PENNY PERRY'S SANTA MONICA DISPOSAL & SALVAGE

Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage is an exceptional book of poems by Penny Perry.  It is at once memoir, cultural and period snapshot and volume of compelling and grace-filled poems.  Here, in these autobiographical poems, Penny Perry shapes a coming-of-age story filled with abandonment and redemption (or the “disposal” and “salvage” of the title).

Penny Perry’s collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage, is set in sunny Southern California, “a place everyone wants to visit,” but the reader soon hears that not all is cheery here:

I learned early past every harbor
there is a line in the horizon,
a final swell, a last door you can’t open.
…
Dare to lift trash can lids in paradise.
Peer under dead palm branches
for body parts you’ve left behind.”

And it’s this “left behind” that is a major theme, captured first in the book’s title (which was the name of her father’s junk yard — “my mother, an English major, named it — “) and carried as the abandonment and survival which mark these poems.  

In addition to parental abandonment, which is central to the book:

After my mother died, [my father] disappeared.
We became each other’s refuse,
egg-shell reminders of a former life.
Like gulls, those unwelcome picnic guests,
we circled each other…

there is also her grandfather’s casting off his Jewish identity:

Blonde, blue-eyed, impeccable English,
he packed his prayer shawl and yarmulke,
changed his last name,
dressed in “Episcopalian clothes:”
white shirt, tie, black shoes.

Additionally seen are “old men playing cards” on the Santa Monica boardwalk by the beach, men who “escaped the Czar, Stalin, Hitler/and have come as far west as they could go.”

And, early in the book, when doctors first began to use ether,

The doctor glanced at his medical license
framed on the wall behind him,
said he was afraid to use ether.

her mother’s sister dies during a medical procedure: “It happened fast.  Ether, a busy housewife,/pulled down the shades.”

What, and who, has been left behind (as well as the feeling of being left behind) is one of the central motifs of this collection of poems.

But there is also salvage, and survival.  Here is one example, and one of my favorite poems from the book:

HOLLYHOCKS

Three days after my mother died,
her hollyhocks tumbled down
under their own weight.  My father disappeared.
I had eaten the last

of her meatloaf wrapped in wax paper.
She had waved me out of her kitchen.
“No need to learn to cook.
You’ll be a professor.” She ground her own meat,

the red strings wriggling like worms.
Though I only had my learner’s permit,
I drove her old PLYMOUTH to the store.
There were whole aisles in SAFEWAY

she never went down. That first day I bought
BIRD’S EYE frozen broccoli,
macaroni and cheese. The mothers
of my friends told their daughters,

“Stay away from her.  Who knows
what’s going on in that house?
Parties.  Boys.”  There were no parties.
No boys.  Nights, I would call Time

to her a lady say it was three-oh-three.
I made JELLO and SWANSON’S turkey dinners.
I asked the gym teacher, perky Miss Butler,
a woman whom a month before I would never

have talked to, about salads.  Miss Butler
coached the girls’ marching drill team.
She told me she had polio as a child.
People could survive all sorts of things.

She said, “Wash the lettuce first.”
I fried hamburger meat, flames jumping
wildly under the iron skillet.  A month later,
my father reappeared, moved us to a dingy

apartment across town.  Nights, I would sit
in my mother’s car in front of our old house.
The new owner, a gardener, stacked
my mother’s hollyhocks.

I couldn’t see the pale pink, ruby, and yellow
flowers in the dark.  But I knew they were there.
(previously published in Contemporary World Poetry)

What impresses me most about Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage is the well-crafted way the book is put together.  Not only does this volume of poetry mesh two opposing conditions (disposal and salvage), a long-standing poetic tradition, but also, in her placement of poems, this talented poet links her poems, so there’s a unified bridge (another great tradition in American poetry) by which all the emotional and cultural perspectives bump up against each other.  For example, in “Noon under the Orange Trees,” she describes her mother, on her final afternoon, in a set of contrasts:

A California housewife —
blue jeans, hair in curlers
wrapped in a red bandana —
sits under an orange tree
eating a peanut butter sandwich,
reading Harper’s Bazaar,
studying models in LILY ANNE suits
posing on Park Avenue.

