Twig Tea and Poetry

Usually I make two cups of tea in the morning, but today I’ve been a little wicked and made three. I’m an underemployed artist who values her time to create and stare into space more than luxury goods, so I can only afford to buy a certain amount of the fancy teas that I drink. Therefore, I make two cups of tea from one tea bag. And I hate the thought of the tea all drying up and sitting vulnerably on a plate in the open dusty air of the kitchen, so I make both cups of tea one after the other and then put a plate over the second cup. However, I have a tendency to forget about the tea that I’m steeping, and today, for example, I was happily listening to Bjork and forgot to switch the tea from one cup to the next, and so, it being Ban Cha and bitter when oversteeped, I had to make another cup of tea with a new tea bag. And somehow ended up with three cups of tea, but I’m kind of distracted, and don’t feel like going into all of the details.

Brain’s a little bit cluttered and wispy this morning, so I’m not even sure how much sense I make. Maybe if I listen to enough Joanna Newson it’ll get clearer- Milk Eyed Mender, though, not YS, YS is just to intense and complicated for this morning. Although I love it dearly, it’s just a little bit overwhelming at the moment, since I’m feeling quite delicate and thin skinned.

The Safeway near my parents house didn’t have Twig tea, so I had to settle for Ban Cha, which I also love, but I feel the caffeine effects more. With twig, I can drink it all day, whenever I want because the caffeine level is negligible, but Ban Cha I can only drink first thing in the morning, otherwise I’m mildly jittery.

Twig tea has been my favorite tea, hands down heart full for awhile. I don’t like fruit teas. I like the earthy taste. Tea that almost tastes like dirt, it grounds me, helps me find me feet rooted down. So I loved it when I stumbled upon a reference to “ a picnic of bee pollen and twig tea” (p 27, Hawksley Burns for Isadora) in a Hawksley Workman poem.

I love twig tea more, but “hawksley burns for isadora” is stunning and well worth the read. I discovered it at the same time that I started reading Anne Michaels’ (author of “Fugitive Pieces) poetry, and the two authors are now permantely entwined in my mind, and I love that. I have high poetic standards, and only have a few poets that I keep on my bookshelves and close to my heart. Stephanie Bolster was my first favorite poet, especially her series written from the paintings of Jean Paul Lemieux in “Two Bowls of Milk”. I used “L’orpheline” as my poetic text in second year voice class, and to this day it’s probably the only piece of text I actually have memorized. “White Stone: The Alice Poems” and “Pavilion” are also extraordinary books, with a visceral yet gentle tone to them.

Although I don’t enjoy a large portion of his work, and am more than slightly uncomfortable with his supposed anti-semitic views ( much like Ezra Pound, who wrote a couple of short stunenrs) which definitely reflects on how I perceive his work, I am enamored of some TS Eliot poems. His preludes are potent. Too bad “Cats” stole some of the more gorgeous lines from these short momentous and emotionally vigorous words.

Also, one of my favorite songs ever is Sarah Slean’s “Eliot”. I remember the first time I heard it, and fell in instant love. I was in the car on the Upper Levels Highway in North van, listening to CBC radio, and it was played, and I was in love. I love to sing it, play it on the piano and sing along, listen to the version on “Blue Parade”, listen to the fabulous revamped version on “Night Bugs”.

And then there’s Emily. Miss Dickinson, who has to be put in a category all of her own, because I relate to her work very differently than my other favorites. One of my goals in life is to read fully and deeply each one of her poems by the end of my life.

I wish I had more profound things to say about the artists whose work I love, but it’s all abouit the experience, and the translation of experience into words is such an arduous and loving process. It’s a lifetime’s worth of work.

And I’m writing all this because it’s calming. It brings me back to myself in this moment of anxiety and separation. I think the Zoloft withdrawl sympton hit big time yesterday, and this morning I’m all full of muscle spasms, unahppy gastrointestinal system, unfocussed- I feel like I have a terrible flu, and it’s really hard to do anything. So I’ll focus on small things that I love, like poems and songs. My body really, really doesn’t like pharmaceuticals.