Lines from Linda Pastan

On recently reading Linda Pastan’s Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (New York: Norton, 1998), I thought I’d share some lines I marked as favourites. In some cases, these quotations run from one line to the next, but I’ve not marked many of their line breaks, and have added occasional capital letters and concluding punctuation. In addition to many entire poems that spoke to me, these are individual lines that especially attracted me.

“I myself fear brevity.”

This might be why Linda Pastan never wrote haiku. But even haiku writers fear brevity, which is why I think they (we) treat this poetry so carefully. (“The Almanac of Lost Things,” page 5)

“Silos, those inland lighthouses.”

Having lived in Manitoba, I can relate. Grain elevators, too, though perhaps there’s not much difference, except that they’re not round like most silos. (“Dreaming of Rural America,” page 6)

“Before he is tackled

and the ball bounces free,

there is one moment

when pure exhilaration

feels almost like prayer,

even to a boy.”

That one moment of exhilaration is what makes haiku tick. And yes, these moments of attention and gratitude are like prayer, something that Mary Oliver and others have written about. (“October Catechisms,” page 10)

“When did solitude become mere loneliness?”

Society’s all too common conflation of solitude and loneliness does a disservice to solitude. It has always been important to me to cultivate an inner life, and to guard it, and to teach this necessity to my children. (“Letter,” page 13)

“The world is diminished leaf by single leaf, person by person, and with excruciating slowness.”

In contrast, the world is also amplified leaf by leaf, person by person. Both are true. Later Pastan writes, “the seasons heal each other, one month at a time” (“The Apple Shrine,” page 286). (“Notes to My Mother,” page 20)

“Even repented sins are ours for good.”

We own our past, or should remind ourselves to do so. I appreciate the wordplay here, where “for good” means permanently, yet also for self-improvement. (“Notes to My Mother,” page 22)

“Embracing the silence as if it were an empty page waiting for me alone to fill it.”

This is where poetry comes from, not just an urge to create, but a responsibility and obligation to say what only I can say. Later she writes of “the consolations of silence” (in “Consolations,” page 104) (“Self-Portrait,” page 24)

“Longing for the perfection that happens in books.”

Books, especially fiction, often offer a kind of perfection, where everything in a good book is exactly the way it should be. The same should be true of poems. (“Self-Portrait,” page 24)

“The wand of the word.”

Ah, such power and possibility writers wield, like the magician directing the waves in Fantasia. (“Anna at 18 Months,” page 28)

“I love the feel of a pen in my hand, like a good stout walking stick.”

Even if many writers may now write at a keyboard, the pen, both literally and figuratively, is a guide, an assurance, a support, an impetus, a motivation, and hopefully a light through the darkness. We need to use that ink as best we can for brightness. (“This Enchanted Forest,” page 31)

“It is really the mystery of the ordinary we’re looking at—the way Vermeer has sanctified the same light that enters our own grimed windows each morning.”

For me, poetry arises from mystery, whether one is able to solve the mystery, or just acknowledge that it exists—both internally and externally. But it begins with looking, with paying attention—to both the internal and the external. (“Woman Holding a Balance,” page 38)

“How hard we try to reach death safely.”

It seems to be a fight worth trying. (“Journey’s End,” page 59)

“Father let go and death will hold you up.”

The poet is addressing her father, urging him to go gently into the good night of death, urging him to trust death to acknowledge his achievements and existence. (“Go Gentle,” page 65)

“Fierce, unruly joy.”

Pastan’s focus is on joy, but the reverse side of the coin might well be duende, an emotional intensity in the face of death that Edward Hirsch has called a “joyful darkness.” All emotion can be demonstrated and received with intensity, especially in poetry. (“Wildflowers,” page 66)

“You say I write like a man and expect me to smile.”

Well, she’s clearly not smiling, and has no need to. (“Sacred to Apollo,” page 78)

“Let us find what wilderness is left.”

An environmental reminder—find and preserve. And write about it—and the finding of it. (“Bicentennial Winter,” page 100)

“Like learning to climb stairs after the amputation.”

This is Pastan’s way of seemingly scorning the five stages of grief. And yet she says, “And so I climbed.” In the same poem she writes, “Hope was my uncle’s middle name, he died of it,” which seems cynical, but I would hope everyone might die of hope. She reveals: “Acceptance. I finally reach it,” but concludes by saying, “Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you.” The loss remains, and we keep climbing. (“The Five Stages of Grief,” pages 114–115)

“The secrets I keep

from myself

are the same secrets

the leaves keep

from the old trunk of the tree

even as they turn color.”

