Lucky Words

If you’re reading this on email, you can click on the header and go to the website and listen to an audio version of the essay (read by me, not some creepy AI).

Also, at the very bottom I’ve got two announcements that might be of interest to some of you.

How to read a poem: feel

Here’s the lesson: emotion first, interpretation (maybe) second.

Let’s start with a poem by Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them”

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

Let’s pretend that you don’t know anything about Frank O’Hara. You come across this poem in a weird little newsletter, and dutifully you read the poem and think to yourself: “and…?” Yes, at first blush it’s a poem where a guy goes on a walk, probably sometime in the middle of the 20th century based on some of his word choices and his mention of Jackson Pollock and a lady wearing fox fur. He goes on a walk at lunchtime, sees some stuff, and goes back to work. Why, you might think to yourself, would anyone read this? What’s the point?

Slow down and visualize

Last week I encouraged you to read a poem slowly, and to read it twice after a little gap in the middle. So go ahead and read it again right now.

And… you’re still in the same place, aren’t you? Even though all the words are pretty easy, most people would scratch their heads and say, “see? This is what I hate about poetry. It isn’t about anything. It’s just, like, a list or something.” You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking this, but you would be still making some wrong assumptions.

Let’s put aside any question of what the poem is “about.” You don’t need to know what it is about. Sometimes you can just take a poem on how it feels. So we need to figure out what this poem feels like.

This O’Hara poem has a lot of good concrete images and references. Can you picture going on a walk on a hot day in New York City, where laborers with dirty torsos are eating sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola on their lunch break. They’re wearing yellow hard hats. Women calf-length skirts are walking, and the skirts are swishing as they walk. A man in a doorway silently watches a pretty girl walk past, he doesn’t say anything but he smiles and rubs his chin. On your walk, stop and get a cheeseburger and a shake. Keep walking. See the posters on the buildings that they’re about to tear down. Stop and get a glass of juice to drink. Head back to work. Try to really picture this. Picture yourself walking, or imagine a movie where they’re filming this happening. What music would you use for the soundtrack? What music feels right?

My O’Hara afternoon

Last summer I took a trip to NYC and did a lot of walking around. New York is a great city for walking. I saw posters on buildings that were under construction,

and I ate a hamburger at a burger joint just a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park.

I visited the Strand bookstore (of course), and a used bookstore that also sells pickles, and waited in a very long line to get a sandwich at Katz’s deli.

(And, yes, I did have a book of poetry in my pocket. Of course I had a book of poetry in my pocket.) No one would ask me what my walk was “about.” It was about walking around NYC and seeing stuff. It was about feeling the city.

O’Hara published the poem above in 1964 in his collection called Lunch Poems. This poem exudes the energy of a walk through New York on a warm summer noontime. And of course there’s a lot more going on that just a walk. Like, for instance, what’s going on with this line: “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” I wonder who Bunny is. I wonder who John Latouche is. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t know who they are, because I feel this jazzy energy when I read the poem. I feel transported to a different time and a different place than I’ve ever visited.

Because the New York I visited is similar to O’Hara’s but it is clearly also very different. I can only get there through the poem.

All poetry plays with emotion

The rule for poetry for today is to put aside meaning and just feel. Let the music of the poem move you. Let it push you forward. Think of poetry like music rather than meaning. This is not to say that poetry is always just music. Clearly, many poems have something they want to say, but at some level a good poem is also about making you feel something.

This is not a foreign concept: you listen to music and it moves you. When you listen to instrumental music, you don’t think “but what does this song mean?” The song doesn’t need to mean anything. Listen to this selection of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor: is it saying anything? No: it’s not necessarily telling a story and preaching with a moral. Sometimes a piece of music might be sad or exciting, it might calm you down or hype you up. The music is doing something emotional in your brain, to your brain.

And a poem, a good poem at least, should do the same thing. So, in practical steps, try this. Read a poem (slowly, twice) and then try to name what it is the poem is trying to make you feel.

Note that I say to name what the poem is trying to make you feel. Some poems will fall flat. You won’t feel anything. That’s on the poem. A good poem will reward an attentive reader, but many poems are failed attempts. That’s just how it works. No one likes every piece of music, and no one likes every poem. Don’t get too worried if you don’t feel anything. Move on the to the next one, and see if that one clicks for you.

An example of a very different poem

I recorded a video the other day doing a reading and some analysis of a pretty well-known poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Watch my video and see the beautiful scenery (because hot dang the mountains around my house are looking spectacular right now), but also look at how I point out some of the deliberate musicality Hopkins puts in here. All the alliteration (“grandeur of God,” “shining from shook foil,” “gathers to greatness” “ooze of oil,” “reck his rod,” “nature is never spent,” “world broods with warm breast”), or the rhymes “seared... smeared... bleared,” “foil, oil, soil, toil”), or the rhythm of “have trod, have trod, have trod.” All of this feels very poetic. And still many people read Hopkins and say, “dang, I can’t figure out what that guy is talking about.”

