinct description of how dreams feed and nurture the damaged psyche and body with the riches of the collective unconscious.

* * * * *

"Pilgrimage to Shiva" by Janaka Stagnaro

The Way of the Soul

Section 5

I am weary my soul, my wandering has lasted too long… 

 –C.G. Jung

In his essay introducing this section, “How Poems Come and What They Bring” (pp. 97-99), Kent Butzine writes of the Muse, that she is “both a part of oneself and a part of the natural world, a part that is ‘wild’ and cannot be controlled.” He gives us a wonderful quote from Galway Kinnell: “There is no work on the poem that is not work on the poet.”

Virginia Chen’s poem, “Old Song” (p. 102), is a lyrical evocation of the experience of Self. The poem’s first line and refrain—borrowed from a poem by W.S. Merwin—shows the power of poetic influence on our work.

When I was me I remembered
The songs of the stars
Before I was born…

When I was me I remembered
I once was me

It is the work of poetry, as well as the work of Jungian analysis, to find our way back to the one we’ve forgotten we are. And as my dream shows—in the dark by the sea in a gathering of Jungians doing a ritual for our ancestors—we are not just individuals, we are a group with a lineage, finding our way back to our ancestral roots. And though the work of writing poetry is mostly solitary, a writing circle in which we read poets who help shape our work and become our common poetic lineage, a circle in which we share our poems and get feedback on them, can become a vessel for collective creativity even, or maybe especially, in dark times. Can an anthology created by such a group, become a crucible which can carry the spirit and soul of Deep River’s years in the Gough Street Institute library, to our new home in the Mission?

"Ancestors" by Marietjie Henning

The Poetry of Resistance III

The Muse at the Oasis

Chaos has awoken from a long nap

is putting on dancing shoes and heading for the streets…

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

High Anxiety

The Kali Yuga say the Hindus is a dark age lacks holy law
a time of hubris greed war
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

We could use an oasis right about now, as the nightmare news cycle beats us about the head, invades our left temporal lobe, where speech dwells. It is hard to find words for the chaos we’re in. We wander a wasteland, our world torn apart at the seams, as our new president proceeds to rip up the careful advances of the Obama administration: Health Care, the Paris Climate Accord, Prison Justice Reform, wholesome food for school lunches, I could go on and on.

Taken by the Boogey Man

The boogey men are out—white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites. Our rampaging president does a sword dance with Arab potentates while his supporters and his opponents duke it out on–line and in the streets. The phantoms of slavery emerge in Jim Crow–like laws, in police shootings of unarmed black men and in the Prison Industrial Complex. Immigrants who have been living in the U.S. peaceably for years, working hard and paying taxes, are deported for no good reason, their families splintered. Gunmen shoot strangers to make who knows what statement in a land where guns are king. The Russians it seems have hijacked our election. The President’s people may have colluded. There are investigations and more investigations; we are holding our breath for justice, for sanity, though we know all this will take time to untangle. We have a President who doesn’t believe in facts, in science or in climate change, who seems to care only about money, power and towers bearing his name, who keeps us in an anxiety state with relentless tweet attacks on all we hold dear: the earth our Mother, our democracy, our immigrant ancestors, our civil rights and liberties, our moral compass, our soul as a culture. He represents our cultural shadow, the worst, most shallow, materialistic, greedy side of America. How do we gain the consciousness we need to confront this?

March for Science (April 22, 2017, New York City)

Soul Medicine

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
—Emily Dickinson

Let me offer you some medicine in the form of a poem: Lucille Lang Day’s magical “Oasis.” Day comes at the truth slantwise. She gives us a poem that resists our collective chaos by creating a green and fertile place in our consciousness, a space where soul visits and the Muse begins to sing. Listen:

Oasis

At an oasis deep
in my left temporal lobe,
I encounter my soul
just before it leaves the party
at 33,000 feet, where
the dead do as they please,
and time is a circular target.

Where does meaning
lurk in a universe
where mountains are mangy
from fires and logging,
the president brags about
forcing himself on women,
and marksmen take aim?

