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Where Joy Resides
(For Today’s Graduates)by Sue Walker delivered during Dr. Walker's
2004 University of South Alabama
commencement address
Think Joy, each day’s joy-filled celebration,
the joy of song, the bell of joy ringing,
the lithe fingers and palm of joy,
the round world of joy on its axis turning.
Think of language as joy, the way
you bring words into being, the way
they gather on your tongue and are breath.
JOY JOY JOY JOY JOY oi oi oi oi oi,
reverberations sounding its sometimes inscrutable presence
in your life, sounding the iambic beat of your heart.
Joy is a lesson in living, an achievement, a college degree.
It is Frederich Schiller’s ethics and philosophy,
his real and tangible "Ode to Joy,"
when he wrote:
Joy all creatures drink
At nature’s bosom.
All good and all evil ones
Follow her rose-petaled path,
the path of Joy, that followed by Beethoven
when he set Schiller’s words to music,
his fingers pressing ivory piano keys,
releasing sounds his deaf ears
would never hear, but affirming
the possibility of being, as Schiller said,
a friend’s friend,
"across the firmament’s splendid design."
Joy is a poetic commencing;
it is an alphabet,
a synthesis of all the letters that become words
that are shaped into meaning.
***
Ask me if what you say is your life
Bodied forth in science and art,
Caritas, let it be laughter,
Dance and dream, each day of dawning,
Education, eumoirousness, the happy result of being good,
Friendship, forgiveness,
Grace erasing greed, espousing
Hope, the heart’s eternal lesson
Inviolable, invincible,
Just, jubilant, the word
Kindness, a lozenge sweet on your tongue.
Language is your obligation to use words well.
Make them into day miracles addressing
Need. Never forget that words wound, so
Open your mind and open your heart.
Praise when you can.
Question always if what you say may
Right wrongs. I am word-working my way from A to Z
Sharing the language, the letters, the symphony,
Tútta la fórza, the whole power as loud as possible celebrating
USA, our country, the University of South Alabama, our
Voices speaking memory, loving this place even as you leave it.
Will you go forth, return, giving the gift of yourself,
Xenium, (Xenium,) a gift ancient Greeks gave to strangers:
Your accomplishments, your graduation from USA,
Zest and zeal, exquisite Joy.
That’s it: Joy from A to Z
Write your Ode to Joy,
the poem that is your life.
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In Want of Spring
(A Sestina)by Sue Walker
Spring brightens her eyes, sharpens her ears, as blackberry
vines bloom, ripe with berries, and the rattlesnake
awakens to hear a veritable festival of birds
in parliament. Everything fulfills the destiny
of Being before the moment of full flower
and the long spin-down and fade of sunset.
Spring struggles against the display of sunset
as it celebrates the vigorous blaze of blackberry
ripening. Young girls coming to flower
know that the skin-shedding rattlesnake
thrusts up its head as if destiny
is rejuvenation in complicity with birds,
eagle and egret, woodcock and teal, all birds
gathering to affirm the last gasp of sunset,
the rays earth-bound because destiny
should not be as short-lived as a blackberry
waiting to be picked, while the rattlesnake
waiting, too, slithers under the wild flower.
Girl, lassie, nymph, darling, maiden-flower
scented with spring's perfume sing like birds,
oblivious to the unraveling rattlesnake,
to the fading fall of day, the rusty sunset,
savoring instead the ripe flavor of blackberry
wine. A woman wholly comes into her destiny,
walks as flesh into a world whose destiny
is the bloom upon the lily, the rose, ever flower
alive with spring in its veins. The blackberry
mellow on its vine, the convocation of birds
making melody, all take the sunset
in stride. The slack skin of the rattlesnake
fashions sleek slippers, rattlesnake
purse to match. A girl taking destiny
as dance is nature, at noon or sunset,
and resplendent like the sun. She wears a flower
in her hair, a primrose, and urges birds
to stay awake in the blackberry
night when the blackest blackberry, rattlesnake,
and birds of all feather deny a destiny
that fades the flower and augurs sunset.
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Loose On The Tongues Of Trees:
A Lesson In Survivalby Sue Walker
Standing tall on the edge of tomorrow,
roundly facing it, the same as yesterday,
spring stirs in the lullaby of limbs,
each reaching toward music the sky knows
in bursts of blue, considerations of grey,
the joisting of comely clouds.
Recitations of magnolia,
scribed ivory petals of perfume
are ready at hand,
are invitations to take this magic
as bees do in scent-searching pleasures.
Words on the tongues of trees
are etched in its rings
as old as the world is
in its rightness. We learn
our place standing
in breathless brooks,
in forest glens,
in swamps and moonlit meadows,
in fields of plenty.
We learn roundness,
even in our lumbering,
how the future and the past
are really the same
as we stand resilient to storms,
the rootedness
of our lives teaching us
that being bent
is not the same
as being broken.
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Beneath The Appearance of Green:
Van Gogh, Saint Remy, and Beyond by Sue Walker
Doctors pronounce
a clean bill of health,
the way a fold of cloth
hides what was spilled upon it,
visible and real as grease.
Beneath crazed eyes,
rust claws the green edge of life'
terror plaints roads addled as waves.
In Saint Remy where brown potatoes
look with hard blind eyes
at a sky of brooding crows,
Vincent fingers his absent ear
and waits the red explosion
of a gun. |
Visitationby Betty Powell
Your absence
visits too often,
an elongated vowel
clothed in camellia
that enters without knocking.
It fingers me awake
on apricot mornings with
an approximation of melody,
pianissimo phrases,
poorly constructed.
It combs rosemary
through its hair,
fastens it with cinnabar,
paints its face with coral,
breathes past imperfect verbs.
It taunts, feints an exit,
circumnavigates myth,
pretends to reach
beneath my gown,
whispers an obscenity.
It has the persistence,
the necessary ache of
incisors gone sour,
the neglected fracture,
the reluctant benediction.
Throughout these
orchid evenings
I stroke the thighs
of your absence
in your absence.
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Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others, (Oxford University Press, 2003), in teaching the villanelle, wrote the following:
I've Not Done This Before:
A First Try At A Villanelleby Pat Schneider
I've not done this before, although I see
I might have come as close as breath to air.
The first time is the hardest. Let it be
mindful of the distance run; let me
stand without apparent question where
I've not done this before, although I see
a multitude of options cleverly
disguised as intersession or as prayer.
The first time is the hardest. Let me be
forgiven. This is not a guilty plea
nor asking for permission. Who would care?
I've not done this before, although I see
how merciful consistency can be.
There isn't any way one can prepare.
The first time is the hardest. Let me be
original or dead. It seems to me
the circle that I am won't fit the square.
I've not done this before although I see
the first time is the hardest. Let me be. |
The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines that consists of 5 triplets and a concluding quatrain. Line 1 subsequently becomes lines 6, 12, and 18. Line 3 becomes lines 9, 15, and 19. An easy way to construct the villanelle is to write down the pages the numbers 1 through 19. Remember that there are 5 three-line stanzas and a final four line stanza. First, write your initial three lines. After this, write lines 1 and 3 in the appropriate places. When this is done, fill in the blanks.
Voilà-a villanelle. The rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA and the final ABA A.
Note: Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writes a villanelle. The refrain is: "Are you not weary of ardent ways" and "Tell no more of enchanted days." Stephen writes the initial lines in his head and then feels "the rhythmic movement of a villanelle." For him, the writing of the first three lines shapes the poem to come.
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