Planting seeds of contemplation

If you allow yourself time to think, you actually think.

I've found that in my three-day imposed hermetical seclusion.

In the quiet, I've found the poet Frederick Seidel, described as perhaps the best poet no one knows about in America. I would print portions of his poems here, but he is controversial, largely I suspect because he's supposed to be a highbrow poet but he combines his erudition with lowbrow reality.

Until about five years ago, I was fairly tone deaf to poetry, unable to tell good from bad but attempting to learn. Then I found found the lowest of lowbrow poets anyone could imagine -- Charles Bukowski -- and began to understand a little better. Maybe that's a sign of my stature in life. The learning came not from the vulgarity but from the idea that a poet need not right solely about great grand life and unrequited love and red-breasted robins. I know others knew this before me, but that's how learning occurs. Not when someone tells you something but when the spark of knowledge alights deep below the orbital ridge.

I found Bukowski accessible, just as I find Seidel. More so than Paul Muldoon, whom I like but mostly for his ability to push nice words together rather than my ability to grasp what they all mean.

In a moment of serendipity, cleaning a bookshelf to make room for more books, I found an old notebook from 2006, in which I found some poems from a project of writing poetry based on breaking news. (It's the lazy man's poetry. Someone else has done all the reporting for you, given you the key words; all you have to do is break them up and rearrange them.)

Here's "Peace at Hand":

Amman talked to Olmert and Fouad

So peace could begin at 5 a.m. Monday

That led to

Fifteen dead in Rachef

Eight near the ports of Sidon and Tripoli

Three in air strikes on Kharayeb

One in the Bakaa VAlley

Eleven from Israel

Seventy wounded

To add to the 1,100 dead

In this month of war

Which will cease to fire

So leaders try to run of bombs

and soldiers

and civilians

Three hundred of whom

were some parent's children.

If you're reading this, you're one of fewer than five people alive who've read any poem I've written. (Now I'm up to six -- huzzah.)

And by the end of the day, I had Thomas Merton in mind. He had a master's from Columbia in literature but gave up the dull life of an English professor forever bedding his students for the life in a silent monastery in Kentucky. I grew up reading Merton and -- while I could never understand his poetry worth a damn -- I admired his prodigious output of material, mostly of the autobiographical and spiritual. I thought long that it was because he had the time to produce, being all monked up and all.

So I dug up my mom's old copy of "Seeds of Contemplation," which he wrote in 1949 (and I purloined nearly forty years later) and found this: "There is too much passion and too much physical violence for men to want to reflect much on the interior life and its meaning. yet since the interior life and contemplation are the things we most of all need ... the kind of considerations written in these pages ought to be something for which everybody, and not only monks, would have a great hunger in our time."

I realize today, he had the time to think it first. That's the key.