Sheila Packa Poetry Blog

New Worlds

2012-03-12T20:47:00.011-05:00

"Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." Rumi

Once in awhile, a few words can rise like a wave and break. Like these. I heard them on the radio, an interview by Krista Tippett on NPR: "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi with Fatemeh Keshavarz."

As a poet, I consider the craft and vision of this sentence. So few words, and two are repeated: new and world. It's written as a command: speak a new language! There's cause and effect, departure and arrival; there is an authority in the voice, a knowing, a mystery. Somehow, like a wave that breaks on the beach and bounces back, the words fall back, rearrange themselves in my mind. These are words translated, a world translated.

Keshavarz was speaking about Iran, but this applies to many things. She also uses the poem in such a way that it rises and breaks like a wave and then meets other waves in a back wash. It is often the case that poetry has this sort of resonance. Keshavarz said:

"Language can take over our lives and make us not see things. He [Rumi] actually has a fabulous verse, he says (Persian spoken). "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." I mean this is the most sophisticated, philosophical approach to language. Now we talk of language as being constitutive of experience, but that's exactly what he said. You know, 'get yourself a new language and then you will be able to see a new world.' So that the world will be a new world, speak a new language. The world will be a new world, so speak a new language. Speak so the world will be new. Speak! It is what the world needs."

Of course, we are born into a language that we grow up speaking. Besides learning another tongue, I think Rumi is also talking about discovering the untried in one's own language: new words in new places.

Next time you are working on a poem, try this. Get a dictionary, or use the lingo from a particular field of study or work (think of boats, technologies, specialized fields of knowledge), or reach into your own history to find the interesting phrases or foreign words that came into your life. Think about the unique ways that we talk in church, in a medical facility, in a math class, to a lover, or to an authority. Try transferring that to another context. Get out of the rut of the usual and expected things, and try the unexpected.

Random or aleotropic techniques can help you break out of a tired pattern. Look up the noun or verb that you want to change, count down seven words in the dictionary and try that word. Collect words from the eleventh line and fifth word in from any book and use them to make a poem. Close your eyes and let your finger fall onto a page of the Bible, a cookbook, a repair manual, a dictionary, or a newspaper. Take that word and make a poem. Make a poem by collage. Make a poem that names seven different shades of a color. Experiment.

Language is a sea that we navigate. See if you can find a new shore.

To listen to the interview between Krista Tippett and Fatemeh Keshavarz, go to http://being.publicradio.org/

Traveling in the Astral: H.D.

2012-02-24T23:36:00.024-06:00

Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D. (1886-1961)

As a young poet, I was often looking for models for myself. Too often, the women poets I admired had committed suicide. But not H. D. I reached for her, and still do. She still sweeps me off my feet. She was also a poet who became an expatriate. She lived in Europe for many years, was married to poet Richard Aldington, was an analysand of Freud, a friend of Ezra Pound, involved in the new medium of film as an actress and writer, and a lover of Bryer, a wealthy woman novelist who during the war had financed the escapes of several Jewish people. In the following, H. D. shows her artistic abilities. The poem is firmly embedded in the body-- and it stays physical-- and it draws on both landscape and mythology.

Lethe

Nor skin nor hide nor fleece
   Shall cover you,
Nor curtain of crimson nor fine
Shelter of cedar-wood be over you,
Nor the fir-tree
Nor the pine.

Nor sight of whin or gorse
   Nor river-yew
Nor fragrance of flowering bush,
Nor wailing of reed-bird to waken you,
   Nor of linnet,
   Nor of thrush.

Nor word nor touch nor sight
   Of lover, you
Shall long through the night but for this:
The roll of the full tide to cover you
   Without question,
   Without kiss.

H. D. is one of the great American poets. In this poem, her power is evident. The sound and rhythm of the language, hypnotic in its accumulation of nor, causes the poem to rise and break in the last lines in the last k sounds, "Without question,/ Without kiss." In Greek mythology, Lethe was the "river of forgetfulness" or the goddess of the underworld river of oblivion. The poem works on more than one level, decrying the losses of love on the physical body. The river likewise is stripped of the beauty of tree and flowering shrub at its banks, as if the river and the land were lovers. Wanting to be annihilated by flood, a victim of its own qualities, of too-muchness, the longing is palpable. It is both real and mythic.

There is a record of letters between H.D., Bryher, and May Sarton. At the time, May was discouraged in her efforts of publishing. H.D. wrote: "O, my dear--don't worry about your work. It is wonderful, you have wonderful gifts. The fact of the writing is the thing--it trains one to a sort of yogi or magi power, it is a sort of contemplation, it is living on another plane, it is 'travelling in the astral' or whatever it is, they are supposed to do. That is the thing" (July 26, 1941).

Trilogy: The Walls Do not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, The Flowering of the Rod is my favorite. H.D. was in London, England with Bryher during the bombing. This was written afterward. I read it again and again, marveling at the tumble and flow of syllables and her deft use of metaphor. In The Flowering of the Rod, excerpted here, the migration of geese and Jesus' resurrection speak to new beginnings in life:

...
I would rather beat in the wind, crying to these others:

yours is the more foolish circling,
yours is the senseless wheeling

round and round--yours has no reason--
I am seeking heaven;

yours has no vision,
I see what is beneath me, what is above me,

what men say is-not--I remember,
I remember, I remember--you have forgot
....

again, the steel sharpened on the stone;

again, the pyramid of skulls;
I gave pity to the dead,

O blasphemy, pity is a stone for bread,
only love is holy and love's ecstasy

that turns and turns and turns about one centre,
reckless, regardless, blind to reality,

that know the Islands of the Blest are there,
for many waters can not quench love's fire.

Her poem soars and circles in this series, moving between opposite poles, touching the images of war and the distance of airborne flight, faraway islands, the vision of divine love and ecstasy.

H.D. as an imagist was much more powerful than her cohort Ezra Pound. She deftly used history and mythology in her work, and her vision was much greater. This poem has been my center during change in my life. I am restless by nature, settling and unsettling as a flock of birds. Along the shoreline of Lake Superior where I have lived for so many years, the migrations of birds have entered my internal landscape. Perhaps my grandparents' migration to the U.S. has had a residual effect, the impetus still echoes like waves from the stern of their ship stirring the ocean.

H.D. has captured the heart-breaking truth of leave-taking, of striving, of being in the air, in the midst of perpetual change. Her words whisper in my ear--in moments of uncertainty, at times of break-up and loss and sorrow--to remember:

"In resurrection, there is confusion
if we start to argue; if we stand and stare,

we do not know where to go;
in resurrection, there is simple affirmation..."

Bibliography

H. D. biography http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/234

Mandell, Charlotte. "Letters Across the Atlantic: H.D., Bryher, May Sarton, During World War II" This article originally appeared in A celebration for May Sarton : essays selected and edited by Constance Hunting. Orono, Maine : Puckerbrush Press (c/o University of Maine, Dept. of English, 5752 Neville Hall, Orono, Maine, 04469-5752), 1994, p.89-104. http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdcmone.html

Martz, Louis, editor. H.D. Collected Poems 1912-1944. New Directions, New York, 1983.

Ponsot, Marie, "Shot Through with Brightness: The Poems of H. D." http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19222

Detesting Ezra Pound

2012-02-24T22:20:00.018-06:00

Pound was a literary giant and many have lived in his shadow. Although I have not often liked his poetry, I've have been influenced by those he influenced. His essays about poetry and his translations are still read, and they still resonate. Pound edited an essay by Ernest Fenollosa comparing the pictographs or characters of the Chinese language with poetry. In the Chinese character, image joined with action to convey the essential quality of transformation. So influenced, it was image that drove Ezra Pound as a poet. He edited the work of Yeats and T.S. Eliot. He was a strong force promoting the work of several other poets. In the essay "Retrospect" he writes about Imagist poetics:

"In the spring or early summer of 1912, H. D., Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:

Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome."