If you do the process of reading slowly and reading twice you might start to unpack it, but really, why not just enjoy the way it feels?

Practical Application

Once you have tentatively named the emotion that the poem is trying to get you to feel, now look back at the poem and see if you can identify what tricks the poet is using to get you to feel that way. Maybe it’s the words he chooses. Maybe it’s like O’Hara and his use of so many concrete images that feel specific to a time and place. Maybe it’s the rhymes and rhythm of Hopkins. You don’t need to know the names of these tricks: you’ll know them when you see them. Make up your own names for things (“words that all start with the same sound” or “lots of words with ooh in them” or “a whole bunch of long words all at once”).

If this feels too much like reading poetry in school, know that there’s no grades here and you don’t need to be comprehensive. You don’t even, really, have to be correct. You’re looking for what is making the poem tick for you, because the poem is interesting to you.

Sometimes it’ll be language things, like Hopkins, and sometimes it’ll be the subject or ideas, like O’Hara. Maybe there’s a personal reason why a poem works for you; that’s ok, too.

A caveat: do you have to do this stuff to read poetry?

If you’re thinking to yourself, “but can’t I just read the poem, and then read the next poem, and then read the next poem?” Sure, you can. You can choose to read poetry just like how you read non-fiction prose. That’s one way to do it. But poetry invites you to read differently, more thoughtfully. This is a style of reading that non-fiction prose (and most fiction prose, too) simply cannot sustain. Poetry can be read deeply, and the process of reading and feeling and disassembling and interrogating: this is part of the pleasure of poetry.

But sometimes the pleasure of poetry is just in reading for the vibes, too.

Anthology

Last week I shared a few poems and called it “homework” but I’ve decided that’s probably trauma-inducing for some of you. This is just an anthology of some interesting poems to practice on.

You might go back and look at the poems from last week with today’s lesson in mind. Look at Auden’s “Twelve Songs: IX” (it begins “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) and think about how that one makes you feel. Ooof. It’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it? Or Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” which makes me want to sit up a bit straighter, hold up my chin and be proud of my nationality.[^ Even despite, you know... everything.] What word would I use to describe the feeling that Mark Strand evokes in “Eating Poetry”? Maybe subversive, or mad, or manic?

Here’s some poems that you might enjoy for this week. I’ve tried to stick with poems that you probably haven’t read before, and I’d be interested to hear if any of them resonate with you (or, on the other hand, any of them leave you cold).

* “Snow Day” by Billy Collins

* “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limón

* “Vespers (Once I believed in you)” by Louise Glück

* “Anticipated Stranger,” by John Ashbery

* “Hysteria” by T.S. Eliot

Least Bad Poem of the Week

Still thinking about a title for this one. “Tables” maybe (as in “tables of stone”), or “Etching”? I’ll probably wake up tomorrow with an idea that’s way better than these, but that’s what we get with the Least Bad Poem of the Week: still always a work in progress! And not all of them are winners!

“Tables”

God spoke to Moses—

Fiction!

We return briefly to Ashley and Heather, as overheard first here and then here. There’s still more to come from these two (and Ashley’s cute-but-klepto boyfriend).

“For how long?”“Two months. Off on a field assignment, and mostly out of cell range.”“I thought everywhere had cell coverage these days.”“Not in Alaska, apparently. I think it’s the Brooks Range. It’s supposed to be one of the most remote places in the US.”“What will you do?”“What can I do but wait? I’ll just, I don’t know, do my normal stuff, I guess. And two months isn’t that long, Heath.”“Oh, Ash, he hasn’t even left yet and you’re already pining.”“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

Wrapping Up

And here’s the two announcements: books!

* I’m putting the final formatting touches on a book of poetry that you can purchase! It’s called Ghosts and other poems and in includes my poem “Ghosts” as well as other poems. It’ll be available on Amazon as an ebook (if I can get the formatting kinks worked out!) and as a printed book (also from Amazon). I’m quite happy with the poems in the book, many of which I’ve featured here already. If you’re looking to start a poetry library, this might be a good place to start... For those who are paid subscribers: I’m going to send you a free copy of the ebook (Kindle and PDF formats) as a thank you for being so incredibly supportive.

