Janice Greenwood

Mental journeys, like physical ones, can be dangerous. It can be helpful to have a guide. The meditative poem can serve as an entryway into altered states of consciousness. This is why I love meditative poetry. The goal of the meditative poem is transcendence. This is achieved through rhythm and incantation.

Really, any poem can be a meditation poem. The act of writing a poem itself is a form of meditation. To be mindful is to pay attention.

Meditation poetry, historically, has been the poetry of pilgrimage and retreat. I think of Han Shan’s hermetic Cold Mountain poems translated beautifully by Gary Snyder (which I review here). These simple and spare poems have the feeling of a well-trodden path through the woods. There’s a sense of familiarity to them when one returns, but also a constant process of discovery. Here is one of my favorites:

“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: There’s no through trail…

How did I make it?

My heart’s not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You’d get it and be right here.”

Han Shan translated by Gary Snyder

The poems of mindfulness, from Han Shan’s perspective, are poems of solitude. But these are not the only poems of meditation. Just as Han Shan’s poems are about the journey inward, Matsuo Basho’s poems from Narrow Road to the Interior are about the journey outward. Basho wrote Narrow Road to the Interior while trekking across the Japanese countryside. The poetry and prose are taken from a journal he kept during the journey.

“The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Basho. Narrow Road to the Interior. Translated by Sam Hamill.

What’s so delightful about meditative poetry is the way it invites the reader to pause and reflect. I believe that for ancient people, poetry was a means to achieve altered states of consciousness. Chants and songs were invoked to create a rhythmic and trancelike state. The incantatory can be transcendent. Poetry, when read aloud, can result in altered states of consciousness. I theorize that this was the original role of poetry. Today that role has been largely lost, but I don’t think it’s beyond redemption.

Poetry still brings us together in ways no other art form can. Poems are still read at weddings and funerals. The words we choose to mark transitional periods in our lives still matter. Even on the internet, amid the endless scrolling through social media, I find poets calling out into the silence, asking to be heard.

Corvid

It was a lost year anyway

so we put a bird feeder inside the house,

let the floor go to seed.

We kept the window open

and the trades blew through.

A bird flew inside. Then another.

One got lost under the ceiling fan, spinning,

until exhausted, it landed

at the feet of the Buddha

I’d put on a platform over the kitchen table

where we had laid out the mangoes

and the breadfruit.

And there they sat–bird and Buddha

until the bird came to its senses,

saw the opened window

and flew outside.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The summer before I entered middle school, my brother and I sat down to play a video game. We didn’t know what we were getting into. To this day, I still believe that Final Fantasy XII is the best game ever made. I’m not an avid gamer, but Final Fantasy XII is different.

Final Fantasy XII unfolds like a good novel—it’s a literary epic. Not only is the game well-written, but the music is sublime (symphony orchestras have played the soundtrack). The story tackles themes like love, death, loss, conservation, sacrifice, and hope. The writers trusted the intelligence of the game players, and the tale is not told linearly. There are plots, side-plots, and flashbacks. We learn about the protagonist, Cloud just as we learn about Gatsby in the Great Gatsby—in bits and pieces and sometimes not at all.

Final Fantasy XII is so much more than a video game, it’s a meditation on the human condition. It draws its themes from mythology and literature. There are genetic experiments and monstrous births, reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There’s a tragic love story, invoking Dante’s Divine Comedy and a little Romeo and Juliet for good measure. There’s intricate-world building. You can drive a submarine, blow up a power plant, gamble your days away at the casino, and even get into breeding birds (the chocobo, for the uninitiated, is a special Final Fantasy XII bird that can be ridden like a horse). There are games within games, invoking every type of video game imaginable, from role playing games, car racing games, war tactics games, and more. In this way, Final Fantasy XII is much like Dante’s Divine Comedy, more an encyclopedia of knowledge about game making and game playing at the point of its creation, in the same way that the Divine Comedy was an encyclopedia of medieval learning at the point of its writing. Every mode of game-playing is explored and exploited.

There’s even a lesson in Mendelian genetics.

Breeding chocobos was my favorite pastime in the game.

I know a lot about breeding chocobos. I spent an entire summer doing it. You start with plain yellow chocobos and, if you are patient, diligent, and if you listen to everything Chocobo Bill has to say, you’ll end up with a coveted gold chocobo, the most amazing of all the chocobos—not only for its bright shimmering hue, but also for its ability to move freely throughout the entire Final Fantasy XII world, allowing you to receive special powers that prove incredibly useful when trying to defeat the boss of the game, the notorious Sephiroth.

Or course, the game doesn’t tell you this.

