Dane Cervine Writes

The Jeweled Net of Indra CONNECTIONS

The Jeweled Net of Indra is the title poem of my book published by Plain View Press. It also appeared in The SUN Magazine, and Poetry Flash, after being chosen by Adrienne Rich for a National Writers Union award in 2005. Since then, the poem keeps appearing, disappearing, and reappearing on the Web in diverse places.

The poem was used by Victoria Safford of the White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota as the basis for a sermon. I thought it an apt connection.

In the San Francisco Shambala Meditation Center Newsletter (Nov/Dec 2006), the poem showed up on page 2 in the Dharma Art section, submitted by sangha member David Asbury...a very nice graphic reproduction of it. View it by clicking on this link:

Download newsletter.pdf 

 

Then, there is this fascinating paper written by a MIT student after visiting New Orleans....

 

MENTAL TRACKING: My Academic Reflections from the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (2007)

　

It’s easy to see it this way. Classified. Ordered. But we as humans are not operating along a line. We’re all part of a contained whole that might be more circular or weblike. There are subcommunities that divide along our values but ultimately we are stuck with the world community and forced to deal with the consequences of all of our actions. Seen and unseen.

So here I am back in the cosmos. Back in Indra’s infinitely connected jeweled net where everything is reflected in every individual eyelet.

I am a subscriber to The Sun literary magazine and have been for many years. Having entered DUSP and MIT last fall, unread issues accumulated in a dusty stack in the corner of my room over the 06-07 school year. When school ended, I loaded up my car and headed down to New Orleans for a summer to work in the recovery czar’s Office of Recovery Management. Stopping along the way at my parents quietly predictable suburban tract home to catch up on sleep and to hug my niece and nephew, I finally opened the September 2006 issue of The Sun. Appropriately, I found this lovely poem

The Jeweled Net of Indra

DANE CERVINE

Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology, Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt, a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean for dinner and beer, for the wife who fears him, loves him, hands that hold their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble when the Nazi bombing relented, and if not for that war, would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio recount the birth of a child named Tsunami after the storm that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars I send to rebuild a village minted with the Rosicrucian-eye above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls that we don’t know about, would I have known to send it, if not for the hands that flew the kite with the key that drew electricity from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood and Ipod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future, while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needs drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure for what burns, this illusion that anyone stands alone, stranded on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected vision of it all off.

And I kept this poem in my heart the whole time in New Orleans to help me get through the muck of the summer and to help keep things in perspective. It helped me come to terms with the daily conflict, racism, despair, poverty, hatred, fear of change, ridiculous faith in technological answers, and depressing evidence of society’s deep fracture locally, nationally, internationally.

I believe that work is just another extension of your being. It is not what defines me. It is just a means to act out in the world. As an architect I wanted to create joy in the physicality of the manmade environment. But I couldn’t keep sight of the large picture. I was mired in the details that weren’t reflecting the light of the interconnected universe. I thought being a teacher or a direct social servant would be the best way to reconnect. I sought out the down and dirty experience, looking to dip my hands in the muck and shit of society far away from the groomed neutral colored firms of the past. And then I saw something large happening and that thing was the world.

The post-modern world has shown herself to me in all her vastness and I am struggling to take it in and to work as an organizer, planner and systemizer of the great global society. Where are the connections? How should we proceed? Not only as human beings but as members of the big natural system called earth and as a larger metaphysical system that we cannot name but I feel is out there.

 

 

NEW BOOK RELEASE: The Jeweled Net of Indra

I am so happy to announce the release of my new book The Jeweled Net of Indra from Plain View Press. You can order from Amazon for single copies, or from the publisher for larger orders.

The back cover includes comments from Adrienne Rich, Ellen Bass, Robert Sward, and Patrice Vecchione. The title poem was chosen by Adrienne Rich as the 2005 National Writers Union winning poem, and was subsequently published in The SUN and Poetry Flash. Many of the other poems were published in a wide variety of magazines touching on themes of social justice, the environment, family, and the interlinked web that ties us all together.

The metaphor of Indra's Net is attributed to an ancient Buddhist teacher named Tu-Shun (557-640 B.C.E.), who envisioned life as a vast net with a jewel at each juncture. Each jewel, representing an individual life form, atom, cell or unit of consciousness, reflects all the other jewels in a cosmic matrix and is intrinsically and intimately connected to all others. A change in one gem is reflected in all the others.

The image of Indra's Net conveys that the compassionate and constructive contribution a person makes produces a ripple effect of beneficial action that reverberates throughout the universe. By the same token, one strand of the net cannot be damaged without damaging the others or setting off a cascading effect of destruction.

I was drawn to the Plain View Press vision, which editor Susan Bright describes: We Find Healing In Existing Reality.

Plain View Press is a 32-year-old issue-based literary publishing house. Over the years we have become a far-flung community of activists whose energies bring humanitarian enlightenment and hope to individuals and communities grappling with the major issues of our time--peace, justice, the environment, education and gender. This is a humane and highly creative group of people committed to art and social change. The written explorations of major issues are significant evidence that despite the relentless violence of our time, there is hope and there is art to show the human face of it.