* I am working on another book as well! This is a collection of Christmas themed essays and poems, and will be out (fingers crossed) before the start of Advent on November 29. This is an explicitly Christian take on the holiday, and will be a great book to bring some good Christmas calmness into your life. This, too, will be sent for free to paid subscribers, and the rest of y’all should look for it on Amazon in about a month. (Full disclosure: there’s still a lot of work left to do here, and I’m not 100% sure I’ll make it in time. But I’ll try!) Working (and maybe final?) title: The Christmas Book. (Catchy, huh?)

Here in Utah, we had a few days of rain and the weather has shifted from mid 80s to mid 60s. There’s a nice cap of snow on Timp and Cascade. The blood of my Nordic ancestors is feeling a sense of relief.

All is well,

Jeff

This is a reading of the main essay from today’s letter. Not included in the audio: the poem and the fiction (but they are here in the notes). You should subscribe to the email version at luckywords.substack.com

On Books

Kate and I had our anniversary this week, and we went book shopping. Besides perhaps the grocery store and church, bookstores are where we’ve spent our marriage, so it feels appropriate that we spent part of our day spending money on books.

It was a used bookstore, in part because we like the selection and in part because we like the prices. The book I bought was $7, but there was a 40% off sale going on, so I got it for less than the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. At freeway speeds, my car gets about 3 gallons per hour, so the math works out very much in favor of the book: will I get 20 minutes of value from the book? The answer to that is almost always yes.

Thrift stores are an even better value of course, since most books come in at a half gallon or less, but the selection is hit or miss, and there’s no organization. Plus it feels strange to plop down on a couch with a pile of books at a thrift store. Someone might want to buy that couch. And of course that couch will have that suspicious basement smell, and the couches at our local used bookstore feel very hygienic.

The book I bought was an old collection from Garrison Keillor called We Are Still Married and even if I hadn’t actually wanted it, it was our anniversary so I couldn’t not buy it.

The intro, the only part I’ve read so far, is from another age. It talks about Ronald Reagan as a contemporary figure and pokes fun at Dan Quayle. There’s a big part of me that feels like 1990 wasn’t all that long ago, which I know makes me feel like an out-of-touch old man. I may be out of touch, but I really don’t feel all that old. On the other hand it was our 33rd wedding anniversary, so I’m not that young either. I feel like just the right age. Just the right balance of young and old: understanding but not indulging in the excesses of youth, grazing but not wallowing in the wisdom of age. Which would sound awfully prideful if it weren’t manifestly true that I’m obviously not enjoying abundant wisdom nor experiencing abundant energy. Dumb and lazy, that’s my style. Perfect balance; just the right age.

Garrison Keillor was 47 when the book came out, and he talks as if 47 made him a grizzled veteran of life. I look back at 47 with some nostalgia. Keillor is now in his 80s, and I can only guess about what the thinks about his 47-year-old self.

The book is paperback, originally $8.95—which is less than two gallons of gas at my local pump today—and has that wonderful soft paper that Penguin uses in its paperbacks. It’s pleasant to flip the pages and feel them feather across my thumb, the whisper of pages that sounds like sitting next to a person sleeping on the couch, book in lap. The pages are not white, not like my notebook or the glowing screen of your phone, but a softer color: paper that is admitting it used to be wood. This book is a humane object not a consumer product, because I won’t consume it. I’ll read it, but the book will persist, happy to be read and then ready, undiminished, for the next reader after me. Plus if I’m lucky I can take it back to the used bookstore and they’ll give me a buck for it, and they’ll mark it up again and sell it again. The real capitalist move is to sell the same object three, four, five times.

Who am I kidding? I won’t sell this book back. If I weren’t going to keep the book I would have borrowed it from the library. For zero dollars I could have read the book and for zero dollars someone else would read it after me. Meanwhile library employees do their work for free, apparently⁠. If I only wanted to rent the book I’d borrow it, otherwise if it comes from the bookstore it is staying with me for the long haul.

Kate keeps threatening me that when we run out of bookshelves, we will need to weed out our books. But we can always fit another bookshelf in the house, and I could always double-stack the books on the shelves that we’ve got. Sure, double stacking makes it difficult to find the book you’re looking for, but it’s excellent for dust collection, and besides who is the boss around here anyway?⁠ I am of course joking about never removing any books from our collection. Over the years, I have given plenty of books to the thrift store or taken them to the used bookstore. Numerous books. Surely over the years I have pruned literally tens of books from our shelves.

Our dear friend Ellen says, “There’s always room on the friend bus.” And since a good book is a true friend, there’s always room for more books.

Young people today meet potential partners via apps: swipe left, swipe right, DM, DM, swipe right, swipe left. It’s not unlike book shopping, really. I absolutely first judge a book by the cover. The cover causes me to pause, the pause gives me a chance to pick it up, picking it up encourages me to read the blurbs on the back cover, which leads to looking at the author photo, and finally I’ll start reading⁠ a couple of pages somewhere in the middle to get a flavor for the prose. How long before I feel hooked? Most of the time I put the book back on the shelf for someone else. Swipe left, swipe right.

