Sunday Mini-Challenge - Ode to the Quotidian

Hey Toads!  

Manicddaily, Karin Gustafson here,to tell you that I don’t much believe in muses.  Or, maybe it’s truer to say that I have absolute faith in them.  

Meaning that I tend to think a muse, i.e. inspiration is here, there, everywhere, all the time, and any trouble I may have in locating her/him/it is due far more to my absence of attention than to any muse having gone missing. 

Meaning that I think there’s a poem (at least an ode) available in pretty much anything, if considered closely.  (Note that I personally am not always capable of this close consideration!) 

One of my favorite “od-ists” to just about anything is Pablo Neruda.  Neruda wrote three collections of odes; they cover topics from the quotidian to the sublime--or maybe he just makes the quotidian--that is, day-to-day stuff-- seem sublime.  One of my favorites is one of his most homely--”Ode to My Socks” in which he rhapsodizes about his heavenly socks as something he is tempted to feed like a pair of tropical birds, with seed and pink melon. 

So, in this mid-June, when, in the Northern hemisphere, you may not even be wearing socks (though you may be eating pink melon) and when, in the Southern hemisphere, you may have donned wool socks "as soft as rabbits," I ask you to think of something simple, something down to earth or day to day--what, for example, your eye passes over as you look over (right now) from your computer screen--and find a poem or ode in it. 

Note that the poem/ode can start with something relatively "lowly", but then scale whatever heights or fancies you wish.  In other words, your ode can, but, need need simply describe the object or experience that is its inspiration; it can just use object or experience as a place for lift-off (if you like).

If the quotidian doesn’t work for you, then feel free to focus upon the “ode” part of this project and keep to a more elevated plane right from the start.  I am thinking here of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale or Ode on a Grecian Urn.  

Classic odes are lyrical, and may follow a traditional rhyme scheme.  Feel free to use a structured format, but do not feel obligated to do so. 

Also, I include below some photos/drawings of quotidian sorts of things--use as you like, but please do give appropriate attribution. (Karin Gustafson).  (BTW, the green vegetables are brussel sprouts on their stalk.)  

Finally, sorry to be a bit rushed--am preparing for my daughter's wedding this upcoming week (which will be at our house!)  A lot to do!  I will definitely visit everyone, but may be slow.  

A Toad's Favourite Poem ~ Kim Nelson

Recently embarking on a minimalist path, I re-read this familiar Neruda piece and felt a new message and meaning. Entitled "Ode to My Socks,"  the poem is essentially an ode to the perfection and value of NOW, a declaration regarding the beauty and function of the ordinary. It is now a new favourite of mine. I hope you share my appreciation.

Ode to My Socks
by Pablo Neruda

Mara Mori brought me

a pair of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder's hands,

two socks as soft as rabbits.

I slipped my feet into them

as if they were two cases

knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,

Violent socks,

my feet were two fish made of wool,

two long sharks

sea blue, shot through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons,

my feet were honored in this way

by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time

my feet seemed to me unacceptable

like two decrepit firemen,

firemen unworthy of that woven fire,

of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation

to save them somewhere as schoolboys

keep fireflies,

as learned men collect

sacred texts,

I resisted the mad impulse to put them

in a golden cage and each day give them

birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle

who hand over the very rare green deer

to the spit and eat it with remorse,

I stretched out my feet and pulled on

the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:

beauty is twice beauty

and what is good is doubly good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool in winter.

Editorial Note:
Pablo Neruda was the pen name of the Chilean writer and communist politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 and is the author of The Heights of Macchu Picchu and World's End.