The title poem, winner of the 2005 National Writers Union competition judged by Adrienne Rich, appears in the September 2006 edition of The SUN Magazine, which can be ordered at the site-link below:

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/september2006.html

The poem also appears in the Summer issue of Poetry Flash, and can be viewed in the opening sections of my website.

The Jeweled Net of Indra book endorsements come from the following poets:

"In the great fields of his country--not just the U.S. but the country of the heart, the country of poetry--Dane Cervine sits with and questions what is unfathomable but must be lived with anyway. I admire his faith in poetry. I admire his demand that it serve us. His lyrical and image-rich poems help light the way. They shorten the distance between us."

---Patrice Vecchione, author of "Writing and the Spiritual Life: Finding Your Voice by Looking Within

"The Jeweled Net of Indra is itself a jewel, an antidote to the illusion that any of us 'stands alone'. A testimony to how we are all of us consciousness and inextricably linked. A change in 'one gem' is reflected in all the others. I go for truth, I go for beauty...Dane Cervine's Jeweled Net of Indra has them both."

---Robert Sward, author of "Collected Poems: 1957-2004"

"'Poetry should matter' Dane Cervine writes in The Jeweled Net of Indra, a volume which tackles some of the most difficult and urgent subjects of our day: war, poverty, greed, alienation, the threats to our environment. These are poems rooted in commitment, caring, and a vision that comprehends our deep interconnectedness--poems that matter".

---Ellen Bass, author of "Mules of Love" 

Blue's Cruzio Cafe: The Jeweled Net of Indra

For a truly unique visual & auditory experience, check out my poem The Jeweled Net of Indra at Blue's Cruzio Cafe:

www.animatedpoets.com/indra31407-2b_30fps.html

 

 

Video from ONE WORLD, MANY VOICES Japan Benefit Reading

Here's a video link to my portion of a wonderful benefit reading held in Santa Cruz, California for a Japanese "sister city" impacted by the devastating earthquake. The entire evening was a varied and moving performance, which you can also watch on YouTube in various segments. The two poems I read are: The Jeweled Net of Indra, and, Every Story is Mine.

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=a9ZnyhoyN_k 

 

Poem Text from Event Website

Two Poems reviewed by Kenneth Salzmann in Substack column

This issue of Kenneth Salzmann’s “How to Grow a Poem” includes two older poems of mine that vary greatly in style (yet both winning awards). His column focuses on the writing process of a wide range of poets each week or so, and is worth the read. This particular column also includes a YouTube link of me reading “The Jeweled Net of Indra” some years ago at a Santa Cruz benefit for our sister city in Japan. The other poem is entitled “The Blue Horse”.

May we have more poetry than ever in 2024……

How to Grow a Poem interview with Dane Cervine

You can also read the text of the column below:

"You don’t really know what you have.”

Two VERY DIFFERENT poems by Dane Cervine

KENNETH SALZMANN

JAN 6, 2024

It might seem that, other than a shared author in Dane Cervine, the poems “The Blue Horse” and “The Jeweled Net of Indra” have little in common—and that’s certainly true if you are looking at such concerns of poetry as form, diction, style, and even subject matter.

But then there is this: viewed side by side, they also provide something of a workshop in the ways each poem finds its proper form, and in the surprises that can result when a poet steps away from his or her accustomed literary landscape.

In the case of “The Blue Horse,” that meant that Cervine was left wondering what the “scrawled lines” sparked by a family photo he happened across really amounted to.

“One of the questions that evolved was, do I actually have something?” he said.

One answer to that question came when the poem—a last minute addition to his submission—won the prestigious Atlanta Review Prize in 2013.

Similarly, “The Jeweled Net of Indra” was so different from his usual work that he didn’t even show it to his regular writers’ group for their comments and suggestions.

“I didn’t want the group to mess with it,” he said. “I just wanted to put it out there.”

When he did that, it became the winning poem in the 2005 National Writers Union contest, chosen by Adrianne Rich.

So, let’s take a look at the poems, and then backtrack a bit to learn how each one was written.

The Blue Horse

My mother wakes me at 3am, hands me a flashlight.

I put on old shoes, a jacket, follow her

to the barn where my father is already

kneeling by the white mare. Her eyes

are wild, her breath filling the cold air

with steam. But her muscled flanks

and immense torso know how to do this:

birth the impossible, life

from almost nothing. One egg,

one sperm, small as a thought,

an instinct, a desire. I had wanted

to see this, said, Wake me

no matter what. And here it is,

the new foal, impossibly folded

emerging from the mare in a blue silky sack,

as though brought here from deep under water

or an incomprehensibly distant star.

I stare like a virgin. This

a second birth, my own

vanished into bone memory.

But this horse: a kind of god.

In the dead of night,

I kneel in dirt,

watch his mother lick

the liquid sea from his fur,

nudge him to wobbly knees,

watch him stand.

—Winner of the Atlanta Review 2013 prize, chosen by Dan Veach. Published after in the book Kung Fu of the Dark Father (Plain View Press).