When I make the commitment to buy a book—and it is a commitment to join my shelves for perhaps the rest of my mortal life—I will bring the book home and that night read for ten minutes, maybe half an hour. And then maybe it will go onto my shelf, never to be touched again. A book is a friend, not a member of the family.

The difference between friend books and human friends is that friend books won’t load themselves onto the truck when it comes time to move. To be fair, human friends aren’t loading themselves either, but the good ones are loading something and can talk while we work together. Books are prima donnas in that regard: when they get my attention they want all of it. No, don’t clean the kitchen, don’t get dressed, don’t talk with anyone else, don’t drive to the store.⁠ But also no “where have you been?” when I return from a multi-year hiatus.

On this standard, how does my iPhone match up? Same push for all my attention with an added burden of neediness. The phone begs for my attention. It tugs at my sleeve. It punches me in the leg. It pulls the fire alarm. It is jealous of everything else.⁠ But! the iPhone collects no dust and doesn’t need an entire truck when I move. So it’s a mixed bag.

Then again, a used book costs me a gallon of gas, 20 minutes of driving. That’s a trip to Costco and back. The cost of my phone is a drive from Boston to Los Angeles. Then to Denver. Then Dallas. Then Atlanta.⁠ Wow I hate my phone right now.

And yes of course I’ve got books on my phone. I have dozens. No, I just checked: hundreds. My Kindle app has more than 500, and there are more than a hundred more in Apple Books, and also Serial Reader, Readwise Reader, Libby, Hoopla, not to mention audiobooks which I’m skipping over for now. So my phone can be a vehicle for reading books, but never with as much pleasure as the paper-ink-glue variety. As an object, my phone has as much attraction for me as someone else’s toothbrush.

The addictive aspect of the phone is all software. What draws me to the book as an object is how sensuous it is: earthy, warm, soft.

On the floor next to me I’ve got 13 books. On the bookshelf at my shoulder are another hundred or so. I’ll say about 300 in the room, and a couple few thousand in the house. Plenty of room for growth. There’s always room on the friend bus.

Least Bad Poem

The poem’s title is still doubly a work in progress, but I didn’t want to just have another “untitled” poem, and the first line is clearly not the way to go in this case.

“Rumbling” Dozing off in my chair Like an old man, Book spread across his (my) belly, Gentle snore thrumming in my (his) chest, I do not know how long The lovers have paused their tiff But my languor has colored their quarrel Into pleasant warm hues And maybe they will reconcile Into a new happy, cozy love, Or maybe they will split forever And find their peace Only hazily remembering Where they once argued In a comfortable chair Under a warm sunny window To the content, rumbling breathing Of an old man reading.

The Least Bad Poems that I share aren’t always quite so closely linked with the subject of the essay, but today it seemed too tidy to pass up. Plus, I love the tiny echo to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with its interrupted lovers. This poem also speaks to the involvement that readers play in the process of transforming written words into a story: the reader’s background, current condition, and prior reading will change how we interpret a text. In this case, the pleasant nap alters the timbre of the events in the story, even though it can’t change the events themselves. I’m certain that there are some books that I liked a lot more because of where I was reading it than if I had read it at another time or in another place, and conversely, there are some books that I might have enjoyed much more had I switched into a pleasanter locale.

Some Fiction

We least heard from these two a couple of weeks ago.

Overheard: Heather and Ashley

“He’s good, thanks. He says hi.”

“So, hey: do you have anything left in your apartment, or has he liberated everything?”

“Ha ha, very funny.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Is he still swiping your stuff?”

“Just little stuff, nothing important. You wouldn’t even notice.”

“It’s going to be so weird if you guys move in together. Suddenly you’ll have a full set of dishes again.”

“It’s not…”

“Have you said anything to him about it ever?”

“No! No, of course not. I couldn’t.”

“You want me to?”

“Hell no! Honestly, Heather, in every other way, he’s like Mr. Right. He’s funny, he listens, he has interesting stories from work that he likes to tell me at night.”

“How often are you seeing him, anyway?”

“Pretty much every day. He comes over for dinner. Or we go out. Most days, we’re together.”

“Does he have a toothbrush at your house?”

“Toothbrush, yes. Door key, no.”

“So he’s not living there yet?”

“No, no. My mother would freak. Oh my gosh. That would be a catastrophe. So no, he’s got his own place, and he sleeps there.”

