Bill McKibben's 2008 visit to Oklahoma Christian University

This post is a little different from the rest of my blog. I'm very proud to say that in October, my school (Oklahoma Christian University), was honored to have a visit from a noted author, Bill McKibben. McKibben isn't a poet, but his writing has been very influential in trying to heal the environmental crisis that America has had a hand in creating. Read on for more information.

Oklahoma Christian University—The Oklahoma Christian University campus got a timely wake-up call from author Bill McKibben, a noted environmentalist writer and activist whose Oct. 3 visit changed the way OC students think about the environment. Each year, the McBride Lectureship Series invites a prominent author to the OC Campus to give a speech, answer questions and sign books. This year’s keynote speaker was Bill McKibben, the author of the 2007 bestseller Deep Economy. McKibben’s speech served to educate and motivate the audience about the current environmental crisis. Topics of concern included global warming, the fuel crisis and the decline of local economies. McKibben encouraged his listeners to fight for change on a national level.

Jaclyn Kaissling, a 20-year-old English major, found McKibben’s discussion of local economy especially relevant.

“I think what Bill McKibben said that spoke to me the most was how we’re losing our sense of community,” she said. “Technology has really come in and taken over so that we don’t have that anymore.”

McKibben’s speech advocated a return to farmer’s markets to avoid the high gas usage associated with flying in produce from all over the world. He suggested that a focus on the local economy would lead to a more closely-knit sense of community.

Since then, OC students have expressed greater interest in farmer’s markets. McKibben brought up the idea of OC implementing a vegetable garden, which OC students could use to connect with Tealridge residents through a sense of common accomplishment. Asked about the possibility, SGA secretary Abigail Townsend said “Right now we’re trying to find a good place we could put the garden, since there’s going to be something else built in the spot Bill McKibben mentioned. We hope to make it happen.”

Another key feature of McKibben’s speech was his emphasis on the fact that global warming is happening sooner than scientists expected, and it is important that the United States act now. McKibben provided frightening examples of a world in turmoil to illustrate his point, and he reminded his audience that no other country is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the United States. When asked by concerned audience members what each person could do to stop global warming, McKibben emphasized the importance of symbolic action as a way to spread awareness and let the leaders of the country know that its people demand change.

McKibben’s message had a great impact on senior English/Writing major Whitney Lenevue. “I bought two of his books,” she said. “I knew global warming was a big deal, and I knew it was approaching, but I didn’t know any of the statistics and I didn’t know any of the facts. I’ve actually told my whole family, and I’ve started being more conscious of things.” Lenevue is one of many students who are becoming more environmentally proactive after McKibben’s speech.

John Barker, another English major with plans for law school, felt similarly affected: “It made me reevaluate my personal responsibility to the environment as well as my responsibility as a participant in the democratic process.”

My Father's Love Letters by Yusef Komunyakaa

Last week's poem was a little dark in tone, and this one is definitely dark as well. It's a treasure I recently discovered, but I've known about the author for a long time. Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet best known for his poem about the Vietnam war memorial, "Facing It." Today, however, I'm featuring a slightly lesser-known poem of his that's just as powerful.

My Father's Love Letters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

Many people's first experience with love is not a positive, "functional" one (when it comes to love and family, is there really such a thing as functional anyway?). Interestingly enough, the reader sees the destructive, failed love story between two people--the father and mother--through the emotionally confused eyes of the child. This adds a new complication the story. It is not just about a man and a woman's abusive relationship. It is about how that relationship looks through the eyes of their child, caught in between. It is about the strange, destructive love so many children watch with confusion and torn emotions.

The love in this poem is brutal, dysfunctional, and yet somehow tender: the imagery of sunsets and flowers is very much at odds with the "quiet brutality" of both the speaker's father and the room in which he or she writes. What does all this warring imagery accomplish? The poem expresses that fearful push and pull of love between something violent and destructive and something tender and almost redemptive.

The last three lines hit a very personal chord with me. The speaker describes his father's clumsy effort to find the right words and overcome his own illiteracy in a way that echoes a larger theme we can all relate to: the aching difficulty of trying to express our own emotions in words. The father's lack of literacy or eloquence only highlights a difficulty of expression present in even the most well-read.

I hope you love this poem half as much as I do. Take a look at another "love" poem; this one is ambiguous and confuses me a little, which I think goes very well with this week's theme. Read for yourself and discover what you think is the meaning behind Always Pity.

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

I'm moving away from love poems this week (or am I?) to talk about a more apocalyptic topic and to reference my favorite poet of all time, Robert Frost. Frost is known primarily for his nature poetry (two of his most famous are Two Roads Diverged in a Wood and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening), but I'm providing something a little different.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

For a poet so known for his contemplation on the beauty of nature, this poem seems more than a little dark. I haven't come across a lot of poetry that talks about the apocalypse, which makes this all the more interesting for me.

Of course, Frost isn't just referring to one type of apocalypse here. I don't think this poem is exclusively about the literal end of the Earth--it's also about a much more person apocalypse. On one level, you could interpret the poem as anti-war: the fire is the war and death around us, which will destroy us if we don't find a way to make peace. It could also be a humanitarian poem, with the ice representing apathy towards suffering, which will eventually destroy us all.

But I think the most profound level of this poem is its meaning on a personal level. The poem functions here as a meditation on what destroys us: our lust, our desire, our greed and our hatred, our cruelty, our selfishness. It is just as frightening and dangerous to be cold as it is to be hot.

