A Gathering of Poetry: October 2024

It's the third Thursday of the month so I'd like to welcome you to A Gathering of Poetry.

We started cleaning up the garden so I've been thinking about the marvel of the compost pile. I was pleasantly surprised to find a poem about it, and I enjoyed how eloquently Andrew Hudgins wrote about "the opulence of everything that rots". I hope you can appreciate the beauty of your own compost heap.

Compost: An Ode
by Andrew Hudgins

Who can bring a clean thing

out of an unclean?

— JOB 14-4

The beauty of the compost heap is not

the eye’s delight.

Eyes see too much.
They see

blood-colored worms

and bugs so white they seem
to feed off ghosts. Eyes
do not see the heat
that simmers in
the moist heart of decay–
in its unmaking,

making fire,

just hot

enough to burn
itself. In summer, the heap
burns like a stove. It can — almost — hurt you.

I’ve held my hand inside the fire and counted

one, two, three,
four,
I cannot hold it there.

Give it to me, the heat insists. It’s mine.

I yank it back and wipe it on my jeans

as if
I’d really heard the words.

And eyes
cannot appreciate
sweet vegetable rot,
how good it smells
as everything dissolves,
dispersing
back from thing

into idea.
From our own table we are feeding it

what we don’t eat. Orange rind and apple core,

corn husks,
and odds and ends the children smear
across their plates — we feed them all into the slow,

damp furnace of decay. Leaves curl at edges,

buckle,
collapsing down into their centers,
as everything turns loose its living shape

and blackens, gives up

what it once was
to become dirt. The table scraps

and leafage join,
indistinguishable,
the way that death insists it’s all the same,

while life
must do a million things at once.
The compost heap is both — life, death — a slow

simmer,
a leisurely collapsing of
the thing
into its possibilities —
both bean and hollyhock, potato, zinnia, squash:

the opulence
of everything that rots.

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Hudgins, Andrew. "Compost: An Ode". Poetry Magazine, October 1985. 

You can read more about the poet here. 

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Unraveled Wednesday: 10/16/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with a completed hat. There's no official linkup today because Kat is enjoying Presque Isle but it's still Unraveled Wednesday in my mind. The hat (Ravelry link) took me a while considering it's just a hat, but I really like the pattern. It looks more like downward-facing arrows when it's being worn on a head and the cables are stretched out a bit, but I had a few problems. 

I'm a bit concerned that the hat isn't deep enough to fit Justin very well. It only measures 7.25" in depth to the bottom of the folded ribbing, and Justin works outside and wears hats to keep his ears warm. I don't use Ravelry nearly as much as I used to, but it was helpful in telling me that the hats I've previously knit for him were 9-10" deep. I plan on knitting this hat again, repeating part of the pattern a second time to hopefully make it another couple of inches longer. Also, the pattern calls for ending the hat with 27 stitches, threading the yarn tail through those 27 stitches, and pulling tight to close the hole. Twenty-seven stitches seemed like an awful lot to close up, so I did a second round out K3tog to make the hole smaller. Nine stitches looked a lot better than 27. 

Ravelry was also useful in telling me that I still had several skeins of Madeline Tosh Vintage in my stash, so I dug through and was happy to find three skeins in Moorland. It's a nice green that I've used for hats for Justin before, so I'm winding yarn this afternoon and knitting him a second (hopefully improved and better-fitting) Christmas hat. 

I didn't finish any books this week but I'm listening to Intermezzo and reading an ARC of Awake in the Floating City on my Kindle. I'm enjoying both of them, much more than I was when I first started them. 

What are you making and reading this week?

I'm Brave!

I'm not sure that's true, but I was brave enough to get my flu and covid shots at the same time last week. I was admiring all the cute stickers that CVS had for kids, and the pharmacist gave me a bunch of them. 

So if a turtle, unicorn, owl, and narwhal have all documented my bravery, then maybe I really am. 

If I was really brave I would get my pneumonia, RSV, and shingles shots, but I think I'll be brave for those shots another day. 

Are You Resilient?

 I'm not, or I think I could be more resilient, so I took some action after reading this on NPR. 

NPR is doing a series of newsletters over five weeks that they say will provide "powerful tools and strategies that have been shown to help people reduce anxiety and improve feelings of well-being". I've only received the first newsletter, and it has the usual advice that we've all probably read (and maybe practiced) before, like breathing exercises.

More interesting (to me, anyway) is this: NPR is collaborating with Northwestern University to bring an online stress-reduction course and research study to their audience. This free course is based on the work of Judith Moskowitz, a research psychologist at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. It teaches eight skills to boost positive feelings.

The course is based on her 20-plus years of research studying people who have experienced difficult situations, such as being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and people who are caregivers for loved ones with Alzheimer's. Her peer-reviewed studies point to benefits. They are recruiting 20,000 participants for an online, self-guided, positive emotions study. The course will teach eight science-backed stress reduction skills over 5 weeks, with the 6th week being a practice and review period (the entire length of the study will be 12 weeks).