“… most of the time…”

“Yeah… most of the time. I know this sounds so dumb, but when we’re together, it’s like we were created to go together. Like puzzle pieces. He’s so easy to be with. Sometimes, we don’t even talk, and it’s not weird or awkward or anything. And, I have to say, his lips and hands seem to have a direct connection with my mind: like a dream.”

“… whew. Maybe don’t mention the kleptomania, then.”

“That’s for sure. If that’s the price I have to pay…”

“What’s a little misdemeanor between friends, right? Or lovers?”

Wrapping up

What’s the last book you purchased? And I mean a real paper-ink-glue book and not an ebook. For me it was, obviously, We Are Still Married and Otherwise: New & Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon. Before that, probably Harvest by Jean Giono. I have bought a few ebooks (a collection of E. B. White pieces from The New Yorker and the complete poems of Jim Harrison earlier this week), usually when I can find them on sale at absurd prices (like, under $3).

All is well,

Jeff

Howdy!

Another audio-first production, this time a sonnet by the fabulous 20th century poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. This one was recorded on a hike up Provo Canyon (yes, again—hey, it’s just up the street and, frankly, it’s a pretty great canyon) shortly before we finally (!) got some snow.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

As I mention in the audio, there’s much to love about this poem. Mostly for me, it’s wonderful because it’s a love poem to herself. All sonnets are love poems, or they contain the echo of a love poem. In this poem, Milay is longing for the woman she used to be. The men in this poem? They’re forgotten. They have no faces and no bodies. They are “unremembered lads.” What Milay does remember is how they made her feel, long ago.

This is a poem about aging. She remembers those times back when she was young and beautiful and carefree, when the boys lined up. Those were in the summer, and now, in the poem, it’s winter. What were once branches full of noisy birds, now the “birds have vanished one by one” and in the present of the poem, those “boughs [are] more silent than before.”

What we can get from this poem is a feeling. We can take Milay’s nostalgia and try it on for a while. What do we remember from our summer times, and what does it feel like now, looking back? When our memories of faces has faded, what’s left? Milay’s poem invites you to just hold on to that feeling of used-to-be, and in holding it, find some pleasure in that, too.

All is well,

Jeff

Yes, yes it’s very late (again!). I apologize.

ON PEACE

When Elisabeth finally (finally!) got pregnant, she had to deal with the discomforts of carrying a baby all the while her husband was struck mute. She said that her “reproach” was taken away, but it is hard to imagine that it was a very pleasant time.

Meanwhile, her young unmarried cousin, Mary, was also pregnant. More unpleasantness.

Mary was “highly favored” among women, but still forced to deal with a pregnancy and the inevitable gossip that surrounded that. Not to mention: travel and childbirth in less-than-ideal conditions. Not only was the birth in a stable, but Mary didn’t have her own mother, any sisters or cousins, any of her support structure except a new husband who probably had never even seen her naked. It sounds like an awkward, lonely way to deliver a child.

God sometimes has a funny way of blessing his favorites.

It isn’t with comfort, that’s obvious enough. It isn’t with a golden ticket to avoid social scandal. It isn’t with material goods, nor with respite from political strife, nor freedom from family troubles. He doesn’t immediately free His people from oppression, stop wars, or even step in to halt the slaughter of babies.

And yet the angels sang, “peace on earth.”

It seems clear enough that God’s peace looks nothing like what we would consider peace in a worldly sense.

But you know, if you pause to think about it, that you can feel peace anytime. And you know, if you pause to think about it, that peace can be completely divorced from external circumstances.

Here’s two quick ideas for finding peace this Christmastime. Warning: neither of these are exactly comfortable, fun, or necessarily easy.

* Practice forgiveness. Yes, of course forgive those who have clearly and obviously trespassed against you. But also, can we forgive the everyday things? Forgive the books for being unread. Forgive the dishes for being unwashed. Forgive the traffic for being too heavy, the stores for being too busy, the people who stop in the middle of an aisle with their cart blocking both directions, the New York Times for headlining only depressing news. Forgive Congress for being disappointing, forgive the noodles for being overcooked and mushy, forgive the car for being low on fuel, forgive the leftovers for spoiling in the fridge. This sounds silly, but consider how much annoyance and sadness that you’re carrying around for these things. Sure, some of them you might have prevented; you didn’t, and so you need to forgive yourself, too. Forgive them, and leave a space in your heart to experience the wonder, hope, joy that God rains down as we head into Christmas. Forgive this stuff, so you can fill yourself with the great and good that’s there for the taking.

