Mourning Seamus Heaney

The great poet died yesterday at age 74... much too young!  I mourn the loss of all the poems he had yet to write.  I selfishly mourn that I didn't go to the AWP in Boston last February, where he read.

I have loved his poetry since I was introduced to it back in 1970, when I was in Ireland.

Here is a well-known poem of his, which I have long loved:


Digging

by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

First Day of Classes

at Mount Saint Mary's , the University where I teach.  We had shortened classes for the annual Mass of the Holy Spirit/ Freshman Matriculation/Opening Convocation.

Here's a photo of the dignitaries marching out at the end:

 

It was a pageant of light and color!  And the music, provided by three different student choirs, was fantastic.  

Then we all marched out in the hot and humid August noon and had a picnic.

Then, back to classes.  This semester, I'm teaching three:

1. The Veritas Symposium:  our take on Freshman Comp, with lots of literature and writing on lots of philosophical questions.  The first essay they read was "Curiosity and Smartphones" - have to look up that writer's name to add it in here later.

2.  The Church in the Modern World/Women of Faith:  juniors and seniors of all majors. During the first month, we study the Vatican II document  "Lumen Gentium" and after that, we delve into the lives of women throughout Christian Tradition.

3. Introduction to Poetry:  this is studying poetry, not writing it.  Lots of writing about it, though.

Listening to QUIET on my iPod

Seems like a contradiction in terms!  I'm only up to Chapter 3, but I find it pretty interesting.

I've known that I am an introvert for most of my life.  Some of it I have attributed to being an "only child" of older parents back in the days when older parents didn't play with their children.  So I learned early on to entertain myself, and to make up stories about the families I drew, and the dolls with which I played.  What must it be like for a born extrovert to be an only child? 

After I joined the Daughters of Charity, at some point in the early 1980's most of us took the MBTI-
the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. I scored as an INFJ -  which very accurately described me.  But I also realized, on reflection, that my mother was an extroverted sensor and my father, an introverted thinker.  Opposites attract... and mutual insecurities attract too, I think.  I remember my mother berating my father many times for being "a hermit" and for not wanting to socialize -- for disappearing behind the newspaper or a book when they had company, which infuriated her.

I was more sociable in my younger years... now I find myself disappearing behind a book as my father did.

Anyway, this book was written by an introvert, and it spends a good amount of time delivering the fruits of the author's research on the topic of the value of introverts in what she calls a world of extroverts - the USA, anyway.  She really does a job on Harvard Business School, and its way of forming future business executives.

I'll have to keep reading to see what else she has to say.

In the meantime, here's an evocative piece of artwork - evocative for an introvert like me:

 Doorways of the Universe    by Midolluin:

Gettysburg

While I was in retreat, I read Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, a new book about the battle, by the historian Allen C. Guelzo. I had read some good reviews of it before, so I was eager to read it, especially since 2013 marks the 150^th anniversary of that Civil War battle.

Actually, I listened to the book, unabridged, on my ipod. This is one that I should have read as a text, because there was so much detail of the movements of the battle that I found myself wanting to look at maps. I know many areas of that battlefield pretty well, and could visualize them, so that helped.

It’s a large and comprehensive book. While listening to it, I found myself reflecting on how central Gettysburg is as a location in my life.  I first remember coming up there with my Dad and a family friend, Vic Lewis and his son Vicky and two other children. I was nine or ten, and dressed in a white cotton sundress. Somewhere there is a photo of us standing on the steps of the Pennsylvania Monument.

I climbed around on the rocks of Devil’s Den in that dress, which by the end of the day was brown with the dust of the battlefield.

The details of the battle didn’t interest me at all in 1958, though I liked the Electric Map.

 Here's the building that housed the map as it looked in 1958.

Here's the map. You walked around it.

Different areas of the battle field lighted up during the narration of the battle . In 1958, no computers.

The Pennsylvania Monument

Then, in 1966, I came to college in Emmitsburg, just ten miles down the road. It was a high school history class trip to Gettysburg that introduced me to Mount Saint Mary’s and Saint Joe’s College in the first place, in the fall of 1964.