In the next poem, “Foretelling,” the grandmother arrives in 

… her stylish wool suit, a LILY
ANNE copy, she steps up our stone path
and opens the door

and is told of her daughter’s sudden death.  The small detail of the name-brand suits links the poems.  (The author uses specific store and brand names to ground many of her poems in time and place.)

This technique is also evident in the ending, and its images, of “Living in a Place Everyone Wants to Visit:”

Breathe in the scent of orange blossoms.
Count as lucky the waves in the sea.

which links to the final lines of the ensuing poem, “Floating:”

The doctor waved my mother in.
White face, head back, Leona was no longer breathing.
The ribbon in her dark hair floated in the breeze of the fan.

Penny Perry’s Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press) is powerful and captivating; her poetry, clear, gracious and graceful.  This is a standout book by a splendid poet.

Click here to go to Garden Oak Press.

ARIZONA POET LAUREATE

Arizona recently selected its first poet laureate (Alberto Ríos), making it the 43rd US state with a post of poet or writer laureate.  Ríos was the unanimous first choice of an expert panel (which sent three nominations to the governor) after a selection process outlined by a law passed by the Legislature.

Alberto Ríos was born in Nogales, a small border town in southern Arizona, to a Mexican-American father and a British mother (whom the father met as a soldier in World War II and brought back to Arizona).  He received his MFA from the University of Arizona (in Tucson) and teaches as a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University (in the Phoenix area).  

Ríos is an award-winning poet, novelist and memoirist.  His first book, Whispering to Fool the Wind (Sheep Meadow Press, 1982), was chosen by Donald Justice as winner of the 1981 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.  The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart, winner of the 1984 Western States Book Award, was published by Blue Moon Press.  He was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award for his Poetry collection, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body.  His memoir about growing up on the US-Mexican border, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), was chosen for the OneBookAZ reading program in 2009.  Ríos also has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In the 1970s, as part of Poets in the Schools, he traveled all over the state doing workshops in schools and libraries.  When his memoir was selected for the OneBookAZ, he again traveled around the state, going back to many of the same places as he’d been to for Poets in the Schools.

In 2002, a public-art project “Words Over Water” was installed in a series of granite tiles around Tempe Town Lake (in Arizona), each tile inscribed with a thought composed by Alberto Ríos and meant to represent the history of the Salt River.  These single lines are philosophical aphorisms, often humorous, based on the Hispanic tradition of greguerias. Here are four of my favorite ones:

We have rain but it’s a dry rain.

In the desert, water is the only thing that doesn’t taste like chicken.

A lake is a river that has retired.

A lake is a hoof-print of the mighty water-horse.

But Alberto Ríos is a fine poet.  Here are two of his poems:

REFUGIO’S HAIR

In the old days of our family
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera — the Land of the Lime —
And her days were happy.

But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bare-back, and sit there
As he held its face in his arms.

And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse’s rear leg.

The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.

When they reached the tress and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.

The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.

But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short, like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.
(published in The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body,       Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

THE PURPOSE OF ALTAR BOYS

Tonio told me at catechism
the big part of the eye
admits good, and the little
black part is for seeing
evil — his mother told him
who was a widow and so
 an authority on such things.
That’s why at night
the black part gets bigger.
That’s why kids can’t go out
at night, and at night
girls take off their clothes
and walk around their
bedrooms or jump on their
beds or wear only sandals
and stand in their windows.
I was the altar boy
who knew about these things,
whose mission on some Sundays
was to remind people of
the night before as they
knelt for Holy Communion.
To keep Christ from falling
I held the metal plate
under chins, while on the thick
red carpet of the altar
I dragged my feet
and waited for the precise
moment: plate to chin
I delivered without expression
the Holy Electric Shock,
the kind that produces
a really large swallowing
and makes people think.
I thought of it as justice.
But on other Sundays the fire
in my eyes was different,
my mission somehow changed.
I would hold the metal plate
a little too hard
against those certain same
nervous chins, and I
I would look
with authority down
the tops of white dresses. 
(published in The Morrow Anthology of Younger 
          American Poets, 1985)

Click to read an interview of Alberto Rios.