* Wait. Try to find excuses to practice waiting, ten seconds at a time. When discomfort comes, wait an extra ten seconds before doing something about it. Just wait. When boredom comes, count to ten before switching to something new. When you drive somewhere by yourself, give yourself ten seconds to just sit in the car, doing nothing. Wait ten seconds before eating the food that’s set in front of you and everyone else is eating. Just practice waiting. As you practice waiting with these ten second gifts to yourself, start to note what happens in those tiny windows. What sorts of feelings bubble up? Maybe you’ll feel some anxiety at first, but that’ll pass. Maybe you’ll spend it counting down, but your desire to do that will fade, too. You’ll still eat, still get to the store, still get out of that uncomfortable or boring situation. And for ten seconds, you’re like Sisyphus as the stone rolls down the mountain: with a respite, a sense of relief, a feeling of peace before the world starts spinning again. If you’re paying attention, this is a space that God can fill, too. And whatever he fills it with, it comes wrapped in peace.

May your next week, as you prepare for Christmas, be filled with peace: ten seconds at a time, and one small act of forgiveness at a time.

Think to yourself: what brings you peace at Christmas time? And what do you need to forgive to start to feel peace in other parts of your life?

A couple of scriptures:

* John 14:27

* Hebrews 12:1

* Alma 38:8

I’m trying to do exactly what I said above and forgive myself for being so late with this post. It’s hard! But this is the way, you know. We’re all going to screw up; and we all need forgiveness from ourselves and from others. I hope that you can forgive me for being so lousy at this. And I do sincerely hope that this little essay thing is helpful to you as you prepare for Christmas.

I’m waiting for snow, but the days are still in the 50s most days. I grew up in San Diego, and thought that it was pretty special that I could ride my bike all the way up until Christmas as a kid. Well, I can still ride my bike here — and I live in the land of “the greatest snow on earth.” If there were any snow…

Also, no poem and no photos today. I’m choosing for done over perfect. I hope you can forgive that, too.

So Advent started last Sunday. I had intended to get this out before then, but then things happened, and I didn’t get it out there. My apologies.

About Advent

Advent is the season leading up to Christmas, starting the fourth Sunday before. Christmas, the twelve days of it, begins on Christmas Day. Right now, we are in the middle of Advent.

For many Christians, they celebrate every Sunday of Advent with a little devotional thing and lighting of candles. We do it in my family.

Just like last year, I have written little essays and will be sharing them here. I’m adding a recording of me reading them, in case you’re too lazy to read.

The plan is to get these out before Sunday, so you could, if you wanted, to use these readings as a seed for your own Advent celebrations. This week I’m late, but I’ll have out the next one, peace, out on Saturday.

WEEK ONE: HOPE

Hope sits at the center of any life who tries to follow Jesus Christ. It nestles alongside faith and charity. And like faith and charity, hope is something we must deliberately choose. When we see the messiness of the world around us, it’s easy to give in to despair. Sometimes, maybe, most of us do.

The birth of Jesus Christ gives us reason to hope when all the signs around us fail to. We acknowledge the reality of the awfulness of things, but then counter-logically, we choose to live with a feeling of hopefulness.

Real hope is firmly grounded in reality. It sees clearly. Hope is not a bury-your-head-in-the-sand virtue. Through hope, we can encounter reality head-on, with clear eyes. We can use all our intellectual gifts to understand the world as it actually is. And, with the gift of hope (and it is indeed a gift), we can see the troubles of the world and yet still hope for something better. Hope powers action.

Anxiety takes a place at the opposite of hope. Anxiety is intellectualized fear about the future. I worry about what might come. Maybe most of us do. With hope, we can acknowledge that worry, that potential for failure or ruin, but we also acknowledge that things might work out after all. Sure, the potential for awfulness exists, but the potential for wonderful success exists, too. Hope sees the many options, but chooses the happy path. I have to choose it, I have to put in some effort. Maybe most of us do.

For me, Christmas feels intentionally designed to foster hopefulness. At Christmastime, despite whatever is happening in the world or in my life today, I look backwards through traditions and memories, and all the while I anticipate a lovely Christmas Day. I live in a short-term hope. Maybe most of us do. It’s the hope that looks forward to a joyful day just a few weeks from now.

But Christmastime also helps me cultivate a larger vision of hope. It reminds me to live in long-term hope. Maybe most of us do that, too. It’s the hope that we will measure up to what God intends for us. It’s the hope that His work can be fulfilled in each of us. He did His part in sending down his Son to exemplify Godly behavior, in sending down his Son to expiate for us—almost like a cheat-code so that our mistakes won’t damn us—though it was enormously painful for everyone involved. After all His hard work, physically and emotionally, I hope that I’m worth it. I hope; I live in hope.

Think to yourself now: what do you hope for in these weeks leading up to Christmas?