So I spent four years going into Gettysburg from Emmitsburg, on Friday night shopping trips and Saturday night mixers and frat parties at Gettysburg College, and numerous visits to the battlefield on late winter afternoons to watch the large herds of deer there.

 Winter view from Little Round Top - photo from civilwarhikes.blogspot.com

Then, Gettysburg disappeared from my life from 1970 until 1978, when I was back in Emmitsburg as a novice in the Daughters of Charity. Father Taggart, the priest who taught us several Theology classes, was a “Gettysburg Buff” and was planning to take us on a tour of the battlefield and give us a blow by blow description of the battle.  I can’t remember if he ever did – part of the novitiate I’ve blocked out. But I know I wasn’t the least bit interested in the details of the battle.

Then, in 1979, I went South – to Petersburg Virginia, and then, Charleston South Carolina.  All of the places I taught from 1979 to 1986 were inextricably linked to the Civil War.

Then, back up to Baltimore, to Seton and Seton Keough High Schools. During those years, I began to take my yearbook staffers to “Yearbook Camp” each summer at Gettysburg College. While the students were in class, I was living in the advisors’ quarters and driving all around the town. Those were the years I really got to know the area. During those years I read Michael Shaara’s book  The Killer Angels for the first time. 

Then, in 1999, I moved back to Emmitsburg to teach at The Mount.  Finally, I became downright interested in the Battle of Gettysburg.  Knowing the roads and the avenues, knowing the landmarks, I could visualize the movements of the battle.  I read The Killer Angels again and again.

It is only now, in 2013, that I really begin to grasp some of the other aspects of that battle: the human struggles, personality clashes of the officers; petty jealousies and ambitions and power plays, etc. I began to think about the complexity of the whole event. Even more poignant,  the terrible casualties.  The Electric Map never gave me any picture of the bodies – thousands of human beings and horses strewn all over that ground.  Imagine the days and weeks immediately after the battle; the burying of the dead.

Yearbook Nightmares

Again, apologies for the long lull between posts. No excuse, really.  I've been working on the syllabi,
but still should have been able to write here.  I get into a fog of ennui and laziness.

Have been wasting my time listening to Dan Brown's latest pot-boiler,   Inferno, on my ipod.

 

Good old Robert Langdon and his mysterious codes, and the rush to save the world from another catastrophe.  The plot is full of contrivances, but it's still gripping.  I also loved all the descriptions of the city of Florence, which I've visited just once, for three days, and want to return to very much.

cover of the 1992 yearbook from Seton Keough HS  , Baltimore

cover of the 1981 yearbook from Gibbons High School, Petersburg VA

Last night I had a Yearbook Nightmare.  These used to occur every August during the fifteen years when I was a Yearbook Advisor for high school yearbooks in Petersburg Virginia and Baltimore Maryland.  The nightmare usually involved the yearbooks arriving with the wrong cover, or the names on the wrong photos.  I haven't been a Yearbook Advisor now since 1996, so this one came out of nowhere.  In this one, I somehow had acquired responsibility for getting a yearbook out, and there was nothing to put in it... or next to nothing.  A few photos, no page plans... a staff who didn't know what they were doing.   The high school seemed to be a combination of my own alma mater, Bishop Shanahan, and Seton High in Baltimore; in the waking world, both schools are no longer in the buildings where the dream took place.  Michelle Bower, a colleague from MSM who is now living in Vermont, was really the Advisor, but somehow I got into it.  Lots of confusion and racing around. I woke up exhausted.  Perhaps all the chase scenes from  Inferno  fueled this frenetic dream.

Now I have a Jennifer Lommers Print

Matted and framed and hanging on the wall in my bedroom!   It's the one I am using as the opening artwork here on my blog.  Talk about synchronicity!  The friend who gave it to me had never visited my blog, so she didn't know that that was the one I had posted.  She saw that I had "liked" Jennifer Lommers' page on Facebook, had gone to the page and fallen in love with Jennifer's art, and had purchased from Jennifer's website.

Meanwhile, here in hot and humid Maryland...  I have been procrastinating terribly.  I do sporadic work on the three syllabi I need for mid-August.  Almost finished two, and much more work to do on the third.  I've taught all three courses before, but the schedules have changed and , for the third, much additional writing assignments need to be incorporated.