I do agree with these principles. I believe that the image carries meaning like nothing else. It easily becomes symbol or metaphor. The image that undergoes change in the poem, like the image of lemon slices in the poem "Miniature" by Yannis Ritsos, goes beyond metaphoric to metamorphic. It's powerful.

H.D. was a powerful poet. Her spare lines still emit her radiant skill with sound and image. Other poets, also called modernist, used these tenets well: William Carlos Williams (although in a letter to Ezra Pound, he criticized Pound's first book of poetry as bitter), D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Gertrude Stein. In the lineage, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, and Amy Lowell.

On the subject of influences, even unwanted influences, here is a poem he wrote about Walt Whitman:

A Pact
by Ezra Pound

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root--
Let there be commerce between us.

The powerful poetry of Whitman with its sweeping democracies and celebrations were not those of Pound's. Pound complained that sometimes he detected Whitman's rhythms emerging in his own lines, but he brought the focus of his poems back from such abundant multiplicity to the single image, defined as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Some of Pound's work seems to me as mysognist: "The Garden," "Portrait d'une Femme" or "The Lake Isle." Sometimes his endings seem clunky. I do much prefer the other modernists to him. Only this poem of his, so deeply influenced by the Chinese poetry he studied, I love:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It is an instant of time, the intellectual and emotional complex, that fascinates. His choice of word, "apparition" means sight, yes, but it also means haunting. This small haiku: a stream of faces, perhaps going to the front, or returning to it, faces of women who are saying good-bye or reuniting, the endless motion that is captured by the strong counterpoint of "petals on a wet, black bough." His equivalent image captures the brevity, the fragility of full blossoms in the rain.

A translation of Li Po, "The River-merchant's Wife: A Letter" Pound did beautifully. This is the work that will let me have commerce with him.

While in Italy, Pound became involved with the Fascists. He was anti-Semitic and pro-Mussolini and Hitler, and he referred to President Roosevelt as "that Jew in the White House." When Mussolini died, Pound was arrested and returned to the United States. He was charged with treason (the penalty was death by execution) for broadcasting fascist propaganda by radio to the U.S., but he was found incompetent to stand trial by reason on insanity. He was committed as mentally ill to a St Elizabeth's Hospital, a federal asylum, in D.C. in about 1946 where he remained until 1958.

Some people have argued he not mentally ill, and some think he must have had bipolar disorder. I've worked in the mental health field for thirty years. I know that at the time he was committed, patients often went into a patriarchal and brutal system. Medications were just coming into use; the heavy tranquilizer Haldol had disabling and sometimes permanent side effects like tongue rolling and uncontrolled hand movements (called pill rolling). This was the era of lobotomies, high voltage electroshock treatments, strait jackets and shackles. Commitments were also done on people with mental retardation, epilepsy, and homosexuality. In 1981, when I first walked through a back ward in a state run psychiatric hospital, I thought of Dante's circles of hell. Patients were over-crowded. Some people spent their life time in these hospitals; often their bizarre behaviors were related to the environment, lack of privacy or control, assaults or intrusions of other patients, and punitive or demeaning systems (like an M&M economy--a system of exchange based on candy M&Ms). I don't know what the conditions were in St Elizabeth's when Ezra Pound was there, but I know they were difficult in general for all mental health patients.

During his commitment, he convinced Eustace Mullins, another writer, of a conspiracy of "The Rothschild system" which was a group of bankers, corporations, and secret governmental agencies which yielded world power. Pound's theory of monetary control leading to the Federal Reserve influenced Mullins went on to write a book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, updated later in The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism (1985), and The World Order: Our Secret Rulers (1992). Pound continued to rant; perhaps he was delusional. Clearly he was racist, and this also I detest about him. When he was released, he returned to Italy and lived there until he died in 1972.

Despite his political involvement, his literary contributions were recognized in 1948 with a Bollingen-Library of Congress Award.

Sources

Aldington, Richard. "Images" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21788

Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/234

Ezra Pound Biography http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/161

Ezra Pound Biography http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ezra-pound

"Insanity on Trial," Frontline, PBS. c1995-2011, WGBH. retrieved 02/24/2012. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/crime/trial/other.html

Pound, Ezra, Editor. The Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa. City Lights Books, San Francisco. c1936 Ezra Pound.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems.

Pound, Ezra. "In Retrospect" and "A Few Don'ts" (1918) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237886

Wendell Berry and William Carlos Williams

2012-02-20T17:01:00.018-06:00

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
by Wendell Berry

I've always lived in the northern forest. I grew up near Lake Esquagama (Ojibwe translation: waters flowing to Superior) and have lived for many years in Duluth in view of the Great Lake, and the farthest inland seaport. For many years, I've loved to read Wendell Berry's poems and savor his connection to place. His voice rings with the solid ground on which he stands.

Wendell writes an impressive critical analysis of the writing of William Carlos Williams. Honoring Williams' commitment to his own local community, Berry praises his efforts to find a language that expresses Rutherford, New Jersey and the people and things of that locale. At the time Williams was writing, New Jersey was considered "provincial." Most of his poetry peers traveled and lived in Europe.

As a doctor, he was of use to his community and as a poet, he sought to be of use to Rutherford and America. Instead of separating himself, becoming academic or writing in the classic forms with meter and rhyme, Williams had the courage to inhabit his own place in the world of writing. Berry borrows the ecological term "local adaption" to express the effort to connect oneself to place. This is the goal of the writer, to find the right relation to the land and community where he or she lives; Berry contrasts this with the focus on self or autonomy in the phrase "identity crisis."

"Williams in his writing moved more and more decisively toward a sense of the poet as a local maker of a kind of order, spokesman and teacher...Since his time, the understanding of place as the right context and measure of work has become as urgent and articulate among some scientists as among some poets."

Berry also defends Williams' proscription, "no ideas except in things." It was not that he was mindless or unconcerned with thought:
"He was accepting a limit (for himself and his work, first of all) that would protect things from the limitlessness of abstract ideas, abstract definition, abstract rules and case. Things--or, by implication, persons, places and things--properly mark the limits of ideas."

It is such a pleasure to read Wendell Berry. He so fully inhabits his place in the world, he brings the wisdom and time of his land to all that he writes. Berry inspires me to grasp the roots of my own heritage here in this place where my grandparents arrived as immigrants from Finland. Finland also is a land of northern forest. As a child, I was aware that my family and the community where not the first people to dwell in that place. I knew it because I'd found in the forest of Norway pines where I lived burial mounds of the Native American culture; the mounds were large, like small hills in an otherwise level ground, and my mother had warned me to respect those grounds, not to climb on or slide down, as a child is tempted. This feeling of people before my people, a layer of history, was strong even as other areas of our land was unearthed and the iron ore taken.

Now, I am contemplating the forest as ecosystem and searching for a language, my language, to express its reach and tangle and roots, its constant change. Wendell Berry rightly gives his blessing to all poets who go deeply into their local culture--the people, places and things-- and in doing so, strengthen it.

An Archeologist of Morning

2012-02-19T21:46:00.003-06:00

The poet Charles Olson influenced poetry in the United States. In 1950, he published this essay, "Projective Verse," as a pamphlet. It was his manifesto. Instead of traditional forms with their meter and rhyme, he urged a new approach:

"the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE."

1. Poem is a way to transfer energy from the poet and his or subject to the reader.
2. The form should evolve from the content of the poem.
3. The poem must be built with a series of perceptions, one quickly following the other.

To read his essay about poetics in its entirety, click on this link:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237880

In a biographical essay at the Poetry Foundation website, this paragraph reveals his process:

"Olson did not consider himself "a poet" or "a writer" by profession, but rather that nebulous and rare 'archeologist of morning,' reminiscent of Thoreau. He wrote on a typewriter. 'It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pause, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.' "

Another good biography is found at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/739

Archeology is the study of human culture based on material objects left behind and the place where these are found. I am fascinated by the phrase "archeologist of morning." (This was the title of a collection of shorter poems by Charles Olson). I traced this phrase back to Thoreau who was also a carpenter, naturalist and in his work on a house, became fascinated with 17th century building techniques in Concord, Massachusetts. He had keen observational skills and was considered "the father of modern archeology."