You can defeat Sephiroth without getting a gold chocobo. But like many things in life, it’s the detours and side-projects that often form us, inform us and change us forever. It’s the wrong bus we took without which we wouldn’t have met him. The night you choose that seat at the bar. The day you bought the surf board on a whim. The side project at work that somehow becomes your career. These small atomic shifts that become the flapping wings of the butterfly that somehow define the greater storms and doldrums of our lives.

The video game ended up consuming my entire summer. I still remember sitting on the bedroom floor, a bowl of strawberries to my right (my favorite childhood snack) and a bottle of coke to my left—all the nutrients I’d need to save the planet. Most importantly, I was a chocobo breeder, and an expert one at that. We didn’t have access to the Internet in those days. Everything I learned about chocobo breeding I had to learn from Chocobo Bill, from racing chocobos at the casino, and from trial and error.

Breeding chocobos brings us back to a world before Google. A world where you had to talk to other people to learn things, a world where it was still possible to get lost, where a quick search couldn’t always reliably bring you back home. There was no Google maps. There was just intuition, your inner sense of direction, and other people.

The key thing to know about chocobo breeding is that it takes time. In order to afford it, you’ll need to beat a lot of monsters. The monsters are not easy to find. You need to venture out into the forest, looking for fights. Some monsters have rare nuts. If you are patient and learn how to breed the right chocobos, you’ll end up with a golden chocobo, the ultimate prize.

I still remember the day I finally bred my gold chocobo. It was better than beating Sephiroth, the final boss of the game (I defeated him quickly thanks to all the strength I had gained while trying to breed chocobos). But of all the tasks in the game, successfully breeding a gold chocobo was best of all.

I think there’s a lesson here.

I’m not going to tell you how to breed chocobos. The right way is the hard way. Don’t take the shortcut. Talk to Chocobo Bill. Look for rare nuts. Go in search of strange monsters. Make mistakes. Have fun.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Documentary, memoir, and poetry, if it is to become art, must leave behind mere stenographic replication of the facts. Memoirists write memoirs not merely because they had an experience, but rather, because they have made meaning of the experience, and have meaning to offer. Cheryl Strayed, in her website, notes that she wrote her memoir Wild about hiking the Pacific Crest trail, not because “I took a hike.” She clarifies that she wrote Wild “because I’m a writer. By which I mean until I had something to say about the experience, I didn’t have any reason to write about it.” A writer doesn’t tell an interesting story merely because something interesting happened. Rather, a writer tells an interesting story because something happened and the writer has something interesting to say about it.

In the Q&A following the screening of his film, Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog gave a speech which was later published in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics called “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” His thesis is this: accountants are the only ones interested in factual truth. Artists are interested in something else, a deeper truth, the “enemy of the merely factual.”

Truth making is the role of the story teller. And truth making has power.

And yet, the making of meaning from the facts can have a dangerous dimension when wielded by those in power and by power structures. We see how the facts can be distorted (and often outright falsified) when filtered through the abomination that is Fox News and the Trump Administration. Those in power can mold the facts to their liking. In the hands of institutions, fiction-making becomes propaganda, or it becomes a means by which the powerful dispossess the less powerful.

This abuse of the factual is seen most clearly in native land rights battles, where the very medium through which truth is conveyed is brought into question. The western insistence on the written document (a title to hold land) is problematic in the face of oral histories and oral cultures. In his essay, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” Werner Herzog tells of how he secured native land rights for the Machiguengas people during his filming of Fitzcarraldo. Though the people had occupied the land for time immemorial, various companies, including oil interests, had been looking to seize the land. When the tribe tried to claim legal title to the land, Herzog explains the elders encountered two problems: (1) they held no legal document or title and officials told them that their claim was supported only by “hearsay” and (2) no one had surveyed the land.

Herzog had the land surveyed, but getting the legal authorities to recognize the claim on the basis of oral history was more difficult. Herzog found that in Anglo Saxon law, hearsay, while generally inadmissible, was not absolutely inadmissible. He pointed out other land claim cases where hearsay was used to determine land rights. And so, by legitimizing the oral stories of the Machiguengas, the legal authorities recognized the Machiguengas as the official holders of the land. One still sees colonial entitlement at play here, though, because the Machiguengas were still forced to seek the written title, which ultimately is the instrument of power in a culture that privileges the material over the oral.

Truth is granted its legitimacy through the power structures that adopt it. The truth telling and fiction-making capacity of the artist is always vulnerable to corruption or adoption by these structures. The artist and storyteller must always ask herself—to what ends is the story being employed?

Herzog questions the nature of reality. What is reality? Social realities can be obscured, blurred, and distorted through television, doctored photographs, and social media. Our interactions with each other are increasingly mediated through technologies that erase and obscure direct communication.

Fake news floods the world, presenting an alternative version of the facts. For some, the facts are up for interpretation. The factual is filtered through the lens of perception—or distorted by it. The role of interpreting the facts has been weaponized. Look at the truth through your chosen lens and you can bend it to your will.