In the heart of a hummingbird

beating more than one
thousand times each minute
during a rapid dive
in a high–speed chase,
while outside a bright theater
night ripens like an avocado,
and a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

(First published in Talking Writing)

Mangy Mountain 

I imagine the poem’s speaker sitting scrunched up 33,000 feet above the earth, in that dissociated state we call airplane travel. Suddenly something shifts in her left temporal lobe, and she is released from the engine noise and the busy glow of lap top screens into another reality, where she encounters her soul. I know that moment—a sacred moment, a moment of grace—space and time open up, the dead show up, past, present and future converge and the poem begins to sing. The “Oasis” speaker looks down at the mountains, which, like a miserable dog, suffer from mange—a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites. In the case of the mountains, the disease is caused by parasitic capitalistic practices, which abuse the forest and the earth much as the president abuses women. The “Oasis” speaker looks for meaning in this ugliness. With the power of the pen she transforms reality: meaning lives in “the heart of a hummingbird/beating more than one/thousand times each minute…” This is a quintessential Lucille Lang Day move—merging a living symbol and scientific fact. Day holds a doctorate in Science/Mathematical Education; her poetry is full of healing medicine in our science-bashing times.

According to American Indian lore, hummingbird medicine evokes joy. Hummingbirds dart from one bright flower to another, sucking nectar, pollinating, able to fly backwards and forwards or to stay in one place. The poem, like the hummingbird, darts from one strong image to another: oasis, soul, the dead, mangy mountains, our misogynistic president. A single hummingbird makes a “rapid dive,” and everything changes: 

…a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

The poem takes the reader on a journey from a loss of faith and meaning, to the miracle of grace. We find ourselves, with the “Oasis” speaker, in the company of the hummingbird. The moth of consciousness gets in. The gunman decides not to shoot. When the moth enters the poem we are in the presence of a transformational mystery. The gunman is transformed. The world, spared all that evil, that suffering, is transformed. We, the readers, are delivered to an oasis, a healing place with trees and water, where we can imagine that moth of consciousness, like the butterfly whose wings change the weather on the other side of the globe, transforming our world.

The Muse of Orpheus

The Muse of Orpheus

Gesang ist Dasein
Song is Being
—(Sonnet to Orpheus #3 Part I)

The Girl Who Slept the World

To the poet’s own astonishment, work on the Elegies was both preceded and succeeded by bursts of creative inspiration that birthed another, wholly unanticipated magnum opus. This unlooked–for gift of the gods was Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
—(Polikoff, Introduction)

In sad times, when death stalks our kith and our kin, in troubling times, when shocking events overwhelm us—young people are gunned down at a rock concert in Paris, people who serve the developmentally disabled are gunned down at a holiday party in San Bernadino, in frightening times when hatred for the stranger runs rampant and the snarl of fascism stalks the land, there’s no comfort like poetry, especially Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke wrote his sonnet sequence “as a grave–monument for Vera Ouckama Knoop,” a nineteen year–old dancer who died of leukemia. Rilke’s great work is a temple in the woods, a sanctuary from dread and terror, beautifully rendered into English in a new translation by Daniel Joseph Polikoff, (Angelico Press, 2015)

Polikoff has devoted much of his creative life to Rilke. He has given us his monumental “Soul History,” In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke. I reviewed this book for the Jung Journal in 2012. Appreciating the influence of Jungian thought and James Hillman’s revisioning of it on Polikoff’s work, I wrote:

"Polikoff, leaning on Jung, focuses on Rilke’s anima fascinations in life and in poetry, He traces Rilke’s soul development as he separates from Lou Andreas Salome, who has been a maternal figure, and meets the lovely young artists Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff in the bucolic landscape of Worpeswede. Clara would eventually become his wife. Rilke’s understanding of the sacred shifts “away from the name and spirit of God toward the soul of nature experienced in and through the eyes of two enchanting maiden-artists” (208). Following Hillman, Polikoff understands the power of anima as …“the archetype of soul coming into its own by way of creative imagination” (202)… Later in his life the death of a maiden will become the inspiration for his Sonnets to Orpheus.

The sonnets are meditations on death, transience, the life cycle, maidens, flowers, trees, animals, the gods—especially Orpheus and his lyre—the quintessential image of the creative imagination. That maiden who died so young takes up residence in the poet’s ear, and in ours:

And it was almost a girl who emerged from
the consonant pleasure of song and lyre
and shone clear through her shady spring attire
and made her bed within my ear’s deep drum.

