Dear friends,
I hope that this finds you very well. Next week, I’ll be up at the Omega Retreat Centre, near Rhinebeck, about two hours north of New York City.
(I know, I know, you spell it Center. I don’t. Welcome to the wild world, with many different centres. Ha!)
Anyway, hallo to you, and welcome to you especially if this is the first time you’re reading this newsletter. There’s an invitation below, and I’d love to read your thoughts, especially if you’ve not commented yet.
This week, we released an episode featuring the poem “Reading Celan in a Subway Station,” where the brilliant poet Carolina Ebeid has a speaker reflect on a scene from a subway station, in the accompaniment of an accordion, and then rise in imagination up through the station to the above-ground, to the air, above the buildings, up to “Cause-of-All.”
The poem’s initial scene in the underground has had my imagination all this week. I’ve been in New York City, and have been going from place to place via subway. Anytime I’ve been waiting for a train (six times a day at least) I’ve looked down to the tracks for those ever-present rats. There are so many.
Earlier on today, I saw two rats chase each other in and out of the rails and the sleepers. I’m not a fan of rats (my scientist sister told me the other day that she finds lab rats profoundly cute, and I looked at her with profound skepticism). However, Carolina Ebeid’s poem had me thinking of how the underground can be a site of something like music, something like prayer, something like poetry. Can two rats chasing each other in and out of railway tracks be a poem?
The invitation I got from Carolina Ebeid’s poem was to see something with new eyes.
So this is the invitation: what would you like to see with new eyes?
Maybe it’s rats (hallo, join the club). Maybe it’s winter. Maybe it’s an argument. Say hello in the comments below, and let me know what you’d like to see with new eyes. If I can help, I’ll suggest a poem. Others might too.
If, rather than something you want to see with new eyes, you have a story about how a poem changed your approach towards looking at something, that’d also be a lovely thing to read in the comments. I grew up Catholic, and after years of complication I realized the reasons I hated the word “confession.” But a line from Paul Durcan’s poem, “10.30am Mass, 16 June 1985” (where a dying man asked for confession, and rather than confess sins, confessed “the story of his life”), changed all that in an instant. Such reframings are a site of art and delight for me. I hope that we can offer each other suggestions of support and wonder.
Friends, thanks for the conversation in the chat in these early weeks of this Substack — I love reading and responding, and I’ll look forward to more this week.
Pádraig
PS: In addition to Carolina’s poem, we also featured Adam Zagajewski’s “Transformation” on Poetry Unbound this week. Follow the links to the episode webpage, or give a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Mark your calendars: We’re planning an online launch of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World for the 6th of December. It’ll be a free, celebratory event, with more details coming soon.
Two rats dancing on the train line
I would like to see a loved one’s dementia with new eyes. Can you help me?
hallo padraig!!
thank you for being you and sharing your words with the world…..
when i was a vet tech student, i did an internship at a nyc university inside their comparative medicine unit where they experimented on animals. rats being a favorite (aside - one of my fav books - flowers for algernon) i saw - with young, sensitive eyes, much unnecessary suffering. i grabbed a handful of newborn baby rats, hid them in my scrub pockets, and left early (feigning sickness) all but two died on the subway ride back to my apt. i was syringe feeding them thru the night, and watched as their tiny pink flesh turned blue, then black then green. i named them carbon and monoxide - only
to lose them to the drugs they had given to the mama.
i do not want new eyes - i want to give my eyes to others - so they, too, can see
all the bruises humans have inflicted on
- oh so many -living things.