And so, there is indeed a danger in the creative capacity to wield the facts to ecstatic ends–for, just as they can be used for good, they can also be used for evil, for manipulation, for empire, and subjugation.

Herzog notes: “Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power.” When we are talking about the realms of science, journalism, politics, and the law, normative power is what lends these institutions their validity and legitimacy. But to put the realms of art, film, and poetry in the same classification is to do a disservice to these forms of human expression. Herzog notes: “In the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.”

The painter who merely paints what he sees is not an artist. The writer who merely records what she has experienced is a journalist, not a poet. The filmmaker who merely strives to replicate experience as it happened, is not telling a story, because life, as it happens, is not a story. The story is the meaning we bring to it. Herzog reminds us, after all, “it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pieta portrays Jesus as a 33 year old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17 year old.”

This is the triumph of humanity over nature, the triumph of art over nature, the triumph of the human spirit over the merely factual. But perhaps triumph isn’t the right word. Perhaps residence within is better.

In the ancient Greek, the truth is that which is “not hidden.” Truth is therefore itself the process of discovery, the joy and ecstasy of discovery. I have written about Werner Herzog’s attention to discovery when writing about his film, “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds.” Herzog’s truth comes from the pleasure of the discovered. Discovery, by its very essence, requires that the thing discovered be not known before. This paradox, of both the known residing within the unknown, is what makes Herzog’s films so fascinating. Herzog uses the word “disclosure.” It is an excellent choice.

And so, ecstatic truth must be a kind of disclosure. We see it in Herzog’s movies, when he draws the camera up close to his subject’s face. We see it when we encounter art, real art, for the first time. We see it when we encounter nature, and reside within it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Steve Almond, in an introduction to Cheryl Strayed’s stunning advice book (which is so transcendent it should not be called such), Tiny Beautiful Things, writes “…America is dying of loneliness…we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those foundations of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.”

I have to admit that I’m absolutely jealous of Cheryl Strayed’s writing in Tiny Beautiful Things. In spare language that shimmers with painful beauty like a Rothko painting, Strayed weaves memoir, aphorism, advice, and poetic psalm together so beautifully that they are utterly breathtaking. Each letter of advice feels a little like a lookout point in a holy place like Yosemite or Yellowstone. You need to pause and take in the view. You want to commit them to heart, quite literally.

Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things is a compilation of Strayed’s advice column, Dear Sugar, which ran in the Rumpus. Strayed wrote these pieces anonymously, and perhaps it was the cloak of anonymity that gave her the freedom to be so bold, so honest, so profound. When I need good advice, I turn to this writing. I’m in awe of it, in thrall of it, and yes, a little–or a lot–jealous of it.

Emotions are highly inconvenient visitors, but none is quite so inconvenient and annoying as jealousy. Jealousy is a close cousin of greed and it arises from a mentality of scarcity.

I find it helpful to understand the nature of a thing or emotion by understanding its meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines jealousy as “anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something.” In the realm of love, jealousy is “fear of being supplanted in the affection, or distrust of the fidelity, of a beloved person.” And in the realm of our modern obsession with fame, money, and social media, jealousy is the “fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will toward another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part.”

Jealousy arises when we commodify things that shouldn’t be commodified. We commodify those we love and destroy love. We commodify sex and destroy its generative and regenerative powers. We commodify success and fame and destroy the honest acts of creation, human connection, and the sentiments of altruism that ultimately motivate our striving. So many of us seek approval on social media to connect. Jealousy is the opposite of connection. It says: “all of this must be mine and none of this is yours.” It divides us when the spirit of sharing would connect us.

I’ve struggled with various forms of jealousy and resentment my entire life. I’ve had jealousy for the success of other writers, and this has led me to isolate myself from the very community of writers who could help me grow. I struggled with jealousy when my ex-husband who got to be in graduate school while I had to teach students SAT vocabulary words to pay the bills; this jealousy was not a small part of why my marriage failed. I’ve been cheated on and lied to, and have been so jealous I’ve spent hours in Prospect Park looking to catch my ex-boyfriend in the act (my suspicions were right, but I still shouldn’t have been in Prospect Park that night). From time to time jealousy has literally made me a crazy person.