What secrets do we keep from ourselves, and how are we are not sufficiently honest with ourselves? How can we write about this? Do we write such things only for ourselves? (“Secrets,” page 124)

“Evil is simply

a grammatical error:

a failure to leap

the precipice

between ‘he’

and ‘I.’”

I am not sure what this means. Do I believe it? Is there evil in not distinguishing “thou” versus “not thou”? Or is that not the point here? I don’t feel instructed. (“Instructions to the Reader,” page 146)

“The intricate terror and beauty I look for in books.”

This is one reason to read, seeking intensities of joy and pain that amplify and acknowledge our own, surely validating it. (“Dream Plants,” page 177)

“Move to the front

of the line

a voice says, and suddenly

there is nobody

left standing between you

and the world.”

One of my first thoughts in 2023 when my aunt told me that my mother had died was that I was now an orphan. I had moved to the front of the line, with my siblings, on the precipice of death. Sounds morbid, but we take our turn. (“The Death of a Parent,” page 189)

“Always save your pity for the living

who walk the eggshell crust of earth so lightly,

in front of them, behind them, only shadows.”

From dust we come, to dust we go. It’s amazing that we can find such joy in life, or at least that’s what I choose. (“Shadows,” page 191)

“We make ourselves the heroines of others’ imaginings.”

We seemingly all fall prey to our own myth-building, making ourselves heroes, whether of the imaginings of others or of our own. What is the help or harm of this? What are the lies we tell ourselves? What are the truths? (“Rereading The Odyssey in Middle Age,” page 202)

“To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end.”

I can’t speak to being the other woman, presumably in an affair, but what about the reverse? Is the ending of a season therefore like being that other woman, in an affair that’s about to fade and die? (“Circe,” page 205)

“I see you in the garden on your knees;

It is as close as you have come to prayer,

Planting the shadblow and the peonies.”

To me, any act of attention is a kind of prayer, and we all pray in different ways. For me, haiku is a kind of prayer. (“from The Imperfect Paradise,” page 229)

“The way the Japanese

put a small window in an obscure place,

hoping that the sight of a particular landscape

will startle them with beauty as they pass

and not become familiar.”

If I were to ever have the luxury of designing my own home, I’ve always thought that I would want it to include a “useless” room—a room with no purpose or logic. I would not call it a “den.” It needs to be more useless than that. I have a hunch that such a space would cultivate creativity. Idleness is not useless. An extension of this idea is how an unexpected window generates fresh seeing, a sense of not taking anything for granted. Likewise, so often the imperfect can inspire art and bring us to fully recognize beauty. (“The Myth of Perfectability,” page 234)

“I sit here at the typewriter,

putting in a comma to slow down

a long sentence, then taking it out,

then putting it back in again

until I feel like a happy Sisyphus.”

The word “happy” tells all—the writer is someone who writes, not merely someone who has written. (“The Myth of Perfectability,” page 234)

“This silence

between fall and winter

will be brief as the pause

between movements of music

when we listen

with all our attention

but may not applaud.”

Every moment has its magic. If we are paying attention, we hold our breaths, anticipate, wish for time to stop, as indeed it does. (“Sculpture Garden,” page 235)

“How much of memory is imagination?”

Some haiku poets choose to write only from direct experience, and some even limit themselves to experience that has just happened. I don’t see haiku that way. Writing from memory strikes me as completely acceptable, and I have argued that what matters is not the recency of a memory but its vibrancy. Pastan’s thought broadens memory in recognizing that memory may be unreliable. It therefore seems that welcoming imagination into haiku is also acceptable, if conscientiously curated. We build personal mythology in our minds. To me, what makes a haiku authentic is whether the reader believes the poem, regardless of whether it really happened. (“Cousins,” page 246)

“Equilibrium is simply that moment when the present is as real as the past or the future.”

My goodness, the now. She’s talking about the present moment, which melds and balances past, present, and future, being more than just the present. Such “active presence” expands on mere therapeutic, joyful, or mindful presence. (“Balance,” page 251)

“If God has a purpose to his seasons, all the flowers of heaven must answer to it.”

