#Poetryfriday: Haibun “Hip-Stir”

A haibun is a poetic form that  originated during 17th Century in Japan as a combination of two poems: a prose poem and haiku. The form was popularized by poet Matsuo Basho. In the haibun, the prose paper of the poem and haiku typically communicate with each other, though poets employ different strategies for this communication.

The prose part of the poem  usually describes a scene or moment in an objective manner. Meanwhile, the haiku portion follows the typical rules for haiku.

Here is my attempt at a haibun poem:

Hip-stir

The hip bone is a large flat bone, constricted in the center and expanded above and below. The two hip bones are part of the pelvic girdle that attach the axial skeleton to the lower limbs.

Osteoarthritis can occur in the hips. The warning  signs of osteoarthritis are:

• Stiffness in a joint after getting out of bed or sitting for a long time
• Swelling or tenderness in one or more joints
• A crunching feeling or the sound of bone rubbing on bone.

 

Arthritis in hips

Has been fixed with a “stand-in”

Such  a hip-stir!

 

#Shakespeare400: (America is) Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On…

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
      The Tempest Act IV.iv. 155–158

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, generally dated around 1611, about the time of the establishment of the American colonies in Virginia (1607). Shakespeare was well aware of the nascent colonies in this “brave new world”, and the play often focuses on the dramatic tension of native vs. foreigner through the characters of Ariel and Caliban as contrasted with Prospero.

The relationship between native vs. foreigner was a topic in Shakespeare’s time. Colonization offered opportunities to develop commercial enterprises, and to expand the breadth of the British kingdom (not quite an empire….yet!)

In England,  ship records (290) from the early 1600s indicate multiple regular trips across the Atlantic; an estimated 7100 families were relocated.

A selection from a larger database  recording ship travel across the Atlantic the year The Tempest was offered in London; credit to Anne Stevens did the work.

While The Tempest references the “stuff that dreams are made on” there could be an argument made that Shakespeare presupposed that “stuff” of imagination would be the force that would drive independent minded pilgrims to our American shores.

What better way to end the month of this year’s 400th anniversary of Shakespeare-Britain best commodity- than by celebrating his ability to anticipate our American Dream?

 

 

 

 

 

#Shakespeare400: 2X as Much Love Over Hate

Of the two most often used words in Shakespeare’s plays, the word love appears almost twice as often as the word hate. Love appears 63,162 times, according to the data on the OpenSourceShakespeare site, while hate is seen 37,971. In addition, the past tense of the verb to love – or loved– appears 13,425 times.

Love is one of the earliest words in the English language, coming from the Old English lufu means”love, affection, friendliness.”

Yet there was little love and affection in Shakespeare’s most produced plays: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth. If anything, many of the characters would have to sit on the hate side of the aisle.

Shakespeare portrayed all different forms of love in relationships. He captured each of the Greek ideas of love, and provided examples of each in his plays and sonnets:

• Eros, or sexual passion of Romeo for Juliet,
• Philia, or deep friendship of Horatio to Hamlet,
• Ludus, or playful love of Bottom and Titania,
• Agape, or love for everyone of King Lear’s daughter Cordelia, and
• Pragma, or longstanding love of Calpurnia for Julius Caesar.

 

There are a number of conclusions to draw, but the immediate take-away is that the evidence suggests that Shakespeare was a “not a hater…”

 

 

#Shakespeare400: The “Wow” Factor

Reading Shakespeare can give us the “wows“!
What are wows?

According to Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English, the linguistic tricks that Shakespeare uses in his poetry,  “excite us, rather than confuse us.”

In an article posted on The Big Think: This is Your Brain on Shakespeare, by Daniel Honan, Davis explains that the brain is more active when listening to word play. Davis cites several switches in parts of speech, a kind of word play, that Shakespeare employs in his plays:

An adjective is made into a verb: ‘thick my blood’ (The Winter’s Tale)

A pronoun is made into a noun: ‘the cruellest she alive’ (Twelfth Night)

A noun is made into a verb: ‘He childed as I fathered’ (King Lear)

Images from Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab; Lee Osterhout, Director: Dept of Psychology, University of Washington

Using brain imaging equipment, Davis and others conducted experiments that revealed brain activity when people listened to these the ways Shakespeare used language.

The researchers noted that, “A normal brain reaction is called an N400, which occurs 400 milliseconds after the brain experiences a thought or perception.” Listening to Shakespeare in contrast caused a peak in brain activity, “or a P600 response occuring  600 milliseconds after the brain experiences a quite different type of thought or perception.”