A couple of scriptures:

* Isaiah 40:9-11, 30-31

* Ether 12:4

I hope to have a Least Bad Poem to share next time, along with a Christmas song.

Until then, may your days be merry and bright.

All is well,

Jeff

I recorded this while sitting on the shady bank of the Provo River, shoes off and feet in the water. It was over 90º outside, and my spot was one of the best places I can imagine along the entire Wasatch Front today.

Text of poem

This is the second sonnet in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence and Other Poems, published in 1917.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year's bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim!

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, "There is no memory of him here!"

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

This is a fun little poem, both highly felt and still deliberately clever. Millay is often a clever poet, and sometimes I think her cleverness gets in the way of sentiment. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but I don’t think so. What do you think?

Read more about this poem or subscribe at luckywords.net

Recorded on a lovely afternoon in early June 2025, up on Cascade mountain, a couple thousand feet above my house. In the recording, I promised a photo. Here it is:

The recording might be a bit quiet, and I apologize about that. If it’s annoying to you, just send me a note so that I’ll be motivated to find a better solution next time.

Text of poems

Sonnet 4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?

Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

And being frank she lends to those are free.

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largess given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,

What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,

Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

Sonnet 5

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Sonnet 6

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface

In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:

Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place

With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.

That use is not forbidden usury,

Which happies those that pay the willing loan;

That's for thyself to breed another thee,

Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:

Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart,

Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair

To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

My voice was quite deep because I was dealing with the beginning of a cold that is still lingering.

I decided to do three sonnets at once because, frankly, the procreation sonnets get a little tiresome after a while. Every one has something interesting in it, but my whole goal is to give you a hook to learn to enjoy/appreciate poetry like this.

If you’re actually paying attention to what you’re reading, and if you pause to think and reread, you will of course see that Shakespeare is making an economic argument in sonnet 6. Basically, if one kid brings happiness, then ten kids will bring 10x happiness. The alternative without children, says Shakespeare is that your only heirs will be worms. Ouch.

If you head to the website you can see some unrelated photos I took at my recording spot

I grabbed some quick pictures with my phone of the wildflowers that were growing on the trail that day.

Beardtongues, mule’s ears, buckwheat, salsify, starwort, and flax. What a wonderful world, don’t you think?

All is well,

Jeff

Recorded on site and in one take on the banks of the Provo River, May 2025.

Today’s poem is by Susan Marsh who is in her own words a “writer, poet, artist” based in Wyoming. That career description is one I aspire to, though, of course I’d choose Utah. The poem was published in 2022.

Text of poem

“One Patch of Quilt” by Susan Marsh

We know about the way they treat the chickens

But on a budget, buy the cheaper eggs.

One man says wolves are meant for shooting,

Another lives with a wolf named Cucumber.

At the sight of a snake my mother grabbed the hoe.

I got there first, carried it to the woods and let it go.

Rescued from a backhoe's jaw, a rubber boa

Spent the winter eating crickets in a terrarium

Until it was warm enough to be set free.

The friend who kept it became an expert

In the ways of rubber boas, small shy snakes

Most of us have never seen.

It all comes down to empathy

One patch of quilt acknowledging the other

For we lie together with stitches tight,

The only escape an irreversible rending of the fabric.

from The Earth Has Been Too Generous (Finishing Line Press, 2022)

I’m fascinated by the idea of interspecies connectedness. I love stories about people working to give rights to trees and rivers, even though it complicates my own interaction with them. In some respects, having empathy for the deer that sneaks down from the foothills at night to snack on suburban gardens is easy: they’re hungry and we just put the food out there in the open. Sometimes it’s harder for me to generate empathy with some of my fellow humans (sidelong glance at the driver of the Cybertruck in the parking lot, Mike Lee, RFK Jr., the person who leaves his empty McDonald’s wrappers on the picnic table and just leaves, any billionaire ever). Perhaps there is a pathway from generating empathy with the natural world and increasing my empathy with my fellow humans.

Of course, the route of natural-world-empathy goes through stewardship. I’m trying to learn more about how it all works together, the natural world.

And I’m looking at the dead tree right next to me, all its bark pulled off and unable to move the liquid from the river right there just twelve inches away to its leaves. Or to where its leaves used to be. That tree is dead, but it’s surrounded by healthy, living trees. The ecosystem in this stretch of river seems healthy. It’s thriving.

On a hike in Zion NP a couple of weeks ago, I had long stretches with no human interaction. I was by myself, and I found myself talking to the plants. When I saw one whose name I knew, I’d say hello as I passed. I’d say, “howdy there, firecracker penstemon. Lookin’ good!” I’d brush the juniper branches in a friendly, nice-to-see-you way. And I know I’m absurd. I’d shut up and keep my hands to myself when I would pass a person going the opposite direction, but so long as I was alone, I pretended that I was at a party, and greeting the people I knew.