Click to see video and hear Alberto Rios.



  

YEATS EXHIBIT AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

I saw a wonderful exhibit on William Butler Yeats, at the National Library of Ireland, when I was there recently. There were display cases containing drafts of his poems, letters, photographs, gifts from others that became subjects of poems, photos of various male and female friends, playbills and books.  There were areas where videos played (one on his interest in the occult, another on Yeats and the women in his life, on the Irish Literary Theatre, and one as an introduction).  One area had a place to sit and listen to an audio presentation of his poetry and a screen on which was projected the particular poem being read.  It was a delightful exhibit — and I didn’t have enough time to see it thoroughly.

But I grabbed the brochure for YEATS: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats, as the exhibit is titled.  On the back of the brochure is printed

Explore our Yeats online exhibition
www.nli.ie/yeats

So when I returned home, I checked out the website and — WOWY-ZOWY! — it’s just like being at the exhibit in Ireland.

After clicking and getting into the site, there’s a map of the exhibit at the bottom right of the screen.  You can click an area and — whoosh — you’re in the area, in front of a display case or video screen.  Click on an object in the display case and a close-up with description appears.  (I clicked on a lapis-lazuli carving that was hard to see up close in the actual exhibit and online I was able to see it in detail and with views from all sides.)  Click on a video screen and see the video.

Click her to go to the exhibit.

This is an amazing exhibit — and all at your fingertips.  I’m not certain how long the exhibit will run: I’m presuming, at least, through the end of this year.

Enjoy!


   

FEATURING STEVE MCDONALD

Steve McDonald’s poems are always a joy for me to read.  He writes about ordinary people — and the everyday things and natural world around them — with open-hearted empathy.  His writing is well-crafted, lyrical and, as I said before, a pleasure for the reader.

Steve's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Nimrod, RATTLE, The Crab Creek Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Spillway, Blue Unicorn, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and The Cresset.  His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2010.  Steve is Professor Emeritus of English and former Dean of Languages and Literature at Palomar College in San Marcos, California.

Of his first book, Where There Was No Pattern (Finishing Line Press), poet Maurya Simon said it “brims with life…McDonald is a poet graced with a deft imagination, a poignant sense of mortality, and true insight into human pathos.”

What I enjoy in Steve’s poems is his humility and humanity, and how he’s able to transform these into avenues for grace.  For example, he’s a regular guy who has to mow his own lawn — but, as a poet, finds a way to uplift the chore into moments of spiritual insight (from a poem in his first book).

His new book, House of Mirrors (Tebot Bach) is now available and already has garnered kudos from other writers.  Judith Pacht, author of Summer Hunger, praises Steve McDonald’s way of “[making] the ordinary extraordinary as he examines nature and ourselves in unflinching detail.  In House of Mirrors, we move from the wonder of a spider and its intricate web to the machinations of the human heart…These are elegant poems — moving and redemptive.” Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men, lauds Steve’s new book’s “attention to language and empathy for its subject matter, the human in all their many guises.”  Ellen Bass and Joseph Millar, distinguished poets, concur and add more praise.

Steve is a superb craftsman.  He has an excellent sense of when and how to use poetic techniques to enrich and expand his poems.  I especially like, in “Rain” from his new book, House of Mirrors, how he furthers a reader’s sense of the rural landscape (besides using “fields” and “wet soil, bladed tillers and chisel plows” — what you’d expect in the country) by including farming images as part of his description of an elementary school: “the corn-silk yellow of caution lights,/ a crop of children,/…parents hovering like harvest moons.” 

For information about his new book and to order a signed copy, click here

Here are three of Steve's poems.

RAIN
        by Steve McDonald



No sidewalk, just the garbled lyrics 
of a muddy path, just rain humming
                                        I will wash the brown earth, 
          and a mother, perhaps twenty-five, 
                          and a son, perhaps seven. 

She is holding his hand, urging him 
past fields darkening into thunder,
                           past roots 
                                         anchored in folds of wet
soil, bladed tillers and chisel plows
                           crammed into long low sheds. 

