Odes to Common Things

In these loud, hot, bewildering days, perhaps we'll find cool in the shade of Neruda and name the things we love

“Odes,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

A few Substack days ago, Darien Gee and I Lived our way into three things and then some. It was a first for me (not for Darien, a Super Pro), and I’ll always be glad that Darien was my guide into the Live atmosphere (even happier that she is now my friend).

Among our topics was a question I asked regarding Darien’s recent Short Reads essay, a piece called “Artifact.” The question: Do pieces that begin in the grounded and factual make more room, ultimately, for elevated and elevating endings? (Darien’s piece achieves just such an alchemical twist.)

This morning I turned to Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Odes to Common Things with that question still thrumming in my head. What, I wondered, might we learn from a poem like the first one, which is called (not surprisingly) “Ode to things.” It begins with a declaration of apparent simplicity, like this:

I have a crazy, 
crazy love of things. 
I like pliers, 
and scissors. 
I love cups, 
rings, 
and bowls—
not to speak, of course,  
of hats.

It’s the sort of thing we might all feel capable of writing, even on a hot, bewildering day. (Why not? I say. Why not make room, in this very moment, for your crazy, crazy love?)

But Neruda is not (you saw this coming) stopping with a bare list, and maybe we shouldn’t either. Over the next many lines, as Neruda unfurls his ode, his crazy, crazy love grows even longer arms. Now they are embracing “thimbles/spurs/plates.” Now “pipes/weaving/hand-held/through tobacco smoke.” Now “keys/and salt shakers—everything.” Neruda has gone ecstatic. He cannot help himself. His list is giving rise to a sacred kind of philosophizing, a religion, almost, of things:

I love
all
things,
not because they are 
passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don't know,
because this ocean is yours,
and mine:
these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten treasures ...

Now Neruda’s naming of loved things becomes active, lived in. You can almost see the poet standing up from his writing desk, flinging open the door, and going out to greet the world of the deeply loved, then “pausing in houses/streets and/elevators,/touching things…” You can see him exulting, sweeping his hands up toward the sky (I imagine this), gracing and feeling graced by the world itself until, at the end, it is all “irrevocable”—elevated and elevating. The closing lines:

Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touched them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.

At which point this reader is thrown back into her chair trying to remember how we got here in the first place. Oh. That’s right. With a simple list. With a declaration. With something deceivingly unfancy.

Perhaps you’ll write your own ode to things, or, still following Neruda’s lead, an ode to a table, an ode to a chair, an ode to a bed or to a pair of scissors. The microphone is yours; I cede; Neruda fades. In fact, I'’m heading off to the city to see a quite loved (not quite) thing—my dear friend (and powerhouse writer) Debbie Levy. I’ll be back at this desk tomorrow, hoping to be ode-ed by you.

Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, a hybrid work of history and the imagination, was released in April from Tursulowe Press.

I have written numerous books on the art of writing and of living a literary life. They can be found here.

Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

Come meet me and my much better half at the Artisan Market, July 18-20, at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, information here.

My mini-collages are now on sale at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, here.

I will be having a one-woman show of my framed prints at the Gryphon Cafe in Wayne, PA, between September 7 and October 4, here.

Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.