My husband
celebrated his 40th birthday last week, and being a planner, he sat me down six months ago.
“I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” he said quite calmly, holding my hands. “At the
very least, a midlife crisis.”
“OK...” I
said. “Are we talking red convertibles?”
“No, no.
Not like that. I'm going to search for meaning.”
I exhaled.
Then fretted. I had been planning to whisk him away to the kind of mindless resort that plies you with Mai Tais
and corn fritters and lets you nap in five different kinds of hammocks. Clearly,
I had to reverse course. I needed a meaningful gift.
I
brainstormed. I made spreadsheets. I googled “my husband is turning 40 and
would like to do something meaningful what should I give him any ideas please I
will give you my credit card number without using PayPal just please ok?”
This
search turned up breath mints emblazoned with the phrase, “Look Who’s 40!” They
were only sold in bulk.
That’s
when I noticed the grimy brass bowl of pennies and keys balancing precariously
on our windowsill. It was a singing bowl, left behind by my mother-in-law when
she passed away. Unsure of what to do with it, we had used it as a coin dish for six
years.
I backed
away from Google and went to work cleaning the bowl, polishing it, and
purchasing a suede mallet to make it sing. I packaged it with a gift
certificate for a meditation retreat and congratulated myself.
My husband
was thrilled with the retreat. But the bowl, he set aside without much comment.
It lay in a pile of wrapping paper for several days before I dug it out and
placed it in his hands.
“Aren’t
you curious?”
“I never was able to make this bowl sing,” he confessed.
“That’s
not possible.” I handed him the mallet, and he rolled the leather
stick around the metal lip. His shoulders slumped.
It made no
sound.
I gave it
a try. How hard could it be? But the only way I could coax any sound from it was to bang it like a gong.
I had
envisioned offering up an instrument that would connect my husband with
his mother, a spiritual mentor whose guidance he needed. Instead, I’d made
him feel disconnected and inept.
The Silent
Bowl was the worst present of all time. Even worse than the Look-Who’s-40
mints.
Desperate,
I went to YouTube for instructions and found that we had been playing it all
wrong. We mistakenly glided the mallet around the inside of the bowl instead of
the outside. We flicked our wrists when we should have held them steady. We
gripped the bowl rather than turning our hands into flat, supportive pedestals.
My husband
tried again.
The room
was silent. The bowl began to shiver. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, an
otherworldly hum rose from its mouth. Before long, the bowl was shaking and our
apartment was filled with song.
***
I play the
singing bowl every day. When I’m stressed. When I have writer’s block. When I start
a project and when I end it. The sensation of the buzzing brass and the contrasting low/male and high/female tones produce an unexpected joy and focus.
And the
singing bowl is teaching me a lot about poetry:
*The value
of instruction. It’s easy to view writing as a mystical practice reserved for
the ordained. But get the right tools and guidance, and
it’s not so mysterious.
*The shape
of a poem. As a poet, I often focus on first and last lines, aiming to wallop readers
at the beginning or the end. As a journalist, I spend 75 percent of my time
crafting a lead and only 25 percent fleshing out the story.
But what about
a singing-bowl or diamond-shaped poem that begins inaudibly, escalates to a
howl, and ends in resonance?
Louise Glück, one of my favorites, does this well. Consider her shocking poem “Mock Orange,” which begins innocently:
It is not
the moon, I tell you.
It is
these flowers
lighting
the yard.
She makes a sound in the next stanza, when she reveals:
I hate
them.
I hate
them as I hate sex.
Smack-dab
in the middle stanza, the poem bellows:
and
the cry that always escapes,
the
low, humiliating
premise
of union–
Finally,
the pitch softens to a point of resonance:
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?
This
happens again in her poem “Hunters” (from A Village Life) when a rat screams in the middle stanza. See how she
builds to it and walks away from it here.
*After
playing the bowl, sometimes I hear a phantom ringing for hours. It lodges in my ear. Similarly, you
hear singing-bowl poems long after you read them.
*Every
bowl sounds different, because everything in the universe vibrates at its own
speed. You, me, bowls. The trick is finding the frequency that makes a bowl
sound its best. Perhaps when we create poems we imbue them
with a perfect, solitary frequency.
That might
explain the magic of the first draft. I have murdered many good poems with excessive
revision, making all the right choices only to find my verse lifeless on the
gurney.
Instead of
trying to make a poem right, I want to find its frequency. Where does it
sing, vibrate, excite? When does it burst into song? Can it sing louder? Can it
be a coloratura soprano? When I make this small change, does the volume go up or down? Does
the tone become more or less clear? How about now? And now?
Somehow, metaphors bring clarity, birthdays bring meaning, and Mary, my mom-in-law,
fills our apartment with music and poetry.
***
I am happy
to be writing about poetry here this week and look forward to meeting you in
the comments section! A student at heart, I’ll leave a prompt at the
end of each post.
Your daily prompt: Find an example of a singing-bowl
poem, or try writing one yourself. Let us know how it goes.