And so, as I write this review, and find myself confronted with jealousy, it brings me bottomless solace to note that Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things doesn’t omit jealousy. Here are a few gems:

• “Write Like a Motherfucker.” Elissa Bassist wrote to Dear Sugar for advice lamenting the fact that she couldn’t write a book, lamenting that she would never be as good as David Foster Wallace, and miserable because no one would take writing about vaginas seriously. Bassist explained: “I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” Strayed’s response to all this is a description of a chalk board she once had in her living room. On it, she wrote a quote by Flannery O’Connor: “The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” There’s a stripe of jealousy that wants the rewards without sacrifice, that wants the acclaim without the risk of looking like an idiot, that wants the finished product without the reality that I’ll need to sit out the next big swell, say no to the beach, and sit on the cold hard floor at 3 a.m., writing and failing, writing some more, and failing, until I don’t fail. Strayed writes: “As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.” To write the book she needed to write, and she had to surrender. When we’re “up too high and down too low” we’re in a place where we don’t get anything done. But we “get the work done on the ground level.” Strayed tells Elissa Bassist that she “will feel insecure and jealous” but the power she gives those feelings is up to her. “Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself.” How many good things have I denied myself because of my own grandiose ideas of my self-importance? How many beautiful pieces of writing did I fail to write because I was so high up in the clouds and in my own ideas of my own greatness that nothing happened. Strayed writes: “Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
• “Romantic Love is Not a Competitive Sport.” Jealous about hearing about your current lover’s past sexual exploits? Strayed has an answer to this: “You aren’t haunted by your boyfriend’s sexual past. You’re haunted by your own irrational, insecure, jealous feelings, and if you continue to behave in this manner you will eventually push your lover away…I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.” And so, intimacy is formed when we push past the jealousy and search for understanding. Intimacy comes when we let ourselves be gutted, but instead of closing the wound or slinking away like a beast, we let ourselves stay open and curious.
• “We are all Savages Inside.” When Awful Jealous Person writes to Dear Sugar, she explains that she feels like she’s swallowed a mouthful of battery acid whenever someone succeeds in her field. When something good happens to someone else, we have all asked that “why not me” question, explains Sugar. But that feeling and that question should not “rule your life. It means you have work to do.” And what does Sugar say to the “why not me” voice in her head? “You know what I do when I feel jealous. I tell myself to not feel jealous. I shut down the why not me? voice and replace it with one that says don’t be silly instead. It really is that easy…When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how much you have been given.” But more importantly, Sugar urges us to explore the roots of the problem, the parts of ourselves that make us feel entitled, the parts of us that act out of fear of the worst possible outcome rather than hope in the best possible world.

Perhaps jealousy is a kind of warning, the ego’s alarm system pointing out its own deficiencies. Sometimes the failure is within. Try harder. Try again. Sometimes it’s more subtle. It’s a call to gratitude–to remember what we have been given. I’m grateful Strayed wrote Tiny Beautiful Things.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Werner Herzog is a poet of the sublime, a filmmaker of the sacred and the profane. His signature style blends opera, the music of various mystic traditions, dramatic encounters with nature that evoke both horror and awe, and an intimate interview style that reveals the humanity of his subjects. Herzog is a master of taking popular subjects and finding the uncommon vantage. In Encounters at the End of the World, for instance, at a time when films about penguins were quite popular, Herzog makes clear in the opening scenes that he has not set off to Antarctica to make another film about penguins. In his film about volcanoes, Into the Inferno, Herzog spends as much time exploring the religious, scientific, and social systems surrounding volcanoes, as he does exploring the volcanoes themselves. Any subject for Herzog begins and ends with the humane and the human. And so, while Fireball: Visions from Darker Worlds is a film about meteorites, it is really a film about the people who study them, and about the implications that meteors have had on the human experience.

Herzog has teamed up with the volcanologist, Clive Oppenheimer (who does most of the film’s on-screen interviews) to explore the esoteric and wondrous world of meteorites and other near earth objects.

What makes Herzog’s films a delight is their ability to tap into our profoundly human hunger for discovery. Humanity’s collective and individual thirst for exploration and discovery has taken us into outer space, under the sea, and across oceans. It could be said that discovery is what motivates some of the best and worst outcomes of human activity. Discovery is intoxicating–quite literally. It releases dopamine. The particular joy of watching Fireball: Visions from Darker Worlds is the little discoveries one encounters in the process of watching the film.

For example, I didn’t know that every year, micrometeorites fall from the sky, raining their dust all around the planet. These dust-sized particles, when magnified, are otherworldly, and incredibly beautiful. They look decidedly alien, but also like pieces of abstract sculpture. For a moment, the film reminded me of David LeBrun’s, Proteus, another stunning documentary that magnifies the tiny world of diatoms, single-celled algae that reside in the ocean and soil, unseen, but stunning in their hiddenness, right before our eyes. Herzog’s filming of the micrometeorites is a stunning homage to LeBrun.

The hidden, right before our eyes, is Herzog’s majestic work and his particular talent. Micrometeorites lie all around us, and all we need to do is know where to look and get the right equipment for gathering them. Herzog shows us how. He introduces us to Jon Larsen, Norway’s most celebrated Jazz guitarist who happens to spend his free time on the roofs of sports arenas looking for space dust. We are told that Larsen invented a new kind of science as we are also taught how to use a zip lock bag and magnet to go searching for space dust and marvels of our own.