I signed up for the course/study and I can see how this may be beneficial. I'm only in the first week, but there are readings about the skills (Positive Events, Savoring, and Gratitude this week) and home practice (basically just writing about positive events and gratitude on a discussion board like many of you already do in a gratitude journal). I've failed at journaling and documenting things plenty of times before but this format works better for me with everything all in one place and a personal "Dashboard" so I can see what I've done and what I still have to do. It's not overwhelming and I think consistency and practice are important for me. Other skills that will be covered include:

• Daily Mindfulness
• Positive Reappraisal 
• Self-Compassion
• Personal Strength 
• Attainable Goals

If any of this sounds like it might be useful to you or just something you'd like to try, here are the sign-up links:

NPR Stress Less newsletter sign up here.

The Resilience Challenge Course/Study registration information sign up here. 

Here's to being more resilient!

Unraveled Wednesday: 10/9/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with the same hat, still in progress, and just one book. 

I may be too used to knitting Hitchhikers somewhat mindlessly as I find myself making careless mistakes on the hat and having to tink back. But it's a good lesson in paying attention to what I'm doing, like crossing cables correctly and actually counting the numbers of knits and purls correctly. Things go better when I do that and don't try to do something else that takes some of my attention (such as answering John's questions about how many bags of mulch he should get or what Medicare Part D program I have). Those questions can wait but he seems to only ask me things when I'm counting.

I requested The Ideological Brain from NetGalley because it sounded like it might help me better understand how people become radicalized and believe in rigid ideologies, especially during this polarized political season in the US. In a combination of psychology, politics, and philosophy, the author argues that some people are biologically predisposed to rigid ways of thinking. Belief in strict ideologies has long been attributed to social forces but Zmigrod's research looks at this in terms of neural and cognitive principles. The book is written in a scholarly manner and can honestly be a little dry to this non-academic reader, but it has at least shown me that there may be reasons for political beliefs that I see as bordering on crazy. She also describes what an open and flexible thinker looks like. Three and a half stars rounded up.

Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on April 25, 2025.

I do have two new ARCs that I'm reading now. Three Days in June is a new novel from Anne Tyler and Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan. I loved Kat's review of the latter so much last week that I wanted to read it (and I'm not even a big fan of dystopian novels)!

What are you making and reading this week?

Read With Us: It's A New Book

Our leaves here are mainly dry and brown and if John saw me sitting in them reading he would probably yell that it was time to get back to raking, but never mind that. It's time to announce our Fall Read With Us book. 

Simply put, it is a novel about two Irish-Slovak brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who are grieving the death of their father. It explores grief and the ways it is manifested at different times in different people, sibling relationships, and love, familial and otherwise. When I was searching for themes in this book, I especially loved this one: "The novel explores themes such as the fear of being seen as ridiculous." Haven't we all experienced that? (I know I have!)

Our new book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. 

The word intermezzo means a short connecting instrumental movement in an opera or other musical work, or a light dramatic, musical, or other performance inserted between the acts of a play. It has a special meaning in chess, where it is also known as a zwischenzug or "in-between move". It's a chess tactic where a player makes an unexpected move in the middle of a combination to disrupt their opponent's plans. I've only read a few chapters so far but something tells me that this may be the more appropriate meaning. 

Intermezzo is available in hardcover, on Kindle, and in audiobook format from Amazon or better yet, your local bookstore. You can place a hold at your library, and I know the hold queues are long, but hopefully, your library will acquire enough copies to keep the line moving. 

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout November. Discussion day for Intermezzo is scheduled for Tuesday, January 7, 2025, at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always fun, educational, and entertaining Zoom discussion.

I do hope you'll Read With Us. Intermezzo may have messy and imperfect relationships, an unlikeable character or two, and sometimes questionable prose, but there is also love of all sorts. 

Quilts and Dreams

One of the things we did when we were visiting my SiL was go to the Quilt Show put together by the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild. I've been once before and this one was just as impressive. There were small decorative quilts, like the one below,

and Challenge quilts, like these.

The challenge involved turning to page 25 in any magazine and interpreting what was on page 25 into a small quilt. 

There were large quilts,

and medium quilts. 

This one was made of tiny triangles

and this one was inspired by a photograph of the maker's father.

This one was made from selvedges,

this one was made from the maker's father's ties,

and this one was inspired by the Pokey Little Puppy. 

I was entranced by these small quilts for some reason, maybe the tininess of the pieces? Whatever the reason, I stood in front of them for quite a while and even dreamed about cutting out tiny blue pieces that night. 

The only quilting I've done is making some place mats so it would be nice if I could get further inspired by these quilts with tiny pieces and maybe even make one of my own.