In the distance
            the corn-silk yellow of caution lights, 
                           a crop of children, 
                                         an elementary school, 
parents hovering like harvest moons. 

           It rains harder.

                                         Hoods up, heads down, 
                                         mother and son 
dodge sink-holes of mud-
filled puddles. A roadside flower stand 

gathers its bouquets—carnation and daisy, 
rose and mum—buttons its coat. 
                                               Rain blossoms 
                                               from rusty gutters.

Mother and son pass
              bicycles tangled like razor wire, 
                            a broken fence, a grocery—migrants
huddled against the weather,
              fingers stuffed
into damp pockets, stories rising
like steam from wet earth. 

           The rain says pour.

Crates of oranges, 
            flats of strawberries, lean in, 
                                                                listening.

SPHINX
    by Steve McDonald

When limestone faces 
wear rivers of cracks,

weathered grimaces 
and frozen grins

create only questions, 
awaken memories

of a parent,
perhaps, whose

series of strokes
left lips uncertain:

the legacy, a hieroglyphic
glance, shards

of shattered Rosetta stone,
the chance for communion 

with the one who is gone,
gone. Just a bed, 

a shroud of sand piling
upon a craggy face,

a sheet of wind sliding 
over the body like a lover,

silent yet ready
with the riddle, 

the one it will carve
in stone. 



MEMENTO MORI
      by Steve McDonald

Once, when a boy, I awoke alone
on the sun-baked boulders at the edge 

of the canyon falls to find a snake, 
green and yellow, curled on the rock 

next to me, asleep, it seemed, or nearly so, 
although its eyes were open, or perhaps 

I was asleep and dreaming, for I did not move, 
just gazed through eyes that seemed to have opened

in a way they had not opened before, 
the snake and I waiting and watching 

as the steady elegy of the waterfall 
spilled into the sun-filled pool. And then,

it seemed,  I awoke again to find myself
at the edge of the off ramp, waiting

for the light to change, waiting to turn 
into the coffee shop for a cup of green tea

and a pastry to ease the burden 
of the long drive home, and as I waited

and watched, a yellow motorcycle swung 
like a scythe from one lane to the next, 

then pulled to a stop in front of me, 
and the rider, a boy in a red jacket, 

rested his foot on the earth, one lover 
leaning into another, then bent at the waist 

as if to embrace his bike, the full moon 
of his helmet rising above the curve 

of his jacket, and emblazoned 
on his helmet were scriptures of death,

one bone-white skull after another 
so that when he surveyed the road 

to his right and then to his left
all I could see were rotating skulls, 

empty eye sockets, dark nasal cavities, 
and I wondered why one would enwreathe 

his head with death, what need that might fill, 
and then I thought of the snake, its gaze

upon my gaze, and the pool, and the fall
of the water, and my own awakening,

and my eyes opened again to this boy, 
the skulls adorning his head my invitation, 

it seemed, to quicken him with imagining, 
ensoul him with wondering, as together 

we waited to spill into the pool of evening.

SAINTS FOR OUR TIMES

Did you know that there’s a patron saint of television?  A thirteenth-century saint — which seems odd as TV was a twentieth-century invention.  But here’s the thinking behind it: Clare of Assisi, in her final years, was very ill.  When she was too weak to attend Mass, a moving picture of the service was projected, miraculously, on the wall of her nun’s cell. (In addition to being patron saint of television, she’s also patron saint of television writers.)

After learning of the patron saint of television, I was going to question whether there’s a patron saint of radio (but have discovered it’s Gabriel, the Archangel, who’s also the saint for radio workers and those in the diplomatic service). Patron saint of the Internet?  St. Isidore of Seville.  I haven’t looked up whether there’s a patron saint of the phonograph (or MP3 player).

Patron saints are chosen, usually based on some incident in their lives.  St. Lidwina, a fourteenth-century Dutch mystic, is patron saint of ice skaters because at age 15 she was ice skating, fell into a river and broke her rib.  (She never recovered; became paralyzed – except for her left hand – and pieces of her body fell off and blood poured out of her mouth, ears and nose.  Some biographers think she suffered from multiple sclerosis.)  

