Still Life and Learning to Abandon the World
I had taken these still life photographs at about the same time I learned about the death of Linda Pastan. I knew she had written a poem about still life, so I looked that up. I read her obit in The Washington Post, finding it interesting that she placed first in a contest in Mademoiselle magazine where Sylvia Plath placed second. She was 90. Poets always feel so timeless in their work so this was a surprise, too. In short, I did all the things I always do when a poet I’ve read and admired died. Took her books off my shelf. Read a few dogeared poems.
It never seems enough, but there it is.
I started with this one:
Learning to Abandon the World
by Linda Pastan
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
{source}
You’d be hard pressed to find a poet who writes about the ordinary and domestic life especially to not have a still life poem or two in their oeuvre. This is from Linda Pastan’s:
Still Life
Still Life the artist called
These pears and apricots
Placed on a blue tablecloth
Next to the leather pouch of hares,
Tied by their slender ears
Like so many vegetables.
But nature morte, the French
Would say, articulating “dead”
As if to tell us life is less
Than life without a hare in the field,
Without the actual taste
Of pear on the tongue.
I did a quick search to find the painting online, and it was on a site titled Poems Meet Paintings by Valerie Robillard which I’d not come across until now. And this kind of reminded me why I’ve always loved good old fashioned blogging — the way you find things you wouldn’t have otherwise. Though the site doesn’t seem to be kept up any more, it’s still a nice resource for those interested in ekphrasis.
I like the complicated relationship Pastan seems to have had with this still life. A resistance to what the painting is saying. A resistance to death and an embrace of life. She frames how we look at a piece as still life or dead nature and this is the crux of the poem. Well, I’ve spent all my writing life considering paintings, the interaction between word and image. My first book, All the God-Sized Fruit started that all off for me, and then in Asking, I wrote a series of poem-essays enacting the ekphrastic moment and the various types of ekphrasis. Calm Things is a book of essays written when our daughter was small about living a life in still life. I can’t help but look back and go, OMG, you HAVE been at this for a while. And how, at the beginning of one’s writing life you worry about things like what your subject is, and if you’re repeating yourself, and all sorts of actually pretty funny things in retrospect. Like, now I say to myself, of course you had your themes and repetitions and obsessions and weird quirks and of course those are going to come through whether you want them to or not. But everything feels so uncertain and full of doubt at the beginning. You know there were so many times when I could have abandoned the writing life — it would have been wiser in so many ways to do so. But I’m nothing if not doggedly persistent. Me and Hokusai amiright?
{Side bar: I have a book of still life essays coming out Spring 2024! Stay tuned :) }
I recently picked up Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I’ve honestly just opened it up and read a line or two here or there and you know that thing where something is so freaking good you just can’t? Yah. I mean for sure I will read it, but also, it’s hard when it’s also your big subject and likely this writer did it so much better :) But that’s GOOD too, right?
Because, here is the big secret of the writing life. We can all do it. Some people will get more acclaim and some will deserve it and some will maybe not quite so very much but none of that actually matters. The writing matters. Your life is going to be made so much more amazing by doing the writing you do, or whatever art you make. So just persist and be rigorous and joyful and delight in the whole beautiful ridiculous mess of it, sometimes rubbish, sometimes chocolate cake delicious. Laugh at your successes and laugh at the rejections and your bloody anonymity and be graceful and humble and raise your eyebrows at times and take such a deep and wonderful delight at everything that everyone is making. Because it could be fucking otherwise? You’re here. This is your time. Make whatever things you have always wanted to make. Please. Trust me it’s all worth it. You’ll look back some day at your little pile of books or stacks of paintings or files of photographs and go, huh! And really, ain’t that pretty cool?