Olson's work is full of the material objects and places that would fascinate an archeologist. In form, Olson seemed to favor a longer length and he often about Gloucester, Massachusetts. The images develop and circle. He varies his stanza size and indentations, and he uses parentheses and visual arrangements on the page. He is known for his experimental work, The Maximus Poems.

This excerpt is from his poem " As the The Dead Prey Upon Us":

each knot of which the net is made

is for the hands to untake

the knot’s making. And touch alone

can turn the knot into its own flame

(o mother, if you had once touched me

o mother, if I had once touched you)

Charles Olson is one example of how each poet must find his or her own path through the work.

Judging a Poetry Contest

2012-02-19T12:18:00.005-06:00

On this dark winter night, I look out upon the sheet of ice in front of the house. Boot prints pressed into the melting and soft snow earlier in the day are now frozen. I have memories of old ice rinks, fenced with boards, memories of carved lines in the ice, compressed and polished. I remember the empty rinks gleaming in the pools of light around the lamps, and beyond, midnight ink.

It's a privilege to read poems and select winners. As a judge of a recent poetry contest, I want to write about the process of winnowing. I know some of the poems in the stack are from new poets and some are from poets with strong skills and confidence. After reading all the entries carefully, I began separating the entries into two piles: "possible yes" and "definite no."

The table looks like voting day at the township meeting hall. Papers and papers. I take some away to look at, stand by the window, look outside. I lay them down on the table again like a game of solitaire. What poems will I elect?

The poem should be presented in a professional manner, free of spelling errors. Large or ornate fonts are distracting. Some have too many archaic or "poetic" words, some are goofy. Humor is definitely okay, but I want the poet to give some serious attention to language. I read more than once, because I don't want to miss a gem.

I look for poetry that has patterns in sound. Some poets use rhyme (internal or at the end of lines) and others use assonance and consonance (a pattern of vowel and consonant sounds). Some poets count meter and create a pattern of stresses (like iambic pentameter or trochaic rhythm, etc). Some poets work with visual patterns on the page or create a circular form or the like. I'm not just looking for formal poems, sonnets or sestinas or villanelles. I'm looking for poems whose form might follow their content. Compression of language is also pleasing. The best way to discover and savor these patterns is to read poems aloud.

I look for poetry that uses concrete details and figurative language (like metaphor). The best poems engage the five senses. The best poems have a strong sense of place. I like those with concise and precise language.

Things that went into the "definite no" pile were poems that were overly sentimental and lacked strong images. Sometimes poets sacrifice meaning for rhythm. A sing-song rhythm can overwhelm and trivialize the topic. Sometimes the language was too loose and prose-y. Extra words. Passive verbs. Jumbles of things at cross purposes. Tired language. A poem is less strong if the writer tells the emotion instead of using a concrete detail to create the emotion.

Show, don't tell. This was a maxim when I was learning to write, and it is still good advice. For example, in a poem I will read a line that goes something like this: "they were bored/ lonely...."
or "...she was happy." This kind of line does not make use of good writing skills. Instead, it would be better to show the feeling with concrete details like in this example by David Allen Evans in "Neighbors":

...

Today they are

washing windows

(each window together)

she on the inside,

he on the outside.

He squirts Windex

at her face,

she squirts Windex

at his face.

Now they are waving

to each other

with rags,

not smiling.

Sometimes writers need to get out of the way of the poem. A poem often gets started on a
good thing, and the writer thinks too much, and starts interfering. Not once does David Allen Evans neglect the picture. He uses concrete details so the reader can see the scene. The emotion is evoked. The reader is not told how to feel.

See the entire poem at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171085

Note: this was not a poem that I reviewed in the contest.

Other "definite no" poems were the ones that had abrupt or jarring shifts in language or their metaphor. Sometimes poets keep jumping to another metaphor. That doesn't work. It's best if the poet can get all the elements working toward their best effect: the images, sounds, details, and form to all become parts of an exquisite whole.

It's a good idea for the poet to take some time to identify who is speaking in the poem, and to whom. If affects the tone. Poems can be personal, even intimate. Or poems can be addressed to a multitude. Consistency is good.

After the first sorting of poems, I picked up the "possible yes" poems and examined each one a lot closer. There were a fair amount of "almost" poems. Finally, I found the top ten percent.

These are all good poems, unfortunately, I can't give that many awards. I've been asked to choose first, second, third place winners and three honorable mentions. I put the poems into a stack and come back a few days later to read and read them. Many poems would be better if the poet had deleted the last few lines or even the last stanza. A poem is not the place to make a summary-of-ideas conclusion. Repeating what has been said is unnecessary and depletes the energy of the poem.

Sometimes I notice there is a line or two that should really be omitted for better effect. Sometimes a word will really bother me. But I'm not the editor, so I don't get to advise anybody about anything. This affects the ranking. What is second or third place might have been first if it wasn't for a single glaring wrong note.

I was asked to make comments on the six selections, so I decided to write comments about my top ten percent. I think best with a pen on paper, it seems to help me drop down a level, go deeper. Suddenly the top choices become very clear. Those are the ones that I want to write about.

At the final selection point, I notice that the poems I selected had the strongest voices. Voice is a term that refers to a personality or energy, a compelling combination of story and sound that rises out of specific place. I chose the poems with the best craft and vision. In addition, the winners were those with the best focus: staying in metaphor long enough to explore it with depth, following the image throughout the poem, and inhabiting the world created in the first two lines.

If a poetry competition were a skating championship, then I'm judging the artistry. My attention is on the poetic equivalents of the triple axles: build-up, execution and landings. Seeing the effort, endurance and grace of a good poem is such pleasure.

The Question

2012-02-13T12:24:00.001-06:00

"We have poetry so we do not die of history," says Meena Alexander in this poem. She also said, "Poetry and place—if poetry is the music of survival, place is the instrument on which that music is played, the gourd, the strings, the fret."

QUESTION TIME by Meena Alexander

...

Hand raised in a crowded room --
What use is poetry?

Above us, lights flickered,
Something wrong with the wiring.

I turned and saw the moon whirl in water
The Rockies struck with a mauve light,

Sea creatures cut into sky foliage.
In the shadow of a shrub once you and I

Brushed lips and thighs,
Dreamt of a past that frees its prisoners.

Standing apart I looked at her and said:
We have poetry

So we do not die of history.
And I had no idea what I meant.


(Published in the journal Black Renaissance/Noire, 2010)

In the following essay, Meena Alexander examines her influences. She grew up in India, was reared in Sudan, and is a scholar in English literature. She finds her home in the polyglot of her languages.

excerpt:

"The first border we cross is that of the body. I put out my hands and touch the stone, the tree, the surface of the mirror and what I mark is the rim of the body, the fleeting surfaces of the world, what we might choose to call the real, irreparably marked by the notations of the body, the unique impress I take of things and the mark I make, however ephemeral in the arrangements of sense. Yet this touching and tasting that my body allows me in the world it creates so I can live, is always rendered up in a density of location, a necessary otherness. My private body, this nest of flesh and blood and bone is already marked and set in place by the temporal passages of a world I have little control over, by others who do not know me, and have never heard of me, and might wish never to do so.
...
"I think of Simone Weil and her notion of decreation - a stripping down of the self, an emptying out, essential to a burning interior life, no thing there, just a waiting on nothingness, a radical act of attentiveness. There is much in her notion that we can learn from as we try to conceive of the imagination, the image making power which works through a febrile openness to emptiness. It is only by stripping ourselves of what we thought we were that the panoply of circumstance the poem sets up, its minute theatre of sense can achieve itself. And only then is poetry permitted its seemingly serendipitous alignment with the haunting we call history."

Read the full essay
Meena Alexander, "The Question of Home"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19032

For more information about Meena Alexander, visit her website http://www.meenaalexander.com/

Poems as Maps

2012-02-12T18:19:00.004-06:00

What Do You Do with the Past?