And slept in me. And her sleep was everything.
The trees I always marveled at, those
palpable distances, the deeply felt meadows… 

She slept the world.
—(Sonnet #2 Part I)

In her death, in her sleep in the poet’s ear, a wondrous world is created—55 sonnets in two parts. Orpheus is a “conjurer” whose “widespread/nature…knows the roots of the willow/can better bend the branches overhead.” (#6 Part I) Above and below are brought together to create the poet’s lyre, made of the roots and upper branches of the willow— a tree associated with grief. Orpheus’ magic, turns grief and decay into vineyard and grape. We are in the realm of the Eleusinian Mysteries here, where the maiden who has been stolen by the god of the underworld, returns to life as leaf and flower in the spring.

We go round with flowers, vine–leaves, fruit.
They speak a language that’s not only of the year.
Rising through darkness, some bright thing breaks clear
revealing, perhaps, the jealousy at the root 

still held by the dead, who fortify the earth.
(Sonnet #14 Part I)

Polikoff’s Introduction to his translation is a fine distillation of his writing on the origin of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets in his Soul History. He places Rilke, a hundred years ago, in a world much like the one we inhabit today, in which “unrelenting violence rent the poet’s inner and outer world.” (p. 1) As WWI broke out Rilke struggled with the “terrible angel” of the Elegies, expressing a “heart–rending lament of alienation from spiritual being.” (p. 7) After the war, having found a home in Switzerland, Rilke was astonished by the “unlooked–for gift of the…Sonnets,” many of which came in a “dam–busting flood of poetic energy” that lasted three days (p. 2).

We are not spared the horrors of death. In Sonnet #25 Part I Rilke imagines Vera’s end:

But you—so swiftly departed—you whom I
loved like a flower whose name I did not know… 

A dancer first, whose body’s sudden pause
froze… 

Illness was near… 

Seized by dark stutterings, more and more

it gleamed of earth. Until—with horrible pounding—
it stepped through the desolate open door.

Many of these sonnets are prayers. One of my favorites holds the vast opposites of life and death:

Be forever dead in Eurydice—in praise of things
ascend, singing…
be a ringing glass that shatters even as it rings. 

Be—and at the same time know the fathomless fount
of non–being…
—(Sonnet #13 Part II)

This is a prayer that expresses the chasm we face, mourning those we love who have passed through that veil, as we grapple with the mystery of being and non–being, of singing and shattering, of loss and release. I am always impressed by how grief changes consciousness, breaks through the rigidities of rationality and lets the living symbol in. Rilke illuminates this transmutation:

Torn open by us again and again
the god is the place that heals, unseen.
We’re sharp; we want to know all we can,
but he’s spread out and serene.
—(Sonnet #16 Part II)

The Joy of German

Any true poem lives and breathes in the nuanced confluence of sound and sense it incorporates; to try to transplant its beating heart into the strange body of a foreign language is inevitably a risky experiment. And how much more delicate the operation when the original is…a sonnet to Orpheus; a poem addressed to that God who symbolizes the very unity of music and meaning any translation cannot but betray?
—(Polikoff, Introduction)

I heard German before I heard English. My parents were German born Jews. I have little call to speak German these days, but I sometimes dream in German, and wake up with a deep longing for my lost mother–tongue. It makes me sad that in our culture the beauty and power of German is not appreciated. Its deep guttural sounds are often mocked. For me German resonates with chthonic energy. It emerges from an earthy place, a root place. English words that are rooted in the Germanic are much more potent than Latinate words to my ear and heart. In Germany recently, I found the language returning to me like water to a thirsty flower. Rilke’s Sonnet #7, Part II describes this feeling: Here is some of the German.

Blumen… 

wartend des Wassers, das sie noch einmal erhole
aus dem begonnenen Tod…

And Polikoff’s rendering:

Flowers… 

awaiting the water that will once more make you whole
after the death already begun…

The conceit of the poem is that cut flowers are beginning to die before they are brought back to life with water. And so it is with us, when we are severed from our roots, it takes the water of poetry to revive us.

Although my German is child like and unsophisticated, I get much joy from moving back and forth between the original and Polikoff’s superb translations. As a poet who sometimes works in forms, I know how difficult it is to write a good rhyming sonnet. I am amazed at how elegantly Polikoff manages to translate the complex rhymes and rhythms of Rilke’s sonnets into fine English poetry.

If you are feeling the dark of this time of the year, or grieving a loved one, or, in horror and dread as you watch the swirls of hate and intolerance take over much of the collective, I urge you to listen to Orpheus’ song as received by Rilke and translated by Polikoff. It will give you entry to that temple deep in the woods, where the spirit of the depths dwells. Here is the entirety of the wonderful Sonnet #19 Part I, which I read at my father’s funeral a lifetime ago.

