In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

--Lt Colonel John McCrae of the Canadian Army, "In Flanders Fields." McCrae was a field surgeon and a field hospital chief during WWI; he died at No. 3 Canadian General Hospital in Boulogne on January 28, 1918.

Poetry for Gumbies

Yesterday, just in time for the end of National Poetry Month, I went to the oddest poetry reading I've ever attended -- a combination poetry reading and yoga class. (Alternately, a new Das Racist breakout hit.) The Rubin Museum of Art cleared out part of its lobby on a Sunday morning and invited poets from all over the world -- Finland, Hungary, Georgia (country) among others -- to sit on the sidelines of an anusara yoga class and read at intervals.

When I described this to my roommate, he skepticked, "But won't it be distracting?" Well, depending on the level of patter, that can be a nice thing. If you've never been to a yoga class, often a teacher will keep up a sort of 'yoga chat' during the class amid instructions, ranging from the practical ("Relax," "dig deep" etc.) to more spiritual (anything describing something you would do to your heart that does not sound biologically sound) Some teachers don't talk at all, just put music on. And some give you a thousand-yard stare while speaking unconvincingly about how much they loved yoga when they finally tried it.

If you are serious about yoga as a practice, you'd probably want to give this class a miss. But no one, not even the called-out regulars, seemed disappointed at this class. At the beginning the teacher spoke for a few minutes about how much she liked poetry and the role it played in her life, and I thought it was both appropriate and pleasant. (The woman next to me even took a notepad and started writing down some of the end-of-class talk, which I thought was pushing the envelope...) Most of the poems read at this event were about breath, or compassion, or similarly spiritual topics, but I think they were easier to contemplate knowing they were a poem first and a yoga accompaniment second.

I definitely didn't catch as much of the poetry as I would have in a classical setting but I'd like to look up more work by the Georgian poet, David-Dephy Gogibedashvili. I was thinking between sessions of stretching and so on how little I go to poetry readings; it's the kind of thing I would have envisioned myself doing all the time, but in fact I don't often seek out poets to go hear as I do other authors. Maybe I should do more of that. I have been doing a little yoga since reading STRETCH and it has made zero measurable difference in anything, but one tries.

Depending on how you feel about Frost...

A group of teenagers were punished with poetry after throwing a house party at Robert Frost's old farm in Ripton, Vermont. The prosecuting attorney on the case offered the 28 partygoers a deal: Your record will be cleared if you attend a class on Frost's poetry taught by a Middlebury professor. In the first of these classes the perps were led through a line by line reading of "The Road Not Taken" and "Out, Out--"

Yeah, that's the way to get kids into poems -- threaten them!