As you might imagine, “The Blue Horse” is a more or less straightforward account of a boyhood memory. But it was only when he had children of his own—and, consequently, an emerging interest in “family inquiry”—that the memory returned to the fore.

That happened one morning when he was looking through some old family photos, his children, still young at the time, playing nearby. One photo—of his sister with a horse—sparked a “visceral memory,” he said.

The memory was of a time when Cervine was still a teenager and his family had boarded a friend’s horse for a couple of weeks (they had horses of their own as well), not knowing at first that the visiting mare was pregnant. Not long afterwards, the entire family was awakened one night to witness the miracle of birth.

Years later, the photograph from that night brought back a rush of vivid memories for Cervine, now a widely published poet, author of a number of books, and the recipient of prestigious literary awards (see his bio, below).

“And I scrawled it out just to capture the memory itself,” he said.

Many of the images—“. . . her muscled flanks/and enormous torso . . . “—were “partly in the original version,” he said, “and I was so struck by the ‘blue silky sack.’”

But that’s where the poet’s craft—twinned with Cervine’s longstanding meditation practice—allowed him to go deeper into the images, to write such evocative lines as “. . . this/a second birth, my own/vanished into bone memory./But this horse: a kind of god.”

Even so, he had his doubts about sending the poem to the highly competitive contest at the Atlanta Review, he said.

“I’m not really sure why I sent it. It wasn’t faith in the poem, really, but I liked it.”

“Part of the magic for an author,” Cervine concluded, “is you don’t really know what you have.”

And here’s “The Jeweled Net of Indra,” read by the author; text follows.

The Jeweled Net of Indra on YOUTUBE

The Jeweled Net of Indra

Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology—

Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting

every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see

the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt,

hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean

for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold

their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking

pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble

when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war,

would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio

recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm

that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars

I send to rebuild a village—minted with the Rosicrucian-eye

above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders

as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls

that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it,

if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity

from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box

that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every

gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes

made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood

and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future—

while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle

drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt

into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls

from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing

its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking

the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure

for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded

on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world

whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough

to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected

vision of it all off.

—Winner of a National Writers Union contest (2005), chosen by Adrienne Rich and subsequently published in Poetry Flash, The SUN Magazine, and the book The Jeweled Net of Indra (Plain View Press)

There is a sense in which “The Jeweled Net of Indra” is an experiment, one influenced by Cervine’s then-teenaged son who had himself plunged into the world of slam or spoken word poetry, a form and language the father hadn’t explored. 

But first there was the “spontaneous mystical experience” that caused Cervine to pull off a busy California freeway to chase after “the flood of words” that had arrived unexpectedly as he was driving.

“I just kind of transcribed it,” he said.

Cervine, a therapist, was on his way home from a professional meeting at which the participants were assessing the connections (and connectedness) among the various specialties and organizations serving children and youth. That, and the meditative effect of the yellow lines rushing by him on Highway 80, may have nudged him toward thoughts about the interconnectedness of all things that is at the heart of “The Jeweled Net of Indra.”

However it happened, “My challenge was to take notes, and later to type them up. I added some [images], but not a lot,” he said.

“In some instances, I jotted down the images, then added in the grammar later.”

And those images—as varied as they are—were the ones he was given when the poem struck. From the Indian goddess’s jeweled net to the road workers, the tickets to London and “hands in China nimbly sewing” to, ultimately, “this illusion that anyone stands alone,” they were just a part of the metaphorical mesh Cervine saw that day.

“I didn’t go looking them up; they were already in my mind,” he said.

Even the appearance of the poem on the page reinforces the interconnections the poem insists upon, he said. “The original ‘block poem’ structure felt like a net or a blanket.”

In each of its facets, Cervine’s poem hews closely to the well-known Buddhist metaphor of the Vedic deity Indra’s jeweled net, in which each of an infinite number of jewels reflects each and all of the others, an illustration of the ways in which “everything contains everything else.” in the words of Zen Buddhism scholar Barbara O’Brien.

That’s a concept that resonates with Cervine, who says he brings three “identities” to his creative work: the therapist and the poet, of course, but also a third one that grows out of a lifelong interest in the spiritual.

“We can be part of this jeweled net,” he said.

Dane Cervine’s new book of prose poems is, The World Is God's Language, published by Sixteen Rivers Press (2021). Recent books include Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword, from Saddle Road Press in Hawaii, a cross-genre work of Zen koan & prose poems. Previous poetry books include Kung Fu of the Dark Father, How Therapists Dance, The Jeweled Net of Indra, and What a Father Dreams. Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for a Pushcart. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Visit his website here.

Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California—where he works as a therapist, and is the emeritus Chief of Children’s Mental Health for the county. His work integrates the arts of therapy and writing with a long-standing meditation practice.

VOX POPULI reprints THE JEWELED NET OF INDRA

Michael Simms re-printed my early poem THE JEWELED NET OF INDRA on his evocative, long-running site VOX POPULI:

https://voxpopulisphere.com/2024/06/02/dane-cervine-the-jeweled-net-of-indra/