Lidwina after falling into river
(Notice her ice skates.)

St. Columbanus, an Irish saint from the sixth and seventh centuries, is patron saint of motorcyclists because, as a missionary, he traveled great distances to many places.  In art, he is represented as bearded, wearing the monastic cowl and holding a book and an Irish satchel as he stands in the midst of wolves.

Often patron saints are invoked against some illness or fatal situation — again, often based on some part of their lives.  St. Hyacinth (a man) is invoked, in prayers, to intercede against drowning.  Several times he walked on water.  St. Harvey (or Hervé), who is invoked against eye trouble, was born blind.  St. Agatha is patron saint of breast cancer patients.  On orders of a spurned suitor who was the governor of Sicily, Agatha’s breasts were cut off.  (Her flesh was healed by none other than St. Peter who appeared as a doctor willing to reattach her breasts.)

OK, where am I going with all this?

Stephen Mitchell, who has written outstanding translations of Rilke, Job and Tao Te Ching, has a delightful prose poem called “Saint Ineptus” in a book of his own poetry (Parables and Portraits, published in hardcover in 1990 and in paperback in 1994).

SAINT INEPTUS
by Stephen Mitchell

Born in third-century Illyria, he soon established a reputation for spilling his food, bruising himself, and tripping over non-existent objects in the street. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, in the hope that the rigorous training would make him more attentive. But he refused. Instead, he spent his time looking for angels in the dark alleyways of his native town, and feeding the stray cats. Even his martyrdom was botched. He felt so terrified, as the wild beasts approached him in the amphitheater, that he forgot the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
       He has become the patron saint of the clumsy, the tactless, and the unqualified. They are instructed to leave a candle burning for him once a month (making sure that there is nothing flammable in the vicinity). His intercession is said to do more good than harm.

Do you have any poems on (fictional) saints for our times?
   

WHIRLING DERVISHES AND RUMI

Last time I wrote about Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet.  Now I want to tell you about the Whirling Dervishes and give you more of Rumi’s poetry (on the whirling dance).

Islamic mysticism, that aspect of Islamic belief and practice of seeking to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God, is known as Sufism.  (The word Sufi derives from an Arabic word for wool – a reference to the coarse woolen garments of early Islamic ascetics.)  The Sufis are known as dervishes, Persian for the poor.  This usually means the poor in spirit or the humble but also can be translated as beggar.

Sufism emerged out of an early reaction against the general worldliness that had overtaken the Islamic community and against the reliance on expressions of solely outward appearance and behavior based on Islamic law.  In its first stage (asceticism), Sufism, practiced in small groups, consisted in the constant meditation of the Qu’ran, especially scriptural words about Doomsday.  With the introduction of the element of love of God, Sufism changed from asceticism to mysticism.

By the twelfth century, Sufism transformed from the practice and doctrine of small circles into a mass religious movement, especially with the spread of Sufi orders or brotherhoods.  The orders centered around their shaikh (master), with their shrines constituting the places of pilgrimage for their followers.

The Mevlevi Order (from the name Mevlana which mean our guide or our lord in Persian and was the name given to Rumi who is referred to as Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi) was founded by one of Rumi’s sons to carry on the master’s teachings and practices.  (For 700 years, the sect has been led by Mevlana’s direct progeny.)  The Mevlevis are known as semazens [whirling dervishes, or those who practice the sema (whirling dervish ceremony)].

During his lifetime, Rumi often was seen whirling through Konya in sheer ecstasy.  Also he found himself drawn to circle a pillar in the mosque.  He held the pillar with one hand and would lean back as he circled the pillar.  This movement caused poetry to pour out from his lips in ecstatic waves.  His disciples began to mimic this movement.

When I saw a sema —  and not one of the purely commercial shows (usually with an added bellydancing act!) — it was held in a thirteenth-century caravanserai (a gated inn, with a large central courtyard, in which caravans – the men, camels and cargo – could stop safely for the night while traveling on the Silk Road).  The sema I saw was a primarily spiritual event and deeply moving.

A sema consists of seven distinct parts, each representing a step in a mystical journey.  The performance follows a strictly prescribed ritual.  Some parts consist of a chant, another accompanied by a drum and/or reed flute and the conclusion with recitations from the Qu’ran.