Davis describes the P600 response as the “Wow Effect,” in which the brain is excited, and is put in “a state of hesitating consciousness.”

Of course, that kind of “hesitating consciousness” may look a little different in high school where any form of consciousness is a goal.

#Shakespeare400: Quilting Shakespeare in the Park

Some of my favorite Shakespeare memories have included the Shakespeare productions at the Delacourt Theatre in Central Park.

I have been fortunate to secure tickets to see Shakespeare plays produced by the Public Theatre during the seasonable summer months either by waiting in line or through the new digital lottery system.

Of the two, my preference is for the digital lottery…enter your name in the morning, find out if you won by 1:00. Then, make a mad dash into the city to retrieve tickets by 6pm.

The waiting on line is by far the more difficult commitment. Depending on the day of the week and the play being performed, the line can begin snaking back to Central Park’s Great Lawn as early as 4 A.M.

Remaining on line for several hours means being prepared-hauling in chairs, blankets- to protect your bottom from the cold ground. Which is maybe where the genius idea of creating a quilt titled “Shakespeare in the Park”  found its genesis.

“Shakespeare in the Park” design.

The quilt designed by Judy Martin captures the magic of spending an evening under the stars. The design mimics the complex connections of characters and the whirl of action in each of Shakespeare’s plays.

Making this quilt could be an activity that could be done while waiting on a line in Central Park for a Shakespeare show …a productive activity that could be done waiting on line between the wee hours of dawn and 1pm.

The finished quilt could be used as a cushion while waiting, however, I think it is too beautiful to sit on. The complex mix of stars and swirls would need protection using a tarp or blanket beneath.

“Shakespeare in the Park” quilt design has a beauty that complements the beauty in Shakespeare’s language.

 

 

 

#Shakespeare400: “How Sharper…”

Last week, my sisters and I placed my 84-year-old mother in a nursing care facility. We represented our other six brothers and sisters in this decision. We were a united front.

My mother has dementia, and even though we know that this is the safest place for her care, I know she will believe that she has lost her independence.

Nothing could be further from truth.
We had hired help 24/7 in the home for the past two years.
We had taken precautions. We refitted the bathroom. She was not allowed to drive.

The illusion of independence was maintained by my sister who kept coins and small bills in her purse during outings. Laundry was done in advance. Food was brought in. Cooking was done while she slept.

My mother operated as though she was in charge.

But the time had come. There were too many hazards, and she could no longer stay in her home.

We are fortunate to have the  financial resources to place her in a lovely apartment in a memory care facility. We had done research, and we were lucky that an apartment was even available in the place we selected.

The night we brought her to the apartment, it was decorated with all things familiar-photos, furniture, lamps.

Her initial reaction was surprise.

“That’s my husband’s picture!”
We had removed it from the dining room wall while she sat softly humming at the dining table the day before.

We had also taken the photos that hung over her bed.  They now hung in the same order over a smaller twin sized bed. For two days, she had not noticed that we were removing these things from her home.

“Those are my children…,” she explained pointing to the wall.
She listed off names…an embedded list of her children in an order that has so far survived the ravages of the disease.

She did not understand for several minutes…but our repeated comments, “This is your apartment, Mom,” set off some alarms.

Then, suddenly, she knew.
Panic set in.

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad! (King Lear I.v.45-46)

She began to plead. She did not want this.
Her roars were quiet, but they were fierce.

” Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!” (King Lear III.ii.1-3)

 

“You are cruel,” she told me.

“Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!” (King Lear I.iv. 281–289)

These lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear surfaced in my brain all week.

This deeply personal experience of caring for a parent who is ill -like so many of Shakespeare’s themes-is a universal experience.

I am not the first to hear him so perfectly express the language of loss and frustration because of age.
His language transcends time, place, and gender.
His words captured my mother’s rage.

My mother’s view of her “thankless child” will hopefully disappear.
The only good part of dementia is the forgetting.

I hope she forgets every time.

 

#Shakespeare400: Taxes

While I may have missed the official date for a blog post on taxes (April 15th), there has been an extension granted for Emancipation Day (set aside to commemorate the signing of the Emancipation Act by President Abraham Lincoln), moving the tax deadline to April 18.

