Edward Harkness: The Law of the Unforeseen

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Our reading at Elliott Bay Books is only one week away! Here’s a poem from Ed’s newest book. I’ve discovered that you can find him all over the web, including Verse Daily and Terrain.

 

One of the things (or two) that I love about Ed’s poems is their range. He strikes me as a thoroughly Pacific Northwest poet, and yet he weaves in  his international rovings, musings about historical and fictional characters, and observations of natural phenomenon from all over the globe, and he does so in such a way that I feel as though I am there, too.

Here is a short poem that gives me that sense of a wholly unfamiliar place (to me), now made knowable.

 

Ed Harkness

 

ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

 

from The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2018)

Where You’ll Find Me

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On Friday, August 16, at 7 p.m.,
I will be reading from Body My House at Elliott Bay Book Company.
I’m thrilled (of course) and very very grateful to poet Ed Harkness and Elliott Bay Books for inviting me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely
if about 50 of my nearest and dearest friends could join us?

(Yes, it would!)

Bethany

 

Writing the Labyrinth

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Some experiences seem beyond words. That’s how I’m feeling about my week in Chartres. And yes, I know it was a writing workshop, and that I should be perfectly at home, writing about it. But.

So I went to Chartres for a writing workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. I wasn’t expecting a  spiritual workshop focused on Chartres Cathedral and its nearly 1000 year old labyrinth (and its 2000 year history, pre-current cathedral). Even had I known that the labyrinth would be a central aspect of our week, I don’t think I could have fathomed how profoundly meaningful this location was going to become for me.

I’ve walked labyrinths before, and I have always found meaning in them. At a Courage to Teach retreat years back (my youngest daughter wasn’t yet in school, so I know it was at least 15 years ago), I encountered a lavender labyrinth and one of the reasons I remember the event is because I wrote a poem about a conversation I had with a friend while standing in that labyrinth. (Did we “walk it”? Did we know that was a thing?)

Thanks to my dear friend Janet, I attended an Episcopal Women’s retreat in 2015 and again (I think) in 2016, at St. Andrew’s House on Hood Canal, and walked their labyrinth. At the first retreat I learned about the history of labyrinths, even about Chartres, though I had still barely scratched the surface. At St. Andrew’s, the labyrinth is outdoors, in a wooded area, and it’s lined by white rocks and shells. I wrote about this labyrinth, too. (Not a successful poem, but one I put through numerous drafts.)

When my mom was in care, I sometimes stopped at a nearby church, St. Hugh’s,and walked their labyrinth. It was always comforting and peaceful. In Ireland I walked a number of stone circles, and at least one actual labyrinth, on my mom’s 85th birthday, as it happens (and, yes, tried to write about it).

This past April during Holy Week my church put down a canvas labyrinth in the sanctuary (apparently, they had done this before, without my clocking it), and I signed up to facilitate a 2-hour slot, and I walked it, of course.

So I am not unfamiliar with the labyrinth structure and spell and movement.

You can find labyrinths all over the world, by the way, by searching this link: https://labyrinthlocator.com/home.

If the other labyrinths were difficult to get into words, the labyrinth at Chartres is proving impossible.

But here I am, typing away and…trying.

I think the best experiences in our lives are exactly like this. I’ve never been able to do a great job, for instance, in writing about my daughters’ births, and I know I have much to do before I’m finished writing about the deaths of my parents. Perhaps some people can be glib about world hunger and climate change and homelessness and the current state of American politics…but I find them daunting. Does that mean I shouldn’t write about them, that I have nothing to say? Or that what I have to say doesn’t fall out of my pen, polished and perfect?

That a subject calls us to write about it and yet proves difficult to capture, is not a reason for us to avoid it. If anything, that’s how you know that you must keep approaching, keep circling, keep trying to put the words down.

Maybe it isn’t a blogpost. Maybe it’s a 30-page essay about tears and healing. Maybe it’s a book.

If you feel called to write it, no matter your conflicting feelings, then I want to encourage you. I am willing to bet that there’s someone out there who needs to hear it.

Me, for instance.

 

 

 

Wait, what just happened?

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Astonished. That was the word I chose during our writing workshop in Chartres, to describe my journey — to France (how did I get so lucky?); through the 12th century labyrinth in the cathedral (frankly unexpected); and in my life generally. It’s a word that nicely describes my second week in France, too. Paris was astonishing and I was astonished. Think stunned. Think stoned. That was me.

I’m now home (3 days since — but when will I remember how to sleep at night and be awake during the day?) and I’m still feeling pretty astonished.

After months of anticipating my trip to Chartres and Paris, after years of thinking that someday I would go to France and see what all the fuss is about…it’s over. I’m still feeling jet-lagged (the nine-hour time difference has my days and nights mixed up), and a bit in denial that I’m really really back home. I’m still feeling the wave of excitement that came with the trip, and simultaneously feeling let-down. (Did I say I’ve not figured out how to sleep?)

No wonder it’s so hard to process.

Winged Victory, The Louvre

People ask me what the highlights were and — if I skip over Chartres (which was like a long tidal wave of highlights — and go straight to Paris, I get stuck again.

We. Did. So. Much.

We visited Père Lachaise Cemetery and saw the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Heloise and Abelard.

We had an amazing 2 hour personal tour of the city (enhanced by a moon-lighting rock-musician tour guide ).

We went to the Musee de L’Orangerie and sat in the oval rooms Monet designed to showcase his waterlilies canvases.

We couldn’t go inside Notre Dame, of course, though we visited Sacre Coeur and Saint Pierre’s at Montmartre (near our apartment), and stood in line to see (more) stained glass windows at Saint Chapelle, plus learned about the arduous and scientific process by which the windows are cleaned and restored.

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry (ca. 1500) at The Cluny

We went to the Rodin Museum, the Cluny, the Louvre (of course), and Musee D’Orsay.

How exactly do I even begin to touch on the highlights amid the art treasures I saw, when there were so many? Although I took several memorable Art History courses as an undergraduate, seeing the buildings, paintings, and sculptures in person was — just as my professors often said — mind-blowing.

Every day we rode the Paris Metro, and that, too, has to be experienced first-hand in order to be understood (so many trains! so many people!). I kept thinking of Ezra Pound’s couplet, “In a Station of the Metro” —

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:  Petals on a wet, black bough.

So many faces, such a press of bodies and odors and colors and sound.

What else? Of course we went to Shakespeare & Co., we ate a lot of terrific food, and we walked miles and miles (4-5 miles per day). We took naps (much needed, as our sleep was all cockeyed while there, too).

And, being writers, we wrote.

Oh, and we went to #spokenwordparis at Au Chat Noir and READ OUR POEMS on the open mike (it’s a gathering of mostly anglo-philes, but I still can’t believe we had the nerve to do this).

What else can I say? (So much.) Paris was not what I expected. (What did I expect?) It became clear to me by the end of the week that I could go back every year and discover another Paris. I’m grateful to my friend Francine for inviting me to join her (and who can parlez-vous Francais way better than I — though I did  figure out how to order coffee).

I really wanted to let you know how the trip went, so forgive me for giving it all in a rush and with so little detail. There is a lot more I could share.

But all I really want right now is to sleep for about 10 hours straight. Then maybe I’ll have the presence of mind to begin unraveling all the pages and pages I scribbled while on this astonishing trip.