We visit ancient craters, the “godforsaken” seaside village of Chicxulub where an ancient asteroid cataclysm rewrote the history of life on earth. We go to Mecca, where sourced footage reveals a haunting image of the asteroid worshipped at its center. We meet the scientists in Maui who watch the skies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking for signs that an asteroid may be coming our way. Herzog takes the time to linger on their faces. We look into the eyes of those who have been entrusted to keep humanity safe and I felt safe looking into their eyes.

One of the most stunning moments in the film is when Herzog returns to Antarctica with Oppenheimer (they met in Antarctica during his filming of Encounters at the End of the Earth) and the camera pans out on the vast expanse of ice of the uninhabited continent that stretches forth for thousands of kilometers into the distance. The sheer blankness of the ice, the blueness, and the vastness is overwhelming and breathtaking. And, amid this blankness, scientists walk, searching for the messages from the sky that the stars have left written on the ice. Because the ice is so blank and because there are no other rocks present, the only rocks on the ice are meteors. Oppenheimer discovers one while performing one of these walking surveys of the ice. Herzog makes clear that the discovery has not been staged. We see the moment the rock is found. It’s beautiful.

Watching a film for the first time brings about the same sense of discovery. To discover a new artist, a new piece of art, or a new creation brings about the same sense of wonder I imagine scientists feel when they stumble or struggle upon new knowledge. There is awe. There is gratitude, and there is a sense of encounter and sublime wonder in it.

Watching a film during a film festival, when a film has been seen by so few people, when you are among the first to see it, is even more special. I live in Hawaii and would have never made it out to Chicago to see the Chicago International Film Festival.

But we live in the era of COVID-19, which has forced the whole film festival to be streamed, and the Q&A at the end of the screening held over Zoom. And so, I saw the film in my living room in Hawaii. And afterward, during the Q&A, I did something I’d never do in an actual movie theatre—I asked a question. (Perhaps it was the anonymity of typing my question into a little box that gave me the courage.) And so, I had the pleasure of my own encounter, the awe and wonder of getting to hear Werner Herzog listen to a question I asked—and answer it.

The question?

In the film Herzog discusses the unique ability of meteoroids to serve as divine prognosticators. They have been used by historic political figures to lend their projects legitimacy. Given all this, I asked Herzog what he made of the fact that an asteroid was passing close to earth on election day.

To this, he chuckled, and in his distinctive Teutonic voice said, “It would be beautiful.”

And it was beautiful.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

As the lead singer of the band Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst was always singing about nostalgia. But it’s one thing to sing about nostalgia when you’re 19. It’s another thing to sing about nostalgia at 40. What happens when the nostalgia you invented in your youth was somehow clairvoyant? Bright Eyes shows us that emotion prognosticated might indeed be quite similar to emotion recollected in tranquility. The thing is this: experience doesn’t need to invent imagery of babies drowning in bathtubs to evoke pathos. Life itself will do.

Bright Eyes’s new album, “Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was” returns to some of the band’s core themes, but with the wisdom of age. I’ve been a Bright Eyes fan since my teens and listening to the album felt like coming home, but knowing that it might be for the last time. There’s the same earnestness there always was, but it’s salted with firsthand knowledge of the power of the unspoken. In the balance between the confessional and the unsaid, Oberst has found poignancy, which he harnesses to stunning effect.

One of the beautiful things about having made art since you were a teen is that you can always go back and see how much of what you thought back then was true. Turns out you might have been right more often than not. Oberst discovers this in “Down in the Weeds.” The visions and revisions are delicious.

Oberst has been singing his angst since he was a teen. Time passes. You get older, but the same old wounds are always there, waiting to be re-opened. Oberst, who is now 40, brings the full force of his artistic maturity to the old themes of loss, loneliness, depression, and alienation, recapturing them in lyrics that are spare and less melodramatic than the material of his younger years, but just as biting. Looking back and forward are about the same. In “Forced Convalescence” Oberst sings: “I’m not afraid of the future / Have to suffer and repeat.” There’s an awareness that the demons never quite go away. We encounter them again and again, in the same old form, or in new form in disguise.

As Pitchfork notes, “the band deliberately ransacked aspects from their back-catalog.” Anyone who knows the Bright Eyes catalog by heart will find echoes of the old tunes, warped as if filtered by memory or time. Bright Eyes was always apocalyptic and Oberst was often criticized for this vein. But in this world of pandemic, climate change, and Constitutional crisis, I can’t help but think that perhaps Oberst was just paying better attention than the rest of us. The tremors of our lives now were always there, warning us; the big one has just finally hit.