In the dance, the dervishes, with their arms crossed across their torso (to testify their unity with God) begin to spin, starting on their right foot, spinning counter-clockwise (around the heart, embracing all of humankind and creation with affection and love).  Arms begin to stretch out as they continue to spin.  One hand is cupped upward to receive the grace of God and the other hand is turned downward to empty that grace onto the world.

The dance requires months of practice.  A novice either uses a sema board (a portable wooden board with an exposed nail in the middle) or he wedges a large floor nail between the big and second toes of his left foot and pivots around it with both arms extended, one palm up and the other down.

In 1925, when Ataturk formed the new, and secular, Republic of Turkey, he ordered all religious sects and orders (brotherhoods) closed.  That included the Mevlevi Order and their tekkes (dervish lodges).  The Order’s assets were confiscated and all ceremonies banned.  Two years later, The Mevlana Mausoleum, where Rumi’s tomb is, in Konya, was allowed to reopen, but only as a museum.  By the 1950s, the Turkish government again permitted the order to hold its annual whirling dervish performance in Konya to commemorate the death of its master.  (The Mevlana Mausoleum is one of the most visited monuments in Turkey.)

Here are three of Rumi’s poems:

[Untitled]

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
translated by Coleman Barks

[Untitled]

A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head.  Neither cares.
They keep turning.
translated by Coleman Barks

[Untitled]

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
         translated by Coleman Barks


    

RUMI

In late April (before the protests in Taksim Square), I went on a tour of Turkey.  One of the stops was the city of Konya in Cappadocia.

Konya has an extensive history and has had many names.  The area around Konya was inhabited as early as the eighth millennium BC.  When the Hittites arrived there in mid-2000 BC, they called it Kuwanna.  The Phrygians (8th century BC) renamed it Kowannia.  The Romans latinized the name to Iconium.  The Seljuk Turks (after crushing the Byzantines in 1071) turkicized the city’s name to its present Konya and established their capital there (renaming themselves the Sultanate of Rum).

This brings me to the highlight of a visit to Konya: the shrine and tomb of Mevlana Jelaleddin, whom we know as Rumi, poet and mystic.

Born September 30, 1207 in Balkh, in modern-day Afghanistan, Jelaleddin (Rumi) came from a noted family of poets and Islamic jurists.  Between 1215 and 1220, his family fled (in advance of attacking Mongol armies) and settled in 1228 in Konya, where his father, a scholar and teacher of Islam, was invited to head the medressa (an Islamic theological academy/seminary, typically built with a tall portal linked to two-storied corridors with dormitories for students and lecturers, library and lesson rooms).  At his father’s death, Rumi succeeded him as shaikh (sheik or master) of the Sufi (Islamic mystic) learning community in Konya. (Jelaleddin acquired the name Rumi because he was from (or of) Rum, the Seljuk Turks’ name for former-Roman Anatolia.)

Crucial to Rumi’s writing and thought was his deep friendship with the Sufi mystic Shams of Tabriz who taught Rumi spiritual dance, music and poetry.  Within less than four years of his appearance, Shams vanished (probably murdered by jealous students of Rumi, led by one of Rumi’s sons, Allaedin).  Grief-stricken, Rumi withdrew.  During this period he wrote 50,000 verses, some expressing his deep loss and referring to Shams as his soul mate.  These mystical love poems take their imagery from everyday life, so that they are vivid, fresh and convincing.

Rumi lived another quarter of a century during which he wrote the Mathnawi (or Mesnevi), an encyclopedic five or six volumes on mystical thought, theories and images, written in Persian (the language of literature).  It is regarded by most Persian-speaking orders of Sufis as second in importance only to the Qu’ran.  Rumi died on December 17, 1273.

Here are two poems by Rumi:

THE GUEST HOUSE

This human being is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
translated by Coleman Barks

MY WORST HABIT

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter.
I become a torture to those I’m with.

If you’re not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity.  My words
tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water?  Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits?  Send me back to you. 

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean.  There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back toward you.
translated by Coleman Barks