Writing is built on memory; it preserves and shapes our memories and lives. In the process of making art, a poet can write from memory. No matter if you're writing poetry, fiction, essay or memoir, the past provides a wealth of material. We use this material in poetry, but as Ted Kooser points out in his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual, an anecdote does not necessarily make a poem. A poem needs something else. Like Mary Oliver says, poetry is writing that casts more than one shadow. The poem needs to mean more than one thing. It needs to convey the 'is-ness' of things and it needs to employ sound. The poem is the map where the memory is placed.

Reading other poets allows you to study their maps. Each poem is a map of the breath, a map of the encounter. In an introduction to one of his books of poems, Neruda emphasizes the tactile. He aims for: "A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denial and doubts, affirmations and taxes." Studying these other maps will help you make your own with your own body, out of your own vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, loathing and love, encounters, doubts and distractions and obsessions.

Good or bad, we can't escape the past, and neither can we escape the inexorable changes. Every day removes us just as it moves us forward into new experience. Neruda says it well in his poem, "The Past." The ending is excerpted here:

Now the heavy eyelid
covers the light of the eye
and what was once living
now no longer lives;
what we were, we are not.
And with words, although the letters
still have transparency and sound,
they change, and the mouth changes;
the same mouth is now another mouth;
they change, lips, skin, circulation;
another being has occupied our skeleton;
what once was in us now is not.
It has gone, but to the call, we reply;
"I am here," knowing we are not,
that what once was, was and is lost,
is lost in the past, and now will not return.

Pablo Neruda, "The Past"
http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/N/NerudaPablo/Past.htm

The past: always crumbling and every moment falling into it. We lose everything, even our selves. Things are not fixed, there is no certainty, only this threshold of constant change.

But it is here that we can stand and work, reaching back to our own material to make and shape new poems, and possibly even new futures. Mona Smith, a Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota storyteller and media artist was recently featured in the Minnesota Women's Press. She is working with others making memory maps, an important writing and media project in Minnesota to recover the history of the Dakota tribe. "Know who you are and know where you are," she says.

Her project involves creating a memory map of the bdote area of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers (a bdote is a place where two waters come together) that is central to Dakota spirituality and history. She is collecting the stories from many Dakota people in her quest. In another project, Mnisota Makoce 2062, she aims to bring together dance, recordings, public performance and stories from the tribe's elders to tell what it was like in the region before Europeans arrived, before the mass executions in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862 when 38 Dakota men were hanged, the largest group hanging in the history of the US. For more information about her, see the article http://eedition.womenspress.com/main.asp?sectionid=2&subsectionid=77&pageID=8

I applaud this work and I bring it into the discussion of poetry and the use of the past because I think she offers much wisdom. She is working on truth-telling on a large scale, using many perspectives. Writers always have done important work when they write about the places and people that have been sacred or important. For writers and those making art, I recommend the development of a memory map. The more people participating in a project like this, the better. Knowing who you are and where you are brings clarity and strength.

There was a type of poetry called "confessional" which is the poetry of "I" and usually involved speaking about things that were normally not spoken in polite society. Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton were examples of this type of writing, and they both wrote about painful experience. It was truth telling on a personal level. Anne wrote about her time in a psychiatric ward. Other poets later, like Sharon Olds, continue to write about sexual abuse and physical abuse, breaking taboos by speaking out. I think this is an important wave of artistic work that has helped change the culture. The taboo against speaking has broken and now more people have awareness and understanding.

After awhile, some critics and readers felt that there was too much emphasis was on the "I" and that the confessional had become solipsistic. At this point in time, in the era of Facebook and MySpace, people in our culture are much more comfortable with sharing personal and even private information. It is no longer breaking any taboos at all; the culture's appetite for the personal and private in our lives is not appeased. If anything, it has grown. Consider the reality shows on television. In my work as a poet, and for most poets, the aim is for something deeper.

Mona Smith's project involves the collection of many individual stories in order to portray a community that was oppressed. As such she is able to uncover the roots of oppression, give a broader context to individual experience, revive the culture and help change the lives of people right now. Because she is also recording dance, music, and art, she can access powerful change. She is working on the larger scale of history.

Here I speak of poetry as a map. Change may not be a direct mission of many poets, but truth-telling is valuable. In the threshold that all of us stand upon, between the past and "the next," I encourage poets to write with passion about their histories, their places and landscapes, their dances and songs and feasts, and the people and things who are important. From these things, the poem's rhythm and sound emerges.

The map is about place. A poem is emotional landscape. It is a way of traveling by sound. In this work of making a map, poets need to connect the anecdote or memory to something larger, to cast more than one shadow, to capture that heart-rending edge where things are coming to be and ceasing to be. Therefore the anecdote or the memory in the poem should be juxtaposed with the larger life, the world outside of the individual. The anecdote itself can be a metaphor, a way of describing something else. This connection to the larger expands the poem. Connecting to history expands the poem's range, and connecting to myth or Biblical story accesses deep cultural meanings.

When the mythic or Biblical is invoked, it is not as parable or conveying a lesson. The story becomes a story within a story. It is a way of deepening the poem and making it larger. It's so important to avoid the sentimental and to avoid naming feelings or telling the reader how to feel. The emotional landscape is not traveled by naming the feeling, but by creating images that evoke the emotion. And all this needs to happen without the poet giving up connection to the physical body and the tactile.

Poets who use memories aren't just writing memoir. We make the map as a way to access the spirit or breath, in the spirit-to-spirit exchange between poet and reader, the I and thou. In this context, the map is made of the personal scratches or marks, it should be physical or tactile, as Neruda says. It offers a rhythm. In order for a poem to move us, the map must reveal the emotional landscape and terrain of the sacred. If the poem is a map of the writer's encounter with "the larger", if a poem is able to find the way into something that can not be said, then the reader can follow in the same sound and rhythm and find the point of connection. It is this aha! -- this encounter -- that the reader of a poem enjoys.

Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf described the luminous moments of life, the memorable experiences, the things that mark us forever as "moments of being." These moments of beings are the heart of who we are or who we have become. The following examples are ways that poets take a moment of being and make a poem from it:

The poet Eleanor Ross Taylor writes about the travel bag that her mother packed for her:

Some days now I wonder if I’ll ever

dare face my given garments—

permanently wrinkled,

surely out of date—

your travel-thought

wasting in its tissue, flesh-corrupt—

till I’ve absorbed it,

like those stitches that dissolve

in an incision

where something’s been removed.

Eleanor Ross Taylor "At the Altar"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241922

This poem by James Galvin, takes a seeming innocuous memory of being in an art class. He enters the drawing itself:

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it, 
To indicate the horizon,

James Galvin "Art Class"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19945

In this poem, Sharon Olds captures the moment her abusive parents were courting, in that moment of possibility before all the mistakes were made:

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

Sharon Olds "I Go Back to May 1937"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176442

In the next poem, Natasha Tretheway takes a story about fishing with an aunt to illuminate her bi-racial identity and the history of racism:

Here, she said, put this on your head.

She handed me a hat.

You ’bout as white as your dad,

and you gone stay like that.

Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down

around each bony ankle,

and I rolled down my white knee socks

letting my thin legs dangle,

Natasha Tretheway "Flounder"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237548

History and Poetry: Letters, Photographs, Journals

The following poems use events in history in a way that is personal and arresting. The form of the resume or curriculum vitae is used by Lisel Mueller to tell:

Curriculum Vitae

1992

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into 
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of 
course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The 
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building 
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones 
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than 
earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother 
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

...
to read the full text, see
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16234

This next poem by NatashaTretheway is structured as a letter written by a mulatto woman in the south who is "passing" as white but has not been able to find work:

though I pretend not to notice--the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive 
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown 
as your dear face, they'd know I'm not quite 
what I pretend to be. I walk these streets 
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes 
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine, 
a negress again. There are enough things here 
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through 
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall

Natasha Tretheway "Letter Home"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16258

The poet in this example offers a photographic image. She structures her poem as a villanelle on that single moment in time, in 1900. The repetition of lines in the villanelle seems to help evoke the scene of five young girls, scolding and shifting as their photograph is taken:

Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch,
are bickering. The eldest has come home
with new truths she can hardly wait to teach.