In 2005, in Bright Eyes’s album “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning,” Oberst sang in “Land-Locked Blues:” “…Laura’s asleep in my bed / As I’m leaving she wakes up and says, / “I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave / Baby, don’t go away, come here.” Fifteen years later, Oberst is still looking at waves, but he’s not being carried away by them. He’s facing them head on. In “Mariana Trench” Oberst sings: “Look up at that big wave… Look down in that Mariana Trench.” In the old days, Oberst sang about dead babies and the imagery always sounded abstract. Now, he’s looking down at his brother’s grave and there’s nothing artful to extract except for that “formal feeling,” that comes when the grief is so intense there’s only numbness there to fill it out.  The infant is there, but this one feels real, more like an unrealized child: “Little infant in a plastic box/ shedding incubator tears/ she doesn’t know yet what a comet does / You’re approaching even as you disappear.”

The brother comes back later in the album: “My phantom brother came to me / his backlit face was hard to see…” But the ghosts of family members past are replaced by the family members still present: “My aging mother steeled herself / against the gravity she felt / braced for another fainting spell.” Oberst’s longtime fascination with death and the memento mori is no longer an abstract concept. In “Tilt-a-Whirl” “Life’s a lonely love affair…It vanishes into thin air/ so suddenly.” For those of us worried about our aging parents and COVID-19, the song is almost too much. It’s a song about the premonition of loss, and the concrete losses that COVID-19 has brought us.

Oberst was always a singer able to draw from the collective conscious and unconscious, able to find the perfect image to capture alienation and loneliness. The imagery Oberst draws from in “Down in the Weeds,” revisits his same old themes, but these aren’t abstract images drawn because they are artistically correct; these have all the dirt of life still attached to them. The songs in “Down in the Weeds” are hard-earned songs, made of the raw stuff of life. In “Pan and Broom” he sings: “Is that blood on your hands / or chocolate and fruit?”  

In “Persona Non Grata” we find ourselves with two estranged lovers. The bare simplicity of the song takes my breath away every time. Oberst is still wailing into the microphone, but he’s not veiling the grief behind the protection of his own cleverness. The spare lyrics reveal the raw emotion. And the rhymes are great. “Made a life of deception / and passive aggression” along with the implausible rhyme of “fallen leaves” and “West Village Halloween.”

“Comet Song” ends the album and I won’t give much away, except that it’s utterly devastating in the way something honest and true is utterly devastating. This is the music of divorce, of heartbreak. Oberst finally gave his heart away. The singer who once sang, “You can count on me to leave” has been left bereft. “Wish I could apologize and come in from the cold.”

All the songs of old lovers are gone. Now Oberst is just “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face.” There’s a perfect image for it that comes next: “Felt so hot in the parking lot / The car windows were all rolled up / Just a dog dying in a Chevrolet.” And it all could be so maudlin were it not for the fragility of Oberst’s vocals, that, like the Bright Eyes of old, tremor on the edge of nervous breakdown.

Oberst knows where his pain comes from now. And this is the wisdom we don’t get in his earlier albums, “What happens will be / Pain of my own making.” Maybe we all “catastrophize…turning forty.” But amid all the transcendence and pain, “there’s no escaping the housework.”

This not a Bright Eyes imagining love gone before it’s even arrived. This is the Bright Eyes that has loved and lost. Sometimes bands give up the ghost. Bright Eyes breathes it in in this one.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The best divorce poems ever written are often not about divorce, given that for the greater part of what we call western literary history, divorce wasn’t really much of an option. So there was death, there were affairs, and there was the occasional killing of one’s spouse. Most of the poetry that speaks to the emotions surrounding divorce involves the poetry of death, heartbreak, breakup, and loss. Modern prose has tackled divorce more robustly. Books about divorce range from the self-help variety to the memoir of survival, to the “divorce novel.” There are books that offer consolation and commiseration, but no genre of literature offers quite as much solace as poetry. Many have tackled the sorrows and challenges of divorce in prose; few have dared write about it in poetry. Sharon Olds, in Stag’s Leap, her stunning book of poetry about her divorce, does just that.

Tolstoy once wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We could say something similar of divorce. Every marriage is alike; every divorce is unique in its own way. Sharon Olds’s book, Stag’s Leap transforms the raw grief of divorce into poetry. Language is a kind of alchemy and Olds’s poems are spells against grief. While Olds’s poetry might be called confessional, I like to think of these poems as more Romantic than anything else. As William Wordsworth once wrote: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Olds’s project is indeed this: the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility. The wisdom of ideas and feelings long fermented permeate these poems. According to NPR, Olds waited 15 years to write about her divorce “half as long as her marriage lasted.” The poems are awful in the truest Romantic sense. They are full of awe at the long-lasting power of love and grief, and they are awful for the devastation they reflect in love’s loss.