Metaphorically, we too are the flowers of heaven. Our seasons must answer to the same purpose. For me, a poem celebrates this purpose, a sense of rightness, amid the unfolding of the seasons. (“March 27,” page 252)

“Last week you called the bonsai living haiku.”

I’ve had this thought too, that bonsai are to larger trees what haiku are to longer poems. This is not a diminishment but a concentration. In The Compact Culture: The Japanese Tradition of “Smaller Is Better” (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982), Korean writer O-Young Lee wrote about such concentrations as being fundamental to Japanese culture. Haiku poems deserve the same care from writers that gardeners put into bonsai. (“Espaliered Pear Trees,” page 261)

“Maybe this place is an alternate Eden created by an urban God who hated gardens.”

Pastan is talking about cities here, but not all of us will agree that cities are alternate Edens, except perhaps ironically. Or maybe the city is simply the opposite of the garden. (“Ideal City,” page 266)

“The scarlet graffiti of laughter.”

The joy of laugher is here characterized by the metaphor of graffiti (similarly unexpected, hopefully not always out of place) meshed with the transgression of scarlet, as if laughter is a scarlet sin. This is a touch of detail that enlivens so much of Linda Pastan’s poetry. (“Ideal City,” page 266)

“The world wounds us with its beauty, as if it knew we had to leave it soon.”

Duende again, that joyful darkness. We will all leave soon. And so we welcome wounding. (“In a Northern Country,” page 277)

“Let us remember this moment. Let us forget it if we can.”

I think the point is that certain moments cannot be forgotten, even if we try. For me, these are the moments that call out to be haiku, where time stops and the timely becomes timeless. (“What We Fear Most,” page 281)

“The fragile symptoms of beauty.”

The cherry blossom is memorable, is beautiful, because it is fragile. Even human life is ephemeral, and we do well to crave every symptom of its beauty. What a way to live a life. (“Flowers,” page 282)

I also recently read Almost an Elegy: New & Later Selected Poems (New York: Norton, 2022). Here are some more lines I marked as favourites.

“The archeology of grief.”

Having lost my mother in 2023, and my dad in 2014, grief has been a new exploration for me. That it’s an archeology seems fitting, as one keeps discovering grief in unexpected places, even where one didn’t think one was digging. (“Truce,” page 9)

“The treacherous beauty of words!”

Few words in history can be as beautiful and treacherous as “Kristallnacht,” the title of this poem. (“Kristallnacht,” page 10)

“Intimacy . . . not isolation—

the trick of being apart

and together at the same time,

as each of us lets something of the world

into the coffee-scented kitchen”

I think of a favourite phrase from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: let there be spaces in your togetherness. This seems to be a key component to any successful relationship. But might it also apply to poetry, to value what connects as well as what separates? I do not mean separation as a loss or agony but as distinctiveness. (“Interior, Woman at the Window,” page 23)

“writing a poem

is the same as solving a crime,

. . .

Each line is a piece of a jigsaw

waiting to fit in a stanza”

This reminds me of Peter Turchi, in A Muse & A Maze (Trinity University Press, 2014), who wrote about writing as puzzle, mystery, and magic, that “Every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle” (page 12). In the same poem, Pastan says “The right words find themselves without knowing how,” and that poets are “lying in order to tell the truth.” We lie in poems to make each puzzle whole.

“I have been writing about death since I was not much more than a child.”

No wonder Pastan’s poems often seem dark. In “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?” (page 65) she says that “When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness.” (“Mirage,” page 28)

“For years I wrestled

with syllables, with silence.

. . .

Now I rest

in a hammock of words.”

Perhaps all poets confront darkness and light, sound and silence. (“The Collected Poems,” page 29)

“Let autumn come.”

I suppose this is an acceptance of death. We might as well accept what we cannot avoid. “All trees,” Pastan also writes, “will succumb to rust, to brown . . . will go naked.” In a later poem, “In the Forest” (page 81), she writes “Autumn, the whole minor key of it.” (“Autumn: For Jane Kenyon,” page 33)

“I think each poem I write will be the last.”

This line is from a villanelle and is varied as “I fear each poem I write will be the last” and “I think this poem I’m writing is the last.” Would this belief garner intensity, the mad flamenco of duende? (“The Future,” page 35)

“If death is everywhere we look, at least let’s marry it to beauty.”