Was this generating empathy or insanity? Kate laughed when I told her about it. Maybe it’s both?

Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this poem and some brief analysis. Marsh says that we are like squares of quilt; can you think of a different metaphor that describes how we relate to others (people or animals)? If you’ve got one, write it down: you’ve got a poem! You can share it with me, if you’d like. I’d love to see them.

In the spirit of getting more prescriptive, this is the first of an intermittent and irregular series about how and why of poetry. Today: the portability of poetry, illustrated with a classic by Carl Sandburg, “Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?”

## Text of poem

“Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?” by Carl Sandburg

"Why did the children

put beans in their ears

when the one thing we told the children

they must not do

was put beans in their ears?

"Why did the children

pour molasses on the cat

when the one thing we told the children

they must not do

was pour molasses on the cat?"

I promised in the recording that you'd have it just about memorized by the time I was done with the episode. Let me know if that's true or not. I strongly suspect that it is, or close enough at least.

When I say that a poem is portable, I mean of course that you can carry it in your head. But here's an interesting thing that's true of poetry and very few other forms of art: what you have in your head is not a copy of the art, and it isn't a memory of the art. You have the thing itself. If you have the poem memorized, you have the poem, the original, all the time.

You may remember a song's performance, and you may remember a piece of visual art, but each of those are just copies. But for a poem, what is the original? While the manuscript in the poet’s hand is of course a discrete object on its own, the manuscript is not the poem. The poem is the words, and words are abstractions. When we write the poem down, we are simply capturing it. When you read it and especially when you memorize it, the action isn't happening on the page, but in your head.

And so, this Sandburg poem. I intentionally chose something easy to remember and apparently straightforward. But as I point out in the podcast, there are layers here. By memorizing this poem, you will discover times when it resonates with you, and the poem will grow in significance. You'll discover more meaning as you stick with it.

Recorded live on the La Virkin Creek Trail in Kolob Canyon, Zion National Park, May 2025. You’ll hear the wind noise pretty prominently at times, and I’m sorry if it annoys you. Not sorry enough to do anything about it, because I personally find it kind of charming.

There are a bunch of photos you can see if you visit the website (luckywords.net) that don’t show up in podcast notes.

## Text of poem

“Variations on the Word Love” by Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug

holes with. It's the right size for those warm

blanks in speech, for those red heart-

shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing

like real hearts. Add lace

and you can sell

it. We insert it also in the one empty

space on the printed form

that comes with no instructions. There are whole

magazines with not much in them

but the word love, you can

rub it all over your body and you

can cook with it too. How do we know

it isn't what goes on at the cool

debaucheries of slugs under damp

pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-

seedlings nosing their tough snouts up

among the lettuces, they shout it.

Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising

their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two

of us. This word

is far too short for us, it has only

four letters, too sparse

to fill those deep bare

vacuums between the stars

that press on us with their deafness.

It's not love we don't wish

to fall into, but that fear.

this word is not enough but it will

have to do. It's a single

vowel in this metallic

silence, a mouth that says

O again and again in wonder

and pain, a breath, a finger

grip on a cliffside. You can

hold on or let go.

In this recording, as usual I break down some of my favorite lines/images/phrases, but I also use it to help illustrate my favorite definition of what poetry is: saying with words something that cannot be expressed in words. Which is a paradox, yes. But poetry is a paradox. And that’s why so many people dislike it.

I had originally written “that’s why so many people struggle with it,” but I realized that “struggling” is the point at issue here. Good poetry will always require some effort, some struggle. Poetry is trying to hang out at the edge of what language can do. All good poems are trying to say, “there’s no word in the language for this thing, and I’m going to try to explain it to you.” That’s what Atwood is trying to do here. Is it any wonder that it requires a little bit of effort from the reader? And in this case, don’t you feel just a little bit that you want to explain it better than she does? I hope you do, and I hope you try.

One of my favorite things on this hike was seeing all the flora and fauna. I of course like hiking with all the dramatic cliffs and geology, but I always get a thrill when I see a firecracker penstemon (penstemon eatonii) in glorious, full bloom.

And many, many lizards. I edited out of the recording where I saw a lizard and then went quiet for a full minute just watching it watching me. I think this is a western whiptail (aspidoscelis tigris), which is one of the cooler names for a lizard.

Strava recorded my hike as 15.88 miles, which I think is slightly exaggerated, but boy howdy were my knees feeling it by the end. Absolutely worth it, but it took a day to recover. I’m certainly glad it wasn’t warmer, and I’m glad to be getting back to my home turf tomorrow.

All is well,

Jeff