The story that underlies Stag’s Leap is sad, but banal (isn’t that the sad fact of grief—how ordinary it is?): after 30 years of marriage, Olds’s husband leaves her for another woman. What Olds’s does with this experience is remarkable. She transformed the human heart into human art, and what emerges is a poetics of divorce that offers solace.

The poetry book opens with the shock of revelation. The first poem, “While He Told Me” follows through on its premise, offering readers a glimpse into the “formal feeling” that follows trauma. In the poem, Olds looks everywhere else but at the thing itself, the fact as it unfolds—the trauma of her marriage ending.

Marriage is a kind of identity-formation machine. The loss of this machinery can leave the lover with a loss of self. Olds later writes: “I feel an invisibility… What was it like, to love me—when you looked at me, what did you see?” Olds slips into beautifully simple and plain declarations, salted with unusual word choices. “I thought we were joined not just for breath’s time, but for the long continuance.”

There are moments where the poetry echoes Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines).” She writes: “I did not know him, I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him.” This is devastating work.

Olds captures the upheaval that follows the division of two lives that had been once closely interwoven together. These are poems that capture the mystery of what it means to know and not know another human being. The work is imbued with the mystery of time, how it heals, how it divides: “After eleven million six hundred sixty-four thousand minutes of not, I am a stunned knower of not.” And: “I knew and did not know his brain, and its woody mountain casing, but the sheer familarness of his brow was like a kind of knowledge.” The beloved is at once known and a stranger, at once strange and familiar. “…from within my illusion of him I could not see him, or know him.” The sorrow of intimacy and familiarity is that it often blinds us to the wonder and marvel of the other. Olds writes, “We lived on it…without my seeing it, on the broken habit of what was not lasting love.” In a marriage, lovers can become blind to the marvel of the other, and they can also become blind to their own dysfunction. The dysfunction can become normalized over time.

But these are not just poems of sorrow; they are also poems of ecstasy. To be left is tragic, but also freeing. Olds writes: “When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it is I who am escaped from.” Love is a state of mind above all else, and the record of how love continues even in the beloved’s absence is poignant and powerful. “I thought whatever we were, we were in lasting love.”

There are different kinds of knowledge at the end of a marriage. There is the knowledge of the marriage ending, usually known first by one person and then the other. There is the knowledge of the ending and the following through with that knowledge. And then there’s the unconscious knowledge. The knowledge of a division known but unspoken. “Tiny Siren” is a brilliant and haunting poem about the moment Olds knew and did not know her husband was cheating on her. She finds a photo of another woman in the Whirlpool (clever of Olds to link the ancient sirens to the modern contraption of a washing machine!). The husband admits that the other woman had given him the photo, and reassures his wife that he loves her. And then they make love. But Olds knows something, and that knowledge is a kind of wisdom any person who has been betrayed understands: “Just once, later in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if a deck were tilting under me…”

Olds doesn’t say goodbye to her husband until the end of the book. Her husband, being the one who left her, had more time to come to terms with the leaving. Olds takes a good year before she says goodbye. When it comes, it is heartrending, but beautiful.

The wonder of poetry is that it can sometimes hit me with such truth and power, such wisdom, that it almost seems as if the poet’s words didn’t come from the poet, but came from within me, its reader. The poem has plumbed the depths of what it means to be human and has pulled up a glimmer of truth. The opening movement of “Approaching Godthab” did this for me, as did the poem, “The Shore”. The lines of “Approaching Godthab” go like this: “So much had become so connected to him that it seemed to belong to him, so that now, flying, for hours, above the Atlantic still felt like being over his realm.” I read those lines and thought about my own divorce, how so many experiences in my life had stopped being mine, and belonged to the “us” that had formed. When my grandmother passed away and I flew down from Canada to Miami for her funeral, I had stared down at the topography below, in awe that I could be looking upon it alone, unable to share it with my former partner. And it’s that alienation, the alienation of the familiar that comes at a breakup or the end of a relationship that Sharon Olds captures so well.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Seamus Heaney called Han Shan’s poetry “enviable stuff/ unfussy and believable.” Like everything simple, the surface of the poetry is like a calm sea that belies depth and marvels beneath. Heaney writes: “Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean/ a state of mind. Or different states of mind.” Han Shan’s poetry is about the search for home. Though the poems are about travel, they are ultimately about how a mind at home with itself carries home always with it. When I have felt unmoored, Han Shan’s poetry always feels like a small habitation, a small habit of language I can repeat like an incantation or spell. Recite these poems and you can’t help but feel at home.