However you read this poem, there's something chilling and unsettling going on here. Robert Frost has found that part of human nature we most fear, latched onto it, and set it all before us in poetic form.

Everyone knows Frost is a poet. One of my English professors would probably tell me to call him a Poet, but that's a story for another time. Today I've also discovered what I think is a brilliant poem from someone who does not consider him or herself a poet at all--or does (s)he? Read Steve Site's poem and decide for yourself.

What Love is Like by Piet Hein

What Love is Like

Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.

-Piet Hein

Can one simple little analogy really be considered a poem? I think so. Still, to write a poem of this length takes extreme attention to detail and an excellent sense of how words work. I don't know much about Piet Hein besides that he was Danish and lives A Long Time Ago, meaning before I was born (he died in 1966). Actually, I kind of like discovering a beautiful poem, looking at the author, and thinking, "who?" That's when a poem can really live and breathe on its own. It has no author we know, so the poem has a unique, separate identity. I like that

About this poem itself: ask someone you know who you're absolutely sure is in love to define it. People tend to give pretty ambiguous answers. "Well, it's not easy..." "You'll know it when you see it." "It took me a while to find it..." No one seems able to just tell you "love is always exactly like this and here is a list I made out with diagrams to make it clear for you." You can't do that. Fortunately, we've all loved someone or been loved at some point in our life, whether it be by a lover, a family member, or a friend. Thank God for that, because without firsthand experience we'd never get it right.

Like short poems? Try your hand at writing some of your own! See this blog post for further info on how you can try your hand at writing short poetry in the form of a haiku.

It's Raining in Love by Richard Brautigan

For the first time, I'm featuring a male poet! Yes, men can write poetry too.

It's Raining in Love

I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.

It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying.

If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking: Does she really like me?

In other words
I get a little creepy.

A friend of mine once said,
"It's twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them."

I think he's right and besides,
it's raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That's all taken care of.

BUT

if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
"Do you think it's going to rain?"
and I say, "It beats me,"
and she says, "Oh,"
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
instead of me.

-Richard Brautigan

Now, when you think about this, the last few lines of this poem aren't very nice. It isn't considerate to be so gleeful when you find out someone else is in that early, miserable stage of head-over-heels in love because of you, is it? Ideally, a person would feel guilty. The truth is, we rarely do. Love can be such a miserable, frustrating thing that the evil little voice in the back of our heads--the one that wants to drink milk out of the carton or offend everyone at the family reunion out of spite--rejoices to see someone else going through the pain and uncertainty we've all suffered.

For another quirky look at the eccentricities of love (this one's extremely relevant to our pop culture era), check out Refrigerator Poetry.

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is so famous I doubt she needs an introduction. Here's a poem of hers that I am simultaneously afraid of and in love with:

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

We've all had that moment when we look in the mirror and realize we do not like what we see. I don't believe self-image is any more or less of an issue than it was in 1961 when this was written; the mother of the fashionably anorexic herself, 60s supermodel Twiggy, came into vogue just five years after this poem was written. Still, body image is a very hot topic now. Everyone wants to enter into the "fat or thin" debate, people love to gossip about how thin Keira Knightley is, Barbie's changed her proportions--some celebrity is probably getting a nose job right now.

A few years ago when I was in Japan, I was flipping through a magazine aimed at teen girls when I saw an unusual ad featuring close-up pictures of young Japanese girls' eyes and before and after pictures. I went and asked my host sister what the ad said, and she explained to me that I was looking at an ad for double eyelid surgery.

I mention all of this to show just how much Sylvia Plath's poem has to do with every day of our lives. People go to great lengths to fix what the mirror shows them, but the poem suggests that we can never really fix it. There have been debates about whether the poem refers to literal aging in the last few lines or emotional aging or worsening depression (Sylvia Plath committed suicide two years after writing this poem), and I think both readings are important.

But is it possible learn from a poet who obviously didn't have all the answers? I think so. Plath's poem expresses the insecurity, fear, and even self-loathing that often dwells within our mirrors. As a poet, her job is only to illuminate--not to answer.

Not Waving but Drowning

This time I'm featuring a poem that's a little more recent; this one was published in 1957, and I love it.

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

First I think it's important to note that "larking" in this context means "playing pranks." I didn't know the word the first time I read this, but I could kind of tell by context.

We read this poem a few weeks ago in my Reading and Writing Poetry class, and everyone had a slightly different interpretation. They were all insightful and lovely, but here's my personal take: this poem seems to me to be about the trouble so many of us have all our lives connecting to other people. We struggle, each in our own way, to be understood and to understand. I think a lack of understanding is at the root of most wars, whether they're the door-slamming, name-calling variety we wrestle out in the living room or the bloody, bomb-dropping kind we read about in newspapers. The misunderstanding here is literal--he's not waving, he's drowning--but in the last stanza it becomes startingly metaphorical and tragic far beyond an accidental death.

I read the last stanza as the man talking. Whether he's actually saying this or if he would say it were he still alive is a mystery, but it doesn't really matter. He's doing what all of us fear so much: looking back on his life and his struggle to connect with others and realizing, in his final moments, that he never really did.

How I wish this poem were just fiction.

On a slightly happier note, here's another blogger's take on how to make the most of life, in spite of all the big and little things that might get in the way. Check out her introspection and other musings.