What I have done is some poetry submission/application:
*  I have revised the manuscript for Reconnaissance and sent it to BOA Publications during this open reading period. 
*  I've applied and will attend the Nightsun Writers' Conference in Frostburg MD which begins July 25... have sent poems ahead to be workshopped.
* I've sent a copy of  Vexed Questions to Garrison Keillor and his Writer's Almanac, hoping he'll read one on the air.
* I've applied for a summer residency for next summer to  Hedgebrook , "a rural retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington where women writers come from all over the world to write, rejuvenate and be in community..."
* I've mailed three of my books to American Life in Poetry, a project sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, which " provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems."  Hope they will use some of my poems.

Fingers crossed on all of those.

I've also done the obligatory summer doctor appointments - eyes, colon, blood, etc.  Everything seems to be holding steady.

Otherwise, I've been watching the Great Dane Service Dog Project online , where two of the mother dogs have had puppies within the last month.  The 24/7 webcam on these two litters is even more addicting for me than those Cornell Hawk cams!

 

eight puppies in this litter... called, collectively, the Pippins...

 six in this litter, collectively called the Merlins...

Pippins Ethel and Beauregard  on July 20

Merlin  Violet  July 20

 

                                                              Merlin  Tiki  July 20

                                                          Merlin Maroon  July 20

Back from Retreat

I returned home on July 3 after two weeks in Louisiana -  six days visiting New Orleans, and eight days in retreat at the Christian Life Center in Saint Benedict, Louisiana, across the 24 mile causeway from New Orleans:

 

photo from airphotona.com

The retreat house sits off to the side on the thousand acre grounds of the Benedictine Monastery and Seminary there.  It was a wonderful ( airconditioned) place, and the grounds were beautiful:

The calm after the storm

At least it seems to be after the storm.  We were not affected as much as many in our country.  Extreme weather and disasters continue:  terrible forest fires in Colorado, tornadoes all through the midwest and even into the east, floods and severe thunderstorms.

The sky outside my window looked like this a short time ago:

but I really love this sky even more, from Culpepper County, Virginia, posted by my college classmate Ginny Conmy, and photo by Isabel Brennan:

I just finished re-reading ( or listening to the audiobook ) Watchers  by Dean Koontz.  I read many of his books back in the 1980's and early 90's, but tired of them.  This one was my favorites back then.

It was still suspenseful, even though I knew the ending.  I loved the premise -  recombinant DNA experiments by the Defense Dept.  come up with a most wonderful dog... but also another creature, a creature of rage and destruction.  It's really not very well written; Koontz gives way more exposition than he needs to, among other things.  But it's still a good tale / tail!

Now I am starting on Barbara Kingsolver's  Flight Behavior.  I am expecting to love it, since I loved her novel Prodigal Summer.  I was haunted by The Poisonwood Bible earlier.  I didn't love that one because I hated the father of the family so much that I had to read the ending to make sure things didn't turn out any worse than I thought they would.

It's a Jungle out there...

Two weeks away from the garden and I return to a jungle, everything growing into everything else, and, after all the rain we've had, infested with mosquitos.  I retreated to the house and took these photos from my bedroom on the third floor.

doesn't look too bad from above,from this angle, but believe me, it is bad.

cropped a bit, you can see the butterfly bushes to the right...

lilies of the valley, ajuga, cherry bells, lambs ears, swamp milkweed, hosta, lilies, coreopsis, etc etc

I really hate to pull anything up, but regretfully, I must.  Tomorrow I will get out there early, coat myself with Deep Woods Off, and go to it.

Rainy Day in Cape May

Tropical Storm Andrea dumped rain on the US East Coast throughout the day today. It really poured!
So six of my sisters and I decided on lunch at the Lobster House.  We really like to lunch on the deck, and watch the fishing boats bringing in their catches, but today we were inside.  It was a delightful lunch, nonetheless.

Otherwise, I continued reading and writing and even watched a DVD.  I've read three books during this week: a very eclectic mix.  First, I finished Ruth Rendell's ( writing as Barbara Vine)novel Anna's Book: really a gripping mystery wrapped in an early 20th century diary:

Then, I read Alexander McCall Smith's  The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency. How did it take so long for me to discover this series?  I read the book in two days, and it was delightful.