Gary Snyder’s beautiful translation of Han Shan’s poetry has accompanied me through various life transitions. The fact that the book remains with me is somewhat remarkable. The book made it with me across the Canadian border when my visa expired. It was one of the books I kept in my tent in Kentucky when I spent a few months camped behind a pizza shop. It survived a tornado that tipped over trucks and trailer homes. I kept it next to my surfboards and climbing gear when I lived out of my van, crossing deserts, searching for cold mountains of my own. I took it with me when I moved across the Pacific, landing in Hawai’i.

Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems travel well.

The book elegantly combines the poetry with simple Zen-like drawings of mountains, leaves, insects, and birds. The simplest things are the most difficult to do well, and Gary Snyder’s translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poetry is done well.

In his introduction to the poems, Snyder explains that when Han Shan: “talks about Cold Mountain, he means himself, his home, his state of mind.”

Who was Han Shan? No one really knows. Some say he looked like a tramp. But it is written that he was a wise man, a man who understood the Tao. In the introduction to Snyder’s translations, Lu Chiu-Yin, the governor of the T’ai prefecture notes that Han Shan’s poems were found written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs, and on the “walls of people’s houses.” Like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy, it appears that Han Shan found his start in the ephemeral and undeniable medium of graffiti.

The poems feel like visitations. They have the force of epiphany, the mystery of koan, and the weight of wisdom. They are deceptively simple, invite re-reading, and open with each reading to new interpretations.

Ultimately, though, the poetry is about home, about the long roads we must take to find our home in this world. “The path to Han-Shan’s place is laughable.” The way to Han Shan’s house is found on “bird paths, but no trails for men.” There is a monastic simplicity to the life Han Shan has chosen. “Go tell families with silverware and cars/ ‘What’s the use of all that noise and money?’” Han Shan’s poetics is a poetics for the seekers. It is a poetics that eschews the material realm. The words are spare because they have been reduced down to almost pure spirit. One gets the feeling of looking at Zen art when reading them.

I found Gary Snyder’s translations of Han Shan’s poems when I was myself very much lost in the world, searching for my home in it. I’d recently gone through a separation, which would later become a divorce, which would mean my visa in Canada would expire and I’d have to say goodbye to the home and friends I’d known for five years in Toronto. Where would my home be? It would become a tent in Kentucky, a car in the woods, an apartment in Park Slope, my parents’ house in Miami, and later their apartment in Portland, Oregon. And eventually it would be Hawai’i. Every stop along the way, I have asked: is this home?

“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain/ Cold Mountain: There’s no through trail,” writes Han Shan. How do we get home? We walk, we live, we breathe. The way home, to our true home, often involves solitude, no person can walk the whole path with us.

I’d find myself returning to these lines:

“My heart’s not the same as yours./ If your heart was like mine/ You’d get it and be right here.”

Gary Snyder’s translation is accompanied by strikingly simple illustrations. They are spare. They make room for white space. They breathe, like the poetry.

A great deal of time passes when you are on the path, when you are traveling the way. When you return, everything has changed. I think of my family and friends on the mainland. They were once an airplane flight away. Now, in this world of pandemic and disease, I’m not so sure.

I live on an island.

Han Shan tried many things as a seeker. “In my first thirty years of life/ I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles…Tried drugs, but couldn’t make immortal;/ read books and wrote poems…Today I’m back at Cold Mountain.”

I brought Gary Snyder’s translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems with me to Hawai’i. Even in Hawai’i, the ocean can sometimes feel cold, especially on days when the waves loom on the horizon like mountains just barely glimpsed. I thought I’d be scared in the ocean swells. Instead I felt calm. Calm, and awe. Sometimes the waves catch you off guard and you get sunk down into the depths of the sea, where there’s no breath, only dark silence. Those moments are the most peaceful. In the ocean, there are times where there’s nothing to do but calmly resign yourself to your fate. The wave will crush you, or it will carry you to shore. Either way, it’s not your choice. There’s a simplicity to being in the ocean. It’s at once a state of meditation and survival.

Cold Mountain poems are poems about the simple life. They’re poems about the simple walk home. When my life gets too complicated (or when I make my life overly complicated) Han Shan’s poetry reminds me that sometimes, all you need to do, is walk, jump in the sea, follow the birds where they go.

For Han Shan, the trappings of society are prisons we build for ourselves: the mortgage, the car, the possessions… “He just sets up a prison for himself./ Once in he can’t get out. Think it over–/ You know it might happen to you.”

The only way out is to live simply, “off mountain plants and berries.” What is there to worry about in this simple place? “Go ahead and let the world change.”

Ultimately, Han Shan taunts and dares his readers to go out and live a bigger life, by which he means—a simpler life. The poems are a message across time and space, delivered to the city and to the lost. “All I can say to those I meet:/ ‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain.’” Can we all make it to Cold Mountain?

All my life I have been trying to get to Cold Mountain, Han Shan. When I’m out in the ocean with the waves, sometimes I feel like I’ve made it at last.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.