Shakespeare understood the need for extensions for taxes, because among the the paltry collection of documents that bear his name are two tax delinquencies. The first is for 5 shillings, the second for 12 shillings:

 

1597-11-15: Tax record. Shakspere is named in the King’s Remembrancer Subsidy Roll as a tax defaulter in Bishopgate ward who failed to pay an assessed 5s (E. 179/146/354).

1598-10-1: Tax record. In the King’s Remembrancer Subsidy Roll, Shakspere is listed as a tax defaulter who failed to pay an assessed 13s.4d (E. 179/146/369).

In a paper titled Shakespeare’s Guide to Tax Policy: ‘Know You of This Taxation?’,  former chief counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, Michael Evans, provides a wonderful explanation of Shakespeare’s delinquencies coupled with analysis of his attitudes towards taxes as written in his plays. 

He explains that Shakespeare was one step of the tax collectors, or maybe several steps, when he moved his theater across the Thames River and hence outside London’s city limits. Shakespeare’s debts were left to be collected by a  bishop in the district where Shakespeare was then thought to reside.

“There the trail ends.” writes Evans, “with Shakespeare two years delinquent paying his taxes for 1598 and with the English tax authorities in slow but diligent pursuit.” In summarizing Shakespeare’s tax problems, Evans suggests:

One assumes that Shakespeare paid the debt and thereby got himself off the tax delinquency list, and there is no evidence, in the records of either the London area or Stratford, to indicate that Shakespeare had further trouble with the tax authorities.

Shakespeare is not alone in tangling with tax authorities.  Considering the delinquency rate for the general public in the US has been historically between 8 percent and 9 percent, Shakespeare shares a special tax delinquency status today  (2016) with roughly 256 million Americans.

 

#Shakespeare400: Shakespeare and Students “See Eye-to-Eye”

Idioms are word combinations that have a different meaning than the literal meanings of each word. In the texts of his plays, Shakespeare was very creative with these word combinations, and some of the idioms he is responsible for either coining or popularizing include:

• Lay it on with a trowel
• Wear your heart on your sleeve
• A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Tonight, the local intermediate school housed a “Festival of Arts” that featured the work of 5th and 6th graders in all subject areas. The Reading Department hallway had a large banner spelling out the word IDIOMS, showcasing the figurative language that the students had been studying this past month.

In “IDIOMS” hallway, the parents, family and friends could wait in lines to receive a donated book. While they stood in line, they also could read the idiomatic phrases that students had designed hanging on the walls:

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Just as Shakespeare used word play and figurative language to create images in the minds of the playgoers 400 years ago, these idioms showed that “pictures paint a thousand words” and that student illustrations were “second to none”!

#Shakespeare400: Sonnet Total of 616 Stanzas

There are a number of websites dedicated to poetry that explain that the word stanza means “room” in Italian. The etymology of the word stanza comes from  from Vulgar Latin stantia meaning “standing, stopping place.” Other explanations  include- “a station,” or “a stopping place” -where each stanza in a poem is compared to a small dwelling. 

Shakespeare’s sonnets share a distinctive style. Each sonnet has three rhyming quatrains (abab/cdcd/efef) and a rhyming couplet (gg), a style that has been named Shakespearean. These sonnets differ from the Petrarchan sonnet, named for the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch.

There are 154 sonnets written by Shakespeare, and that is a total of 616 stanzas. If you want to be literal, and think of stanzas as little rooms, you could check what those 616 “stanzas”  might look like in the following:

• Kahler Grand Hotel, Rochester, Minnesota
• Marriott Louisville Downtown, Louisville
• Golden Sands Hotel Apartments, Dubai
• Fiesta Americana Reforma, Mexico City

#Shakespeare400 -One Page XXXL Folios

A folio is:

• “an individual leaf of paper or parchment, numbered on the recto or front side only, occurring either loose as one of a series or forming part of a bound volume.”
• “a sheet of paper folded once to form two leaves (four pages) of a book.”

William Shakespeare’s plays were printed on folios. There were 36 plays collected in what is known as the  First Folio (1623) which were advertised to be better than copies “stol’n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.”

Several years ago, a friend gave me a large “one-page” reproduction of the text of Shakespeare’s play “Much Ado about Nothing.” The entire play -all 21,157 words- is laid out in a 27″ X 40″ frame.

The title of the play is a pun “noting” a reference to written messages, spying, and eavesdropping, which are all woven through the plot. There is “much ado” made of something which is insignificant or “nothing”….which is also why my husband would not let this hang this in our bedroom.