Now, I am almost finished listening to the audiobook of Michael Connelly's The Overlook. As I've said before, he is one of my favorite crime novelists.

And last night, I watched the video  "The Good Shepherd," starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie,
William Hurt, and Robert De Niro, among others.  Even Albus Dumbledore ( Michael Gambon) was in it.   It was grim and puzzling - about the development of the US Intelligence service, the OSS and CIA.  I had to go back to many scenes to figure it out.  It gripped me, but I am not raving about it.

Tomorrow, our week at Cape May is over, and we'll be travelling back to Emmitsburg, Washington, Baltimore, Georgia, Indiana, and Buffalo NY.  We've had five gorgeous weather days, and two rainy ones.  This is  the house where we stay:

Have I ever mentioned that I love Cape May?

The Blues Brothers

Still revelling in Cape May...

This morning a friend and I went birding at the Cox Hall Creek WMA  in North Cape May. This one was just purchased in 2006 ; it was formerly Ponderlodge Golf Course!  The folks at New Jersey Audubon have planted many native species there, and have let the whole place turn back to nature.
It was a wonderful three hours -  we must have walked the entire former 18 holes!

Here's the aerial view:

Here's a bird walk advertized on the CMBO site -  we went ourselves on this walk:

It looks like this, but greener and more flourishing since this photo was taken:

 and here

We saw at least 33 species of birds this morning, including what my friend calls "the Blues Brothers"

By that, she means the:

Indigo Bunting       ( photo by Kari Lukens)

Eastern Bluebird     ( photo by Don Freiday)

and  the

Blue Grosbeak  ( photo from the NJAS blog)

The Blue Grosbeak we saw was perched on a wildflower about six feet away from us, just magnificent in the sunshine!

A Diamond Hard Morning

Cape May, New Jersey

After a rainy Monday, we woke to a magnificent Tuesday - so clear and crisp and cool- the horizon out on the Atlantic so sharp.

It reminded me of a song that Eric Bogle wrote to honor his friend and fellow singer/songwriter Stan Rogers, who died in a plane crash at the age of  33 in 1983:

SAFE IN THE HARBOUR
(Eric Bogle)

Have you stood by the ocean, on a diamond-hard morning
And felt the hor-izon stir deep in your soul
Watched the wake of a steamer as it cut through blue water
And been gripped by a fever you just can't control

Oh to throw off the shackles and fly with the seagulls
To where green waves tumble before a driving sea wind
Or to lie on the decking on a warm summer's evening
Watch the red sun fall burning, be-neath the earth's rim

cho: But to every sailor, comes time to drop anchor
Haul in the sails, and make the lines fast
You deep water dreamer, your journey is over
You're safe in the harbour at last
You're safe in the harbour at last

Some men are sailors, but most are just dreamers
Held fast by the anchors they forge in their minds
Who in ther hearts know they'll never sail over deep water
To search for a treasure they're afraid they won't find

So in sheltered harbours, they cling to their anchors
Bank down their boilers and shut down their steam
And wait for the sailors to re-turn with bright treasures
That will fan the dull embers and fire up their dreams

But to every sailor, comes time to drop anchor
Haul in the sails, and make the lines fast
You deep water dreamer, your journey is over
You're safe in the harbour at last
You're safe in the harbour at last

And some men are schemers who laugh at the dreamers
Take the gold from the sailors and turn it to dross
They're men in a prison, they're men without vision
Whose only horizon is profit and loss

So when storm clouds come sailing a-cross your blue ocean
Hold fast to your dreaming for all that your're worth
For as long as there's dreamers, there will always be sailors
Bringing back their bright treasures from the corners of earth

But to every sailor, comes time to drop anchor
Haul in the sails, and make the lines fast
You deep water dreamer, your journey is over
You're safe in the harbour at last
You're safe in the harbour at last.

Eric Bogle, 1984, Record: Where The Wind Blows
Copyright Larrikin Music
- Record: Margaret Cristl: Looking Towards Home