Though the world too will transform
quick as cloud–shape or course
all that’s complete is born
home to archaic source.

Over all coming and going
further and freer
your song–breath’s still blowing
god with the lyre.

Suffering we do not comprehend
and love’s as yet unlearned;
what takes us at life’s end

is shrouded in veils.
Only the song over the land
hallows and hails.

#######################

The Sister from Below invites you to hear Naomi Ruth Lowinsky read:

Jan. 3rd Poetry Unbound, 5-8 pm

Art House Gallery

2905 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA

$5-10 donation

(with Lucy Day and Connie Post)

Open Mike

In the dark of the year we welcome the magic of poetry, magic that can take us travelling through landscapes of our past, of our psyches, of the natural world. Three poets guide us, Connie Post, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, and Lucy Lang Day in “The Poetry of Place.” All three are prizewinners, one with a Lyrebird Award and two with the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize.

Place is a powerful Muse who can remember our childhood meadows and woods and all the homes we’ve loved and lost. The Muse of Place inspires poems of yearning, exile, diaspora, and poems about landscape and environmental desecration as well—all the harm we humans have done to our Earth. This Muse loves journeys, the sounds, tastes, smells, and sights of foreign lands and even shows up in dreams, revealing to us mysterious realms. Come to the old church at the end of a dirt road, ancestral homes and a house on stilts, the horned lark singing beside a field of silver hairgrass.

Feb. 8th Poetry Express, 7-9pm

Himalayan Flavors

1585 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 

Naomi will be featured, reading from her prize winning chapbook,

The Little House On Stilts Remembers 

Open Mike

The Language Muse

[Image from Black Mountain Bulletin Summer 1944]

With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest.

C.G. Jung The Red Book

I have been musing about language ever since I can remember. As a child I wandered between my parents native German, their adopted Dutch -used for secrets- the Italian I learned young, when we lived in Rome and Florence, and English. In my last posting I wrote about my father’s angry curse, “Potfadorry, which was frightening, magical -of mysterious origin. I thought it was a German expression. My friend Carly, who lives in South Africa but is Dutch, informs me that it’s a Dutch word spelled "Potverdorie” and meaning damn you --but with some humor.

The swirl of languages was fascinating and confusing. I remember being 5, getting off the ocean liner that had carried my family from Italy to New York Harbor. My mother’s cousin Annemie was there to greet us. “Oh” she said to me “the kiddies will be so glad to see you.” Kiddies? I thought, does she have kittens? No kittens. Just cousins Callie and Pampy. I felt dumb, and disappointed.

I muse about expressions as they dance in and out of fashion. I was amused to discover that the long gone rhyme besotted saying of my youth “See you later alligator” has a contemporary cousin. Our teenage grandson Justin texted: “Okey Dokey artichokey.” I love it!

Some phases seem to me to express the poetic soul of the collective. A favorite of mine, one that has emerged in recent years, is “back in the day.” It sets a tone, enchants, invites us into a shimmering mythic time when things were different and we were young. It’s a bit like “Once upon a time” because it opens the way to a story. Another favorite of mine is “back of the beyond,” which holds an alliterative tension between back and beyond. Back is where we keep the trash cans, where the backdoor man makes his appearance, the part of our bodies that we can’t see, the part that we place on the toilet seat. Beyond, in contrast, is open and shining, the mystery of the after life, an evocation of the unknown and unfathomable. The back of beyond is both disgusting and marvelous.

These expressions resonate with cultural and personal associations. They feel good on my tongue and in my heart. They sing with the joy of speech.

But sometimes an expression comes along that bothers me a lot. It sets my teeth on edge. It irritates me and puts me in a foul humor. “Gone South," as in “the market has gone south” is one of these. It flattens and negates. It conveys a quantitative image of a graph with sharp angles pointing downwards. That’s South. That’s bad. As opposed to sharp angles pointing upwards. These are North. That’s good.

I find this offensive. South to me is warm and sexy. South is full of music, hot nights, vivid flowers. I spent my youngest years in the American South -North Carolina. Now we all know that there was plenty of bad stuff happening in the South in the forties, when I was a baby and toddler. But I was a lucky child. My father’s first teaching job in this country was at Black Mountain College. It was a radical school -desegregated, with my parents help, in 1945. It was the fountain of much energy in the arts and poetry. When I visited the site of the long gone college some years ago I realized that I had been blessed by the very landscape of that place. My world was magical. The log cabin we lived in was called “Black Dwarf.” The school was situated at the shore of Lake Eden. It was Paradise.

