{"id":85,"date":"2008-02-09T16:35:10","date_gmt":"2008-02-09T16:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2008\/02\/poetry-and-meditation.html"},"modified":"2008-02-09T16:35:10","modified_gmt":"2008-02-09T16:35:10","slug":"poetry-and-meditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/02\/poetry-and-meditation.html","title":{"rendered":"Poetry and Meditation"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/font>\u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n

“I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon me and know it is the Darkness of God.”<\/font><\/p>\n

-T. S. Eliot<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/font>\u00a0<\/font>\u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n

There are many poets who are or were also meditators.\u00a0 <\/span>Ginsberg.\u00a0 <\/span>Stanley Kunitz.\u00a0 <\/span>Anne Waldman.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel very connected to this lineage, of pens and cushions, silence and speech.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

I attended my first 10 day silent meditation retreat a few years ago, after a friend of mine attended one person and came back another.\u00a0 <\/span>A better one, I thought, and I, too, found myself on a Greyhound headed\u00a0 <\/span>to an unknown patch of land in Massachusetts.\u00a0 <\/span>At the registration desk, I checked in my cell phone, my magazines, and my (!) notebook.\u00a0 <\/span>But I kept my pen, an ever-extension of my arm, stashed quietly in my bag.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

I knew I wasn’t supposed to write, just as I wasn’t supposed to talk or listen to the radio or call home.\u00a0 <\/span>I was nervous about many of these things, but mostly about not writing.\u00a0 <\/span>Here I was in a whole new experience, without my normal routine of pen scratching on paper to contemplate, to “figure\u00a0things out?”<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

On the first night I found myself in the bathroom scrawling on thick brown papertowel.\u00a0 <\/span>“Day 1.”\u00a0 <\/span>I wrote the details of my day and my feelings about them, a junkie hiding her habit.\u00a0 <\/span>The guilt was palpable at the base of my tongue, my heart raced with it.\u00a0 <\/span>But I had to write!\u00a0 <\/span>I had to interpret, catagorize, fantisize, harmonize my day with myself.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

Crawling back to bed, my mind rocking with words stirred up with a Bic, I made a decision.\u00a0 <\/span>No more writing for the rest of the retreat.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u00a0felt\u00a0 this would get in the way of my experiencing the retreat, that while writing brought me closer to some experiences, it did so by first distancing me, and this was something\u00a0 <\/span>had to dive into without immediately deconstructing….letting thoughts come and go, not stick to paperfiber.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

As the days went on, I emersed myself in experience, not the contemplation of experience.\u00a0 This was different for me.\u00a0 I felt the language beneath, or behind?, words, the web that carries it through.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

On the bus ride home, I marvelled at the trees I’d ignored on my way there, my nose in a book.\u00a0 <\/span>I reached into my reclaimed bag to find my notebook.\u00a0 <\/span>I pulled out my pen to finally write.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

And for the first time, I felt that words weren’t enough.\u00a0 <\/span>After sitting in silence for 10 days, I just couldn’t find the words to express what I’d experienced there.\u00a0 This both fascinated me, and scared me.\u00a0 <\/span>I could find shadow-words, words that would point the way.\u00a0 But the words no longer felt like stable anchors to hold onto.\u00a0 <\/span>I understood more fully the difference between the word “tree” and the tree itself.\u00a0 <\/span>I realized I’d always been writing shadow-words, that there was so much I couldn’t “figure out.”<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

In re-entering NY, I became more fully involved with my poetry, and in a few weeks found myself sharing a bench at a Korean restaurant with Anne Waldman and a crew from the Bowery Poetry Club.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

“I just returned from a retreat,” I told her. \u00a0<\/span>Her eyes lit up, and we talked of the words and non-words.\u00a0 I felt thankful for the practices of meditation and poetry, which, to me, is the form of writing that comes closest to pointing to the gaps between words and the truths we sometimes feel but are too human to express.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/font>~~~~~~~<\/font>\u00a0<\/p>\n

this day<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

what is the start<\/font><\/p>\n

of this heart?<\/font><\/p>\n

this engine running<\/font><\/p>\n

slowly dying?<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

the body is a thing that needs<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

sweet cell<\/font><\/p>\n

sweet weight<\/font><\/p>\n

kissing singing<\/font><\/p>\n

flower stem<\/font><\/p>\n

roots <\/font><\/p>\n

soil<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

if all beings were bodiless we would escape for a minute<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

air everywhere<\/font><\/p>\n

silent bubbles<\/font><\/p>\n

pouch of sudden creatures<\/font><\/p>\n

trembling parades flying<\/font><\/p>\n

reverberating like jelly fish<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

the halo over my head is a portrait<\/font><\/p>\n

that dances and twists<\/font><\/p>\n

like a tree moving in and out of focus<\/font><\/p>\n

a wild party full of lost moods<\/font><\/p>\n

a diamond on your wrist<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

this juice<\/font><\/p>\n

year after year<\/font><\/p>\n

orange inexhaustable<\/font><\/p>\n

this year a number<\/font><\/p>\n

i cannot hide<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0 “I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon me and know it is the Darkness of God.” -T. S. Eliot \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are many poets who are or were also meditators.\u00a0 Ginsberg.\u00a0 Stanley Kunitz.\u00a0 Anne Waldman.\u00a0 I feel very connected to this lineage, of pens and cushions, silence and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":336,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"\nPoetry and Meditation - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/02\/poetry-and-meditation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poetry and Meditation - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u00a0\u00a0 “I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon me and know it is the Darkness of God.” -T. 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Eliot \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are many poets who are or were also meditators.\u00a0 Ginsberg.\u00a0 Stanley Kunitz.\u00a0 Anne Waldman.\u00a0 I feel very connected to this lineage, of pens and cushions, silence and…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/02\/poetry-and-meditation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-02-09T16:35:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"streetlegalplay\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Poetry and Meditation - One City","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/02\/poetry-and-meditation.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Poetry and Meditation - One City","og_description":"\u00a0\u00a0 “I said to my soul be still and let the darkness come upon me and know it is the Darkness of God.” -T. 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