She lectures them: the younger daughters search
the sky, elbow each others' ribs, and groan. 
Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch

and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch
saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown
with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach,

Marilyn Nelson "Daughters, 1900"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15820

The poet in the following example writes a narrative about war. She has a specific time and place, a day of departure in a specific geographic location. Her offhand tone contrasts with the horror for the individuals in the story, it emphasizes how common this scene is, how it happens all the time. Her tone is ironic, biting, and reminds the reader about how much we tend to blame others and ignore our own complicity.

Some people fleeing some other people. 
In some country under the sun 
and some clouds. 

They leave behind some of their everything, 
sown fields, some chickens, dogs, 
mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected. 

On their backs are pitchers and bundles, 
the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next.

Wislawa Szymborska "Some People"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20449

Poems connecting with myth or Biblical stories

In the following poems, the intensely personal story has found a connection to Biblical or mythical stories. It like placing the small within a larger cultural map. The personal voice is immediate and riveting; that these stories are embedded in the larger myth or Biblical story lends them much more power. The poem itself is just a moment in time, but the reader understands the entire arc, the story from beginning to inevitable end.

Jean Valentine, "Annunciation"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16934

Maureen Gibbon "Magdalena Remembering"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19521

Rita Dove "Persephone, Falling"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19856

Alicia Suskin Ostriker "Demeter to Persephone"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21760

Accolades for Poets

2012-02-08T21:28:00.005-06:00

A good poem is like an arrow shot from a bow, it penetrates deeply. However, poems do not wound. They heal us. Recently these three poets have been honored for their work. Click on the links to find out more about these writers and their truly great work.

What is a poet laureate? A laureate award honors the poet. The United States appoints a poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress. Generally, the poet laureate initiates a program that will promote poetry and expand the audience for poetry. Many cities and states have a poet laureate program. It is a great way to recognize the contributions of poets and to create community around the art of writing poetry.

I want to thank the Duluth Poet Laureate program for the opportunity to be the city's poet laureate for 2010-2012. In May, a new poet laureate will be named and I look forward to the new initiatives that person will create. It's been a wonderful experience. In the role, I offered workshops and completed a Community Arts Learning project, collecting poems and writing about transitions in life. These have been collected in the book, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions (Wildwood River, 2011).

Nobel Prize for Literature

Tomas Tranströmer
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/arts/swedish-poet-wins-nobel-prize-for-literature.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=tomas%20transtromer&st=cse
Selection of poems

http://tomastranstromer.net/poetry/poetry-3/

U.S. Poet Laureate
Philip Levine
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-levine
sample poem
"What Work Is" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182873

Minnesota Poet Laureate
Joyce Sutphen
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/08/23/state-poet-laureate/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/joyce-sutphen
sample poems
"Homesteading" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/176/1#20604932
"Aunts" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241314

In All, There Were Three Things by Fernando Pessoa

2012-01-28T12:42:00.006-06:00

de todo, quedaron tres cosas:

la certeza de que estaba siempre comenzando,
la certeza de que había que seguir
y la certeza de que sería interrumpido
antes de terminar.

Hacer de la interrupción un camino nuevo,
hacer de la caida, un paso de danza,
del miedo, una escalera,
del sueño, un puente, de la búsqueda,...un encuentro

by Fernando Pessoa

In all, there were three things:

the certainty one is always beginning

the certainty one must go further

and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.

From the interruptions, to make a new path,

from falling, a dance step,

from fear, a ladder

from dream, a bridge, from search...the encounter

By Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Cecilia Ramon and Sheila Packa

Note: the original text was written in Portuguese

These words by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa express the frustrations of being a writer or artist. I post them here to remind myself of the fact that each new project has these three things. Art is capability, and maybe the best art flourishes in the tension between failure and success. The writer or artist learns how to use limitations productively in the service of creating the new work. In my mind, the best artists and writers are always exploring -- whether that is beings, objects or obstacles -- and learning new approaches, techniques, and methods. I remind myself -- so easy to forget -- that my muse has a name: Seek.

Quotes from the Masters

2012-01-23T10:48:00.001-06:00

"Poetry is made up of nothing except beautiful details." --Voltaire

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (July 12, 1827)

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
-- Walt Whitman, from Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way. --Emily Dickinson

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions. The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility. If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
--Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

Walking, like prose, has a definite aim....When the man who is walking has reached his goal...when he was reached the place, book, fruit, the object of his desire...this possession at once entirely annuls his whole act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the means; and whatever the act, only the result remains. It is the same with utilitarian language: the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard....The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.
-- Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The Art of Poetry

The difference between the action of a poem and and of an ordinary narrative is physiological.
--Paul Valery, "Remarks on Poetry," The Art of Poetry

Making Poems and Love

2012-01-21T11:54:00.007-06:00

If there is a connection between love and good writing, then it's the body. Many poets write the erotic. This poem by Donald Hall (see the New Yorker January 23, 2012 for his wonderful essay about aging) creates a couple making love, and his focus on the color gold fascinates me. It's as if he has set this moment in amber to keep for all eternity. The sense of enclosure is palpable, the walls of the room echoed by the sides of the clear bowl that holds the yellow roses. The other focus is centers of daisies, the couple centered in the room, and the light.

Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

The stanza break in this poem travels forward in time, beyond the deaths of these two lovers in a fascinating and satisfying figurative leap, the "tiny identical rooms inside our bodies"
where gold light will remain. The "o" sound resonates through this poem, solemn, orchestral, and extraordinary. It is as if the poet were spinning honey.

If there is one mantra spoken by writing teachers, it might be this: write with the five senses. If writers forget physicality, we forget the source of pleasure. This poem by "Little Lion Face" by May Swenson uses all the sensual and erotic possibilities of the body. Here is an excerpt:

Little lion face
I stopped to pick
among the mass of thick
succulent blooms, the twice

streaked flanges of your silk
sunwheel relaxed in wide
dilation, I brought inside,
placed in a vase.  Milk

of your shaggy stem
sticky on my fingers, and
your barbs hooked to my hand,
sudden stings from them 

were sweet.  Now I'm bold
to touch your swollen neck,
put careful lips to slick
petals, snuff up gold

pollen in your navel cup.

There are two bodies connecting, interacting, in this poem. The narrator feels "barbs hooked to my hand, sudden stings," and the dandelion she has described with "swollen neck" and a "navel cup." The entire poem delivers this level of intense connection. The sibilance, the s sounds, abound and the vowel sounds, or assonance, lends more richness. Later in the poem, echoing the succulent, the poet twice repeats the word, suck. And the erotic energy amazes, considering the topic is a dandelion. She makes love with her words. The reader is transported.

Transport is a very apt word. The use of figurative language, associational leaps of time and space, and ecstatic moments of being are the realm of poetry. In another poem by Mark Doty, "A Display of Mackerel," we find a juxtaposition of mackerel at a fish market with a Tiffany stained glass window and jewels displayed in a shop. The "iridescent, watery, prismatics" can transport us between the body of a fish, to a soap bubble, to gems in a glass case.

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

It's a meditation on love and death, this meditation on mackerel. Doty heightens the effect by
the use of high contrast. The fish are displayed on crushed ice, quickly followed by an image
of sun on gasoline. The particular is considered along with the multitude. He puts no boundary
between the natural and the created, fish scale and jeweler's enamels, dead and alive. All is
beauty. "They're all exact expressions/ of the one soul..." and

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer--would you want

to be yourself only
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They'd prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

With mackerel, no less, Doty strikes at the fundamental questions of the individual and
communal. What is it for, he seems to ask, except for what he calls in The Art of Description,
dazzle?

Love, love, love. That's what all these poems are about. They demonstrate how poets enter
writing through the body, explore with the senses, and leap into the figurative, reaching the
metaphysical, all the while remaining connected to the physical body.