Here is my grandmother’s painting of Lake Eden, and a couple of poems about my childhood in the South.

Painting of Lake Eden by Emma Hoffman

MY EDEN
(Black Mountain College, 1943-47)

Garden of the sun dappled baby I was
and the tow headed toddler, I can see me now
on the wooded path, beloved of the morning

and the night, drunk on mother’s milk
and daddy’s lullabies, cradled in the rapture
of the mountains, captivated by the fiery flash

of a Cardinal in flight, seer of the light
in willows, and in the waters of Lake Eden
enchanted by the song of the Carolina Wren

transported into sleep on wings of Bach and Schubert
enfolded as I was in this Black Mountain tribe
of music makers, paint stirrers, pot throwers, leapers in the air

Outside the gates—news of the war
Smoke rose, bombs fell
Inside the gates—faculty fights

for or against, communism, twelve tone music, short shorts
on young women. In the basement of the cottage named
Black Dwarf, a Moccasin frightened my mother. But I

lucky baby, took my first steps
between your apple and your wild
rhododendron, greedy for the names of your every living thing

Early I lost you. Lately I’ve found you
again. Sweet spot, source
of the singing in my heart, and my communion
with the mountains


BLACK DWARF

Who came up with so fairy tale a name for you?
Once you housed my greenhorn parents
the upstairs poet, his toy trains, the library lady, and me

Did I roll down your sunny lawns? Did I learn about stairs
on your front porch, or up the long flight
to see the trains run? Was there snow

in the winter? Did your windows let in summer’s
full foliage? Do you remember my first step, first word, first mashed
banana? Did you protect me in my sleep? Did you practice magic

in the way of the little people? Did you teach the toddler I was
to cast the circle, call the directions? Are my dreams inscribed
in your walls? Did creatures from other realms fly about

your ceilings? Are you haunted by my parents early love—
my father’s Well Tempered Klavier; my mother’s Mozart Divertimenti
by Roland Hayes singing, in your living room, that Old Pharoah

should let our people go?

You, little house with the enchanted name
toadstool under which my whole world hatched…


This is how my grandmother saw me, when I was a toddler.

Painting of Naomi, Age 2 by Emma Hoffman

Italy is also South, also magical, also a beloved childhood landscape. When I’ve traveled there as an adult, I’ve always felt profoundly at home, even though, sadly, I have lost my Italian. Some part of me knows the music of that language in my soul and in my hands. When my grandmother’s family fled Germany in 1932, after Hitler’s rise, they went to Italy, to Capris, for a brief holiday, to recover after so much fear and grief, before they moved on to the Netherlands. My grandmother’s painting of that Southern landscape hangs in my living room.

Painting of Capri by Emma Hoffman

Nowadays my favorite South is Mexico. Dan and I recover from the stresses and strains of our lives by going South to Mexico in the winter. We go to an enchanting small town, San Pancho -north of Puerto Vallarta and stay in a lovely B & B- Casa Obelisco, whose owners have become our dear friends over the years. It always soothes our souls to be there, reconnects us to our deeper lives.

Go South. I recommend it. Ignore the media hype about Mexico. There are no drug wars in San Pancho. It’s safer than North Oakland. Ignore the graphs about the endless ups and downs of markets; ignore the news of wars and disasters. Gaze at the bougainvillea and the hibiscus. Take a long walk down the beach, watch the pelicans grazing the waves with their wings. Fill your tired eyes with ocean, sky and palm trees. Have a margarita at sunset. Decide which of many fine local restaurants you’ll visit tonight.

Write a poem.

Gone South

One who has too many things to do
Has gone South, by the sea. She
Watches the curl of a wave. It crashes
Into a thousand thousand drops -all reflecting
The one
Sun

She
Who is too many things
To too many people
Returns
To her senses

Ocean in her ears, purple
Bougainvillea, yellow hibiscus, green palms
In her eyes, breeze
In her face, bringing news
To her nose
Of fish, wet sand, sea salt
To her tongue

Seagull cries. Someone
Opens the gate, calls out
“Hola!”

