In 2009 I made my first  trip to the Fine Arts Work Center and  attended a workshop led by Vijay Seshadri, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry this month.  Below is the last poem in his book by the same name; the poem is one of my favorites, encapsulating the wit, wisdom, intelligence, and warmth that distinguish his poetry.  I feel very fortunate to have had the privilege of working with Vijay.
 
The Long Meadow

Near the end of one of the old poems, the son of righteousness,
the source of virtue and civility,
on whose back the kingdom is carried
as on the back of the tortoise the earth is carried,
passes into the next world.
The wood is dark. The wood is dark,
and on the other side of the wood the sea is shallow, warm, endless.
In and around it, there is no threat of life --
so little is the atmosphere charged with possibility that
he might as well be wading through a flooded basement.
He wades for what seems like forever,
and never stops to rest in the shade of the metal raintrees
springing out of the water at fixed intervals.
Time, though endless, is also short,
so he wades on, until he walks out of the sea and into the mountains,
where he burns on the windward slopes and freezes in the valleys.
After unendurable struggles,
he finally arrives at the celestial realm.
The god waits there for him. The god invites him to enter.
But looking through the glowing portal,
he sees on that happy plain not those he thinks wait eagerly for him--
his beloved, his brothers, his companions in war and exile,
all long since dead and gone--
but, sitting pretty and enjoying the gorgeous sunset,
his cousin and bitter enemy, the cause of that war, that exile,
whose arrogance and vicious indolence
plunged the world into grief.
The god informs him that, yes, those he loved have been carried down
the river of fire. Their thirst for justice
offended the cosmic powers, who are jealous of justice.
In their place in the celestial realm, called Alaukika in the ancient texts,
the breaker of faith is now glorified.
He, at least, acted in keeping with his nature.
Who has not felt a little of the despair the son of righteousness now feels,
staring wildly around him?
The god watches, not without compassion and a certain wonder.
This is the final illusion,
the one to which all the others lead.
He has to pierce through it himself, without divine assistance.
He will take a long time about it,
with only his dog to keep him company,
the mongrel dog, celebrated down the millennia,
who has waded with him,
shivered and burned with him,
and never abandoned him to his loneliness.
That dog bears a slight resemblance to my dog,
a skinny, restless, needy, overprotective mutt,
who was rescued from a crack house by Suzanne.
On weekends, and when I can shake free during the week,
I take her to the Long Meadow, in Prospect Park, where dogs
are allowed off the leash in the early morning.
She’s gray-muzzled and old now, but you can’t tell that by the way she runs.

© 2004, Vijay Seshadri
From: The Long Meadow
Publisher: Graywolf Press, Minnesota, 2004
ISBN: 1555974007

 
 
 

Today I visited first and second grade classes at Marion Cross School here in Norwich.  I brought with me a box of tricks I had kept from a workshop with Christopher Bursk at the Frost Place. Every day he put a small toy on the table for each of us and asked us to think about how and why the object could help us write poems.
Think of them as inspirations for writing poems, he said.
So I did.

Gifts at a Poetry Workshop

            for Christopher Bursk

Here’s what he gave us:
a small plastic ball,
a rubber frog,
a fairy with purple wings
a bubble bottle and blower,
an alphabet block
a small spatula
a miniature pirate.

1. The plastic ball

It never would stop rolling
had a mind of its own,
insisted on getting under
bureaus and bookshelves,
where it found the dust
of the ages.  Rolled its way
up mountains and across
oceans, went wherever
it wanted to go. Outdid the Rolling
Stones in singing, the steam roller
in making roads, curled hair
better than any beauty parlor,
beat the Lilac Breasted Roller,
in catching lizards, scorpions,
and snails, gave skates a speed
they’d never had before,
inspired fitness devices
that built balance, muscle,
better bodies, now and then
became the subject of a poem.

2. The Rubber Frog

Older than our species,
frogs know how to adapt
to the world they’re in,
can live both in and out
of water, fatten well
on what they eat, are
great jumpers, swimmers,
climbers, reproduce in
large numbers, have become
the subject of myth and legend,
even starred on Sesame Street.
Food source for humans
and other predators, frogs
like poets, are flexible,
jumping from place to place,
going where they will.

3. The Fairy with Purple Wings

Even if fairy tales aren’t your thing
it’s good to have a fairy on your desk
who’ll wave her magic wand, transform
your writing into ethereal wonderment,
fly with you to never-never land,
take you deep into the forests
of your mind.

4.Bubble wand and bottle

Useful to blow away
the cobwebs of the brain,

capture thought within
those translucent orbs,
let them fly up and out
onto your page before they
pop and are gone.

5. Alphabet Block

Green V, red I, Z outlined
in black, a grasshopper,
a TV, and a six or nine,
where the block falls. 

A green
grasshopper jumped
into an old T.V, hopped
six times across the screen,
took nine long leaps
into the land of Z,
dove into its reflectingpool,
left a shimmering
I on the surface to show
who it was and where
it had gone.

6.  Small spatula

Cooking utensil too big
for the fairy, too small
for human use, but good
for scraping out those
gooey words that clog
our poems and make
them stick.

7. The Pirate

His smile belies his dark profession.
Adept at finding and taking
treasures, he’s the key to it all;
without the derring-do to snare
and capture what you will, you’ll
always lack the nerve to seize
whatever you can find
and make it new and rich,
hidden chest on a desert island,
words golden and bejeweled.

what  Christopher Bursk gave us most of all in each of his classes:

windows to imagination.

I did not read my poem to the first and second graders, but they all loved the little objects I had brought and understood right away what the pieces could mean in terms of writing poems (without my ever using the word metaphor).

Here are the poems I provided as examples.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

By Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

Rabbit  by Mary Ann Hoberman

A rabbit

         Bit

A little bit

An itty-bitty

         Little bit of beet

Then bit

         By bit         
          
        He bit


Because he liked the taste of it

Every Tree   by Kobayashi Issa

Every tree
With its calling card...
Spring buds.

We talked about how these poems used language, form, repetition, how a poem could be as short as a haiku and as long as an epic. The topic the children wanted to write about was spring.  It is still quite cold in Vermont, rivers and lakes are just beginning to melt;  there are huge snow mounds everywhere.       

We made a list of signs of spring that they could hear, see, feel, taste, or smell, and wrote about them. They made great observations. A few produced something quite poetic; everyone wrote something.  They may work further on their poems, perhaps producing a poem written collectively. 

Perhaps a poet or two may have found a lifelong calling today.