There’s a theme here. Again, Edward Hirsch’s “joyful darkness.” (“Women on the Shore,” page 39)

“Serenity as a form of manners.”

My goodness, how much well-mannered we’d all be in adopting a behavior of serenity. (“The Cossacks: For F,” page 43)

“The single sigh of a syllable.”

The best haiku poets give great attention to each syllable, not to count them to make each one carry weight. (“Bess,” page 45)

“We go about our ordinary days

as if the acts of boiling an egg

or smoothing down a bed

were so small

they must be overlooked

by death.”

But no, exactly the opposite, it seems to me. She concludes the poem by referring to how “a portrait of lovers endures . . . long after the names of the artist and models have disappeared.” (“50 Years,” page 57)

“The pure astonishment of seeing her own words blaze up on the page.”

This is not something Pastan aspires to but, in this poem, is giving up, to no longer be “hungry for the scent of laurel” and instead to lie “in this hammock in the fading sun without guilt or longing.” (“Firing the Muse,” page 58)

“Sometimes I think all the best poems

have been written already

. . .

At other times though,

I remember how one flower

in a meadow already full of flowers

somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

. . .

the smallest note of the smallest

instrument in the band,

the triangle for instance,

is important to the conductor”

The whole is larger than the sum of its parts. How do we cultivate our every flower? (“Rereading Frost,” page 59)

“Are there seasons in heaven?”

I once remember a haiku poet telling me he did not believe in using seasonal references in haiku because they were too earth-centric, and not sufficiently universal. This seems to be a misapplication of the “universal” as a goal for haiku, or other poetry. As Joyce said, Dublin is everywhere. (“Heaven,” page 60)

“blindsided by beauty”

It seems that beauty is more intense when it surprises us, when we do not expect it. That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t look for it. (“On Seeing an Old Photograph,” page 78)

“Those two aging conspirators, Hope and Luck.”

Hope has been my favourite word for as long as I can remember. Does hope conspire with luck, or does it compete with it? Perhaps both. As hopeful as one might be in life, it is tempered by luck, both good luck and bad. (“Somewhere in the World,” page 82)

“it is the ordinary

that comes to save you—

the china teacup waiting

to be washed, the old dogs

whining to go out.”

Haiku poets have known this for centuries, and celebrate it. It is a point of growth to recognize that the ordinary saves you. (“The Ordinary,” page 84)

“Perhaps beauty is the mother of death, not the other way around.”

Light and dark strike again. Is dark possible without light? Is light possible without the dark? (“Late in October,” page 91)

“Desire transforms the plainest of us. . . . Flashes of insight . . . flare for a moment then flicker out.”

What to make of this in terms of haiku? If haiku offer flashes of insight, we know that insight, like the poem’s images, flare and flicker out. But does this mean we should suppress desire, or welcome it? (“Fireflies,” page 98)

“You tell me to live each day

as if it were my last.

. . .

Why not

live each day as if it were the first—

all raw astonishment.”

W. S. Merwin has written that “Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.” This is the joy of haiku, perhaps balanced with the idea of living each day as if it were the last. Rather than choose one or the other, why not both at once? Astonishment and gratitude. (“Imaginary Conversation,” page 99)

“Perhaps Eden is buried here in Japan.”

The West easily idealizes Japan, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But Eden is also buried in the West. (“In the Happo-en Garden, Tokyo,” page 100)

“The bird has its arias,

the clock its mathematics.

I string words together

wherever I am—

in planes, in waiting rooms”

The poet too has her song, welcomed everywhere. (“Ship’s Clock,” page 102)

“I will never be more ready

than I am now

. . .

turning the brittle pages

in the long book

of my life.”

A welcoming of the inevitability of life, not just death. (“Ah, Friend,” page 104)

“Revision . . . is sometimes holy.”

In the context Pastan refers to makeup on a woman’s face, a kind of revision, but I also take it to mean the revision of words. It’s the process that’s holy, not the finished product. (“Musings Before Sleep,” page 106)

“After all that careful planning anything can happen.”

A welcoming of happenstance, an embrace of the unknown. (“The New Dog,” page 112)

“in the fading half-life of ambition

wanting and having merge.

. . .

poetry will save the world”

Every poet’s credo, surely. Or maybe it will at least save you, and save me. (“In the Walled Garden,” page 114)