Later, she and her Dan
Will sit on the roof
Caught in that moment
Before sun falls
Into sea
Before moody moon
Takes over
Seven pelicans float past

Hush!
Let this moment linger
Let the sun engrave
Its dying lavender magenta
Into the belly of the clouds

Let the too many things
Dissolve into
The One

Sunset, San Pancho, Nayarit, Mexico. Photo by Dan Safran

The Muse of Unexpected Memories

The Story Behind the Poem

One of Poetry’s many gifts is the sudden associative leap that opens the door to a forgotten room in your soul, one full of meaning and memory. I had not expected Adlai Stevenson to show up in my poem. There he was, my schoolgirl crush. You’ve lived a good long time if you remember Adlai Stevenson. He ran for president in 1952 and 1956. Could a man with a bald spot and a hole in his shoe run for President today?

What did he mean to me, age 9, age 13? When I saw his face, when I heard his voice, something settled down in my body. I felt safe. As the American born child of Jewish refugees from Hitler, feeling safe was not familiar. But Adlai Stevenson felt like kin. He stood for an America in which I could feel at home. Stevenson was my good American father -urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal. Unlike my own father, who was also urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal, I never heard Stevenson fly into a German rage because I’d played a wrong note on the piano. What I heard him say was:

There are men among us who use ‘patriotism’ as a club for attacking other Americans. What can we say for the self-styled patriot who thinks that a Negro, a Jew, a Catholic, or a Japanese-American is less American than he? That he betrays the deepest article of our faith, the belief in individual liberty and equality which has always been the heart and soul of the American idea.

(He said this in 1952, addressing the American Legion in Madison Square Garden.) All we have to do to make that statement current is add “Muslim” and “immigrant” to the list of groups that suffer prejudice.

Stevenson was ridiculed in his time for his indecisive aristocratic air. (Sound familiar, Barack?) He was labeled an egghead. Young as I was, I knew I was an egghead, that my family and friends were eggheads, that I would spend my life among eggheads. I loved it when Stevenson said: "Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks." Spoken like a poet! No wonder I adored him.

A supporter told him that he was sure to get the vote of “every thinking” person in the U.S., to which Stevenson replied, “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.”

Stevenson was a man of moral courage and wisdom. In accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1952 he said:

“Our troubles are ahead of us. Some will call us appeasers; others will say we are the War Party. Some will say we are reactionary; others will say we stand for socialism. There will be...the inevitable cries of ‘Throw the rascals out,’ ‘It’s time for a change,’ and so on and so on.”

Obama could say those very words today.

So much has changed and so much remains the same. The kinship I felt as a girl, for Adlai Stevenson, was matched by no one until Barack Obama arrived on the national stage: urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal, though some would argue with that last adjective. Something settles down in my body when I hear our President speak. His intelligence, his vision, his ability to contain great complexity, makes him kin. I hope he is aware of Adlai Stevenson as an ancestor.

Of course, Stevenson lost two elections. He did not face the impossible task of transforming his vision into political reality. He wasn’t given the opportunity to disappoint and disillusion us. He was not tested as Barack Obama is being tested today. And the safety I felt in Stevenson’s aura did not last. The hateful vitriol of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it’s vicious attack on the livelihoods of eggheads, artists, intellectuals, people who were my kin, and the ugliness of those cross-burning racist murderers, the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, took over center stage in the country, and in my haunted heart. And today there is a new brand of vitriol, hatred, nastiness in our politics.

But Barack, difficult as this time is for you, for all of us who admire and support you, I think these words from Stevenson’s 1952 acceptance speech are good advice from your remarkable forerunner:

Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains...that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man -war, poverty and tyranny- and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each....

The people are wise, wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s Party -not the labor Party, not the farmer’s Party, not the employer’s Party-it is the Party...of everyone.

And Barack, there is just one more quote I want you to hold in your heart, as you go around the country talking sense to the American people. Stevenson spoke of our fragile planet in a speech before the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, Switzerland in 1965, the year of his death. He said:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserve of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.

The poem that opened the door to Adlai Stevenson’s place in my heart is called “When I’m Gone.” Like so many of my poems it is an elegy. I am happy it has landed in a fine on line publication, Emprise Review, in which Tracy Youngblom has written an elegant essay on elegy. Any poet who aligns her work with that of Rilke and Celan, as she does, is kin to me. I hope you’ll read the essay and check out the poems in Emprise 21.