___

Doty has a new book about writing, The Art of Description: World Into Word (Graywolf Press,
2010) that I recommend. From a poets perspective, he examines splendid descriptive work
by various poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swenson, and that of many
others beside an abecedarian guide.

____

"Gold" by Donald Hall
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16635

"Little Lion Face" by May Swenson
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15815

"A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty
"http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/176663

The Use of the Past: Reading Virginia Woolf

2012-01-02T13:09:00.006-06:00

Memory is a rich source of material for all poets and writers. It is the substance of memoir but also a major part of fiction and poetry. What we notice, what images resonate, what our mind fastens upon -- what fascinates -- changes over time. I've been reading a wonderful work about origins: Virginia Woolf, in "A Sketch of the Past," wrote:

"I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it -- the past -- as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There are the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start."

Each of us possesses those moments of great intensity that live in our mind, that actually illuminate and cast light on other events and become part of our perception. We listen to the past.

These moments make us who we are. Our listening to the past takes us back to events that are moments of intense sensation and awareness. Moments of being, Virginia Woolf calls them. And it isn't only events -- day dreams or night dreams like her own dream of the looking glass where she saw the frightening face of an animal in the background also create our consciousness. They are our dream of life.

Each writer has their own set of images, words, and sounds that are unique. These are repeated through one's body of work. Kate Green, a writing teacher, poet and novelist from Minneapolis, called these "totemic images" because they are very deep and they are in fact sources for the individual writer that yield again and again.

In writing, these are coordinates on the map that one might call the self. We see, hear, smell, taste and touch everything through these moments of being. It gives our work dimension and depth. Woolf said:

"I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand time deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason -- that it destroys the fullness of life -- any break -- like that of house moving -- causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L: "What's there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?" "At Monk's House," he says. So I write this, taking a morning off...I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream."

I write a lot, essay, poetry and fiction. It seems difficult now to distinguish kinds of writing -- memoir or nonfiction, fiction or poetry -- except by considering the external form, the writer's intent, and the purpose of the language. We want memoir and biography to be based on facts. of course. But it is a creation or a re-creation.

In fiction, the writer can create the facts to make a drama. Fiction captures the heightened moments of being and those other moments that mundane and the unremarkable in every life. "Non-being" according to Woolf -- "those moments lived not consciously." She said: "The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being."

Poetry (including prose poems) seems to have a shorter circuit, an immediate arrival at being, through its compression, physicality, language and music. Poetry has the capability of simultaneity. To me, it is the invention or device that Woolf wanted. Good writing does help us "plug in" and live our lives through from the start.
_______

Schulkind, Jeanne, Editor. Moments of Being: Virginia Woolf. Second Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, New York, London. c1985 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett.

Revision and The Body

2011-12-30T17:58:00.004-06:00

Good poems are written in the body. Some might say that poems are written with the body. The five senses are full engaged. The poem is connected to the body of the person and to the earth's body.

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry," says Emily Dickinson. She reminds me that part of the body is energy. The first half of this sentence, "if I feel physically..." is countered by the next part, "as if the top of my head were taken off." I think of this as energy. These days we are aware of an energy body in alternative healing, Hindu or yoga philosophy, people talk about the chakras and the concept of kundalini, the upward journey through the body toward union with the divine. This experience is a spiritual one. I define the word spirituality in this way--a mutuality of spirits, a feeling of congruence with another. Poetry is the union or communion of the spirit.

How does one create a poem that gives another person this experience? I do think there are ways to revise increase the poems physicality and spirituality. First question then is, is the poem written in the body? Does it employ all the senses? Is it fully physical?

The next question is about spirit or energy. This part of revision, in my experience is about taking out the extra junk: extra words, explanation, interpretation. It involves becoming more simple, more focused, more evocative. In my college writing class with teacher Wayne Moen, I learned that the more evocative a poem, the stronger it was. He insisted that we allow the reader to participate in making meaning. Lawrence Sterne also said this; he was the author of Tristam Shandy. Do not insult the reader, Sterne warned, by telling him what to think or feel. The revision technique needed is one of ellision. Take out clutter, words, lines, sections of the poem in a fearless surgery.

The next way to increase the energy of the poem is through the rhythm and sound of the words. One strives to create a certain music, even if it is not a formal poem, the poet pays attention to the vowels, consonants and where the stresses fall. Other things increase the energy as well -- resistances, frictions, contrasts, textures.

Muriel Rukeyser wrote about energy: "In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions."

"The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.

"If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death." --Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and social activist. The Life of Poetry was published in 1949. She was actively against the war and censorship (remember McCarthyism). The first chapters of her book examine the resistances that our culture has had to poetry. People say they "don't have time for it." I love the way she analyzes this as a fear. "A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response." Are we willing to open ourselves to an emotional experience? Are we willing to take a poem inside, to listen with our own senses to the world another has given us? Are we willing to have time for the spirit?

New Work & Poetry Hybrids

2011-12-12T16:01:00.004-06:00

Right now, I am at work on a new piece of writing. It is a hybrid between poetry and prose, and I search inside for its form. The goal is to find that interesting friction or energy that will engage me and the reader, and that will help the work go forward. Often, writer's block will occur when I've taken a wrong turn. I work in fits and starts, forward and back, revising and developing.

Anne Carson writes (from the section Short Talks in her book of essays and poems, Plainwater (Vintage Books, New York, 1995):

Anne Carson is a poet, translator, scholar of ancient Greek literature, and essayist, and she is a good example of a writer who is combining forms. She is entertaining and incisive. The Autobiography of Red carries the Greek myth of Herakles into contemporary culture. This story in poems details the Red Monster as a gay man who wears a heavy black coat to disguise his wings. We read about Herakles' mother and a lover in Argentina. The book also contains an interesting essay about the adjective and meat. The book Men in the Off Hours has poems that are essays. The Beauty of the Husband is billed as a fictional essay in 29 tangos. Decreation contains a set of poems, a play, and essays about ecstasy and eclipses. Nox is an art box of fragments and photographs, memories of a brother, and a translation of an ancient Greek elegy.

The boundaries are not fixed. Patterns shift. Formal poems give way to informal. Meaning gives way to language. Poetry gives way to prose. Sources vary. Discourses mix. There is a potluck of essay, fiction, autobiography, poetry. Conventions travel. Cultures blend. Translations err and err again. Words are the stock in trade. Poets conduct raids of other landscapes and lexicons. We make forays into art and science and metadata to yield the right friction or energy or fusion.

Recently, WW Norton came out with an anthology, American Hybrid. The editors have included many good poets who are experimenting with language, but I thought the collection falls a little short. The editors acknowledged how challenging it was to put the collection together. Their initial choices they decided against, in favor of collecting the work of the earlier generation, the precursors. The publishing world has turned upside down Cole Swenson writes, and academics are no longer on top. Changes are happening fast. Technology, the internet, and rapid changes in our culture make it difficult for an editor of such an anthology to keep pace. In order to learn the new works, it's best to scan the New York Times Book Review. Besides the interesting fusions in genre, other influences exist. Graphic novels, music videos, video games, and hypertext provide interesting story telling techniques.

I read Anne Carson because she opens doors. I also read Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian prose writer. This is an excerpt from the novel, The Hour of the Star (New Directions, 1992) that so clearly conveys that each book tells the writer how it must be written. It was written in Portuguese and is translated by Giovanni Pointiero. The narrator is a writer, Rodrigo S.M., who tells the story of a poor girl from Northeast Brazil who comes to the city and works as a typist. She is a very bad typist, and she lives a very sad existence. The drama of the novel is the struggle the writer Rodrigo has with his story. He says:

"I know perfectly well that every day is one more day stolen from death. In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze, the words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow. Allegro con brio. I shall attempt to extract gold from charcoal."

"I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day. Yet I am prepared to leave quietly by the back door. I have experienced almost everything, even passion and despair. Now I only wish to possess what might have been but never was."

Lispector is not a writer who is much concerned with plot. She has the concerns of a poet yet writes in prose. She is a wonderful and deep writer who is able to bring the reader with her into a threshold space of each moment, a threshold of becoming. This book is a very good book to read when one is struggling with a piece of writing, becoming. I return to her work again and again for her vision.

How Do You Know When You're Done?

2011-11-22T17:54:00.005-06:00

Endings are difficult -- think of love affairs, departures, and deaths. So where do you begin? I ask this question not only to open a line of thinking about the ways to conclude a poem, but as a reminder that, at least in a work of art, an end is likely intimate with its beginning. And this might be true of other things too.

A few years ago, yearning for a dog, my partner and I went to the animal shelter. There was a photograph on line. Some rescue websites post beautiful photographs of silky furred puppies playing on orange pumpkins, but the photograph we viewed was of a skinny, medium-sized black dog, smiling, behind a chain link fence. She had her head tilted just so, a certain wistfulness that caused us to get in the car and have a look. She was about a year old, and she'd been found on the Townline Road, starving. Her body revealed she had been recently lactating as well, but had no puppies. She did have a wonderful grin caused in part by a underbite, a permanent smile, a shining row of white teeth. We took her home despite the fact she could not for a minute focus on us, or be persuaded away from the rabbit cage, or coaxed into accompanying our lead on the leash. I thought of her a teen mother; bred too young, unable to be responsible. It's something we have made into a joke; we say we posted bail, got her out of jail, for turning tricks on the Townline Road. As soon as we got her home; she ran away. It's probably the Border Collie in her; she is a mix of many things. A special blend. We named her Sky.

Sky ran away several times, and in fact is incapable of staying home or in the yard. Yesterday, as I was going out of the house with an armful of old newspapers and the end of her leash, I dropped everything. There wasn't even a heartbeat of hesitation; she flung herself down the road with wild abandon. I've tried to change that behavior, carried treats in my pocket, conducted training exercises, been consistent. But running is her nature; I can't change it. Someday, I'm sure, that will be her end.

And think of all those other beginnings and ends. My last love began with a lavendar note; it ended also with writing. My job happened to me. I fell into it almost accidentally, on my way somewhere else. It was a case of being in the right time and right place, and I stayed for many years. The departure did not feature much deliberation; I was seized with a sudden urge to go, in order to pursue other opportunity. Endings can happen in so many ways. My mother died after a long illness. A cousin I had died suddenly, in a car accident.

I've been considering endings quite a lot lately, after leaving my job, and bringing another large writing project to a close. I've been doing a writing workshop every month for a year, and I wonder really, how do you know when you're done? Once one is in a flow, there is a certain force that carries you along. Endings should be considered. How do you find the right way, the right time and place?

Formal poetry have built-in conclusions. The sonnet has its question and response; the form itself lends the writer the place for a turn in the poem that becomes a conclusion. The conclusion might be an amplification or epiphany. The sestina form with its obsessive repeats of the end words, 6 line stanzas, 6 stanzas, ends in a 3 line final stanza that incorporates all the six end words used throughout the poem. The villanelle also leads the writer into the conclusion if one follows the form. Studying forms of poetry might help you understand how meter, rhyme, and line might come together. The formal poem is a like a ritual or ceremony. One follows it; the experience has a certain shape and form.

Rituals and ceremonies are wise practice; the funeral will help us accept a death. A divorce proceeding will undo a wedding. A break-up has its familiar characteristics. Good-byes entail certain rituals, even in poems. Change can happen suddenly; it can be too abrupt. A good ending is a good resolution; it satisfies.

Free verse or blank verse does not offer formulaic resolutions. I've been considering the conclusion of free verse poems and decided to review some ways they end. Some are actually good-bye poems, and some are not. This one for example is published at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19191

I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run
by Matthea Harvey

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign

for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.

When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.

The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.

Harvey's poem is very focused; she begins with rain falling, and the word "post-romantic" immediately indicates the situation is a break up; and it could be the final drink she describes in that restaurant/bar. There is a tearing sensation created by "heads in the carpets, toes tucked under carpets" and even more distance indicated by the detail about a translator and twenty horses backing away.

As the poem develops, the details exact to the room, very specific. "The drink we drank was cordial" has a very pleasing sound play. The alliteration of d sounds, hard consonants, echo a relationship that is done. The meter is very pronounced: two iambs, one anapest. It rings of ending. Image-wise, it is as if her consciousness was withdrawing from the expansive pre-romantic world and she was no longer having eye contact. "In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled."

Her last two lines are a great conclusion to the poem. The figurative image, "The Old World smoked in the fireplace," picks up a likely detail of the room she's in and uses it to mean the former world of the relationship has just turned to ashes and smoke. And "Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat" would suggest the old children's song, "Out went the doctor, out went the nurse, out went the lady in the alligator purse." But perhaps the detail might also reflect a painting found on the wall; the narrator now is no longer at the table, staring into the spoon, but even farther away. She has disappeared completely.

The conclusion is so completely congruent with the withdrawal of love; the narrator disappears before the end of the poem. It's a clear good-bye poem. The ending image is consistent with a conclusion that is a farewell. The image resonates like a bell that sounds after it's been struck.

Good poems begin in image and action, stay focused on that thing that came in when they begin, and find the sound to accompany you along the way. This is a superb poem.

Strong endings are very important to a good poem, in my opinion. There is another poem to consider. This one by Naomi Shihab Nye was published on Writer's Almanac at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/03/29

The Art of Disappearing
by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

This is a wonderful poem in a pattern of "When," "If/then," and imperatives. In the last stanza, a slight shift in sentence structure away from when and if to three commands creates a satisfying conclusion. However, there is a "then." This unifies it to the earlier stanzas. There is that resonant quality here too, in fact an actual bell resounds. The reader is left with a strong image of leaf and tumbling and the proviso to decide what to do with one's time.

The poem seems to result in a moment of silence, as if the reader must pause and take it in, as if one is filling in one's own details, weighing the desire to say no to all the expectations and demands. The sound of the language here also has a ring, the long i sound, as in chime. It resounds. The sound of the line is very important, and decisions about when one is finished with a poem can be made when one is satisfied with the sound when one reads it aloud.

There are many other ways to end poems, of course. In the poem by Allen Ginsberg, "The Lion for Real," the poem offers long ranging lines and a sequence of images in a story about a lion; the narrator of the poem explains his encounters, where and what it was like and what it did. In the end stanza, there is a shift. The narrator turns from explaining to the reader or others and addresses the lion directly. It is suddenly a prayer or entreaty to a god; and it's very powerful:
...
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the Universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy.

The entire poem can be read online at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179384

The story turns, like a sonnet might turn. It ends in a capitulation or adoration; he has offered his complete being to the fear. The last line has even a sexual inference, "I wait in my room" which acknowledges that fear is paradoxical, we are drawn to it; the power of the lion is seductive and potentially transformative. He surrenders completely.

Ginsberg's poems have an incantatory power. Howl ends with a last section of anaphoristic lines. "I am with you..." begins each line and the narrator focuses on the images of the psychiatric ward but also larger America. This poem is also at the Poetry Foundation website at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381This is the end:
...

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

The sequence of "O" phrases develop into an emotional crescendo. It moves beyond the ward, across America, in the Western night. It's no surprise that Ginsberg returns with another poem, "Footnote to Howl" that returns to Howl to add a final incantatory, celebratory footnote that is a blessing. He is grounded in the body, and singing it as holy. It's a stronger final conclusion. You can read the entire poem here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240700

The story I offered about our dog Sky is a story still unfolding. She came back today and was rewarded with treats. I'm not sure if she hasn't trained me more than I've trained her. We have -- each for the other-- expectations.

Free verse poems develop their own patterns. The pattern is an expectation, and it must be considered and lead into a satisfying ending. The structure of the poem will offer a clue to the appropriate choice. The epiphany is perhaps a classic ending to a poem; the concept of "turn," referring to a shift that's made inside a sonnet, offers a useful guide. The direction of the poem shifts; the language shifts, it is perhaps how best one can read a situation to know if it is the end.

The examples that I've offered here suggest that good endings have resonant images, pleasing sounds in the language, movement, crescendos or blessings. Finding the right ending will release the poem in the best way; it is perhaps a spiritual exchange, a transfer of image and sound that rises, travels, arrives from the writer's inhaled breath to the reader's last exhalation.

Submitting Your Work to Competitions

2011-11-03T10:57:00.001-05:00

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Whether fiction or poetry, it must be work that is original yet not merely sensational for the sake of sensation. It must contain clear, well-developed themes and be written in a style that exhibits love of language and mastery of craft.

If fiction, whether literary/mainstream or genre fiction, the characters must be fully drawn, not stereotypes, and must be engaged in conflicts (either internal or external) that are compelling and show forward momentum.

In both poetry and fiction, if it's a universal story (love, death, loss, coming of age, moral responsiveness or failure to respond), it must be told in a fresh way.

And poetry, whether formal or free-verse, must exhibit rhythm and "music" in its use of language, syntax, line breaks, and structure. A group of words carelessly slung lengthwise down a page is not a free-verse poem; it's a group of words that needs to be made into a poem.

Furthermore, a group of words that ‘plays’ with language without attempting meaning or message is not a poem, it’s an exercise.

This is an excerpt from www.danaawards.com and I've copied it here because I think it's the most succinct statement of what competitions and editors like to see. In addition, the work should be free of errors (spelling, commonly confused words, or the like) and the writer needs to read the directions carefully in order to follow the submission guidelines. In some, the author's name can not appear on the manuscript. Many of the competitions have reading fees around $25 or more; the writer should know that the prestigious awards have a lot of submissions, upward of a 1000 or more. The work needs to be a very high caliber. This is the caliber that a manuscript needs to be for publication.

I used to send a lot of manuscripts out and pay many fees--I didn't mind supporting the many small presses that used these funds to help maintain their operation. But it began to feel like a form of gambling; I realized I had better ways to use my funds. I've become more selective.

There are arts boards that take applications; these are very worthwhile and they do not ask for a reading fee. In Minnesota, the state arts board offers many opportunities. Visit their website at http://www.arts.state.mn.us/grants/artists.htm There are regional arts councils as well, and I recommend that you go to any workshops that are offered for assistance in the application process. In northeastern Minnesota, see www.aracouncil.org

Life and Work

2011-10-16T20:19:00.006-05:00

http://www.superiortelegram.com/event/article/id/59581/publisher_ID/37/
Phantom Gallery: "Migrations" a multi-media exhibit at 1215 Tower Avenue, Superior, WI: Poetry/video exhibit: On view from October 20, 2011 to November 30, 2011
www.wildwoodriver.com/rooms/migrations

Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work. Or maybe my creative work is an answer to my mother; often she told me as a child that life was hard. My grandparents were Finnish immigrants in far northern Minnesota with no grasp of the English language when they came. They lived in poverty. My grandfather's alcoholism and domestic violence only made things worse for my grandmother and their ten children. It was strength and resilience of the women that carried them through.

Migration from the old country was only the beginning, and it taught me things about moving from one culture to another. After that were other kinds of migrations: from a difficult marriage to coming out as a lesbian, from working in a taconite mine to a career in social work, from a love of hearing stories to establishing myself as a writer. One of the central obsessions in my life is the question why women (and men, for that matter) often deny their own needs, enter into or stay in dangerous situations, risk their children's safety, and deny or defy reality because of their dreams. From individual stories to myth to deep patterns in nature, I am engaged in the question about what propels us.

Echo and Lightning uses the metaphor of bird migration and myth to examine ways that women change and even relinquish the self. It is a spiritual exploration of fear, ecstasy and love through poems about Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot's Wife, Eurydyce, Leda and The Swan, and the Gnostic book Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Cloud Birds is about immigrants, bears, wilderness, bird migration, and the journey of women through hardship and violence, including the story of Persephone going back home to mother. This book explores a Minnesota family history and has a sequence of love poems to bears.

The third book, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions, traces movement and change in the community. This book is an anthology of writers from the Lake Superior and Northern Minnesota region that came out of an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning grant and my work as Duluth's Poet Laureate, teaching writing as a tool for life's transitions in the community and at Safe Haven Women's Shelter, the Family Justice Center and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project.

In addition to the books, this creative work has moved into collaborations with my partner, composer and cellist Kathy McTavish. As the name Wildwood River implies, our arts collaborative is a confluence of the arts. We live and work closely together in a wilderness area and in a creative process that draws from our own life histories and experience. The project continues in the form of musical compositions, abstract film, poetry videos, gallery installations, and live performances.

Catherine Holm (author of My Heart Is a Mountain, Holy Cow! Press, 2010) wrote: I read Echo and Lightning on my porch, after a night of queasiness, an upcoming demand later in the day, and the noise of traffic competing with the birds. I was instantly transported; material world forgotten. Packa's poems are passionate and they make me want to BE the narrator. Who hasn't "given themselves up" or left a part of life behind? What if we were the wind? What if we ARE the wind, in some or all aspects? These poems bring artistry, subtlety, and power to the world -- the world will benefit. I found myself want to, wishing to, write with this depth. This is the power of Sheila Packa's poetry. Read this and be transported. Namaste, Sheila."

The Midwest Book Review says: "The changing of seasons, the changing of life seems to move so much faster in the north. Cloud Birds is a collection of poetry from Sheila Packa, a Finnish American woman who calls Minnesota home, viewing the changing of nature and life as she sees it and always moving. Cloud Birds is an excellent compilation of poetry driven by both humanity and the beauty and uncertainty of nature. "Cloud Birds": 'we live on both sides of the border/ in two countries/ in and outside each other/ bone and blood/ in disguise without intention or force/ without blandishments/ blown by wind/ silent like shadow crossing and crossing/ over the boundaries without end/ borne by moon or sun/burnished by wing.' "

The books are available at your local bookstore or at http://amzn.to/oVJRAD

Starting to Write

2011-10-15T10:25:00.002-05:00

I begin with procrastination. Seriously, I think all writing begins this way. Instead of being discouraged, I consider this a useful tension, a gestation period. It's a time of silence and darkness, very fertile. On a subconscious level, what is going on is auditioning of images, sounds or phrases. The resistance of procrastination builds pressure, and pressure helps create the compression needed in a poem.

I walk. I avoid talking about what I'll be writing because it would dissipate the energy. I do laundry or yard work. The sound of running water is particularly conducive to writing. I shower, wash dishes, throw a load of clothes in the washing machine. Get my hands busy but keep my mind free. Writing is like becoming a river; I do things to start flowing. Read poetry. Do yoga.

I write in my journal everyday. At some point, I decide to give myself a half hour to do a rough draft of a poem. I try a writing exercise, finding one on-line or in a book.

Or, I invent ways to use the random. For example, yesterday I decided to make a word list. I chose four favorite authors and from pages of their books, using only page numbers divisible by 3, I count down 7 lines and choose a noun or verb from that line. I make a list of words. This looks like a word cloud in my journal. Then, I make a poem using most of those words. Next I make a second poem with the words used differently.

These exercises are all arbitrary, something for my conscious mind to become occupied with so my subconscious mind can emerge. I invent new rules all the time. When I find a poem of somebody else's that I love, I create a parallel poem with the same structure or with a something that is similar. I let my poem develop on its own so even I don't recognize the initial resemblance.

I give myself permission to be a beginner. Each new work will have its own set of rules that you learn as you go. Assume nothing. Listen intently. Be willing to take risks. No matter how many works you have completed, you will be surprised at what doesn't work and what does.

In my journal I write down images that resonate. It's a painterly thing to do. I focus on images and find them memorable. Sometimes I sketch. I write down stories that I tell more than once. I record my dreams. I describe places. I search my memories. I write about what I'm reading. I write listening to instrumental music, and give words to the experience.

I avoid expectations and work at being attentive, in the moment.

I create constellations of influences for each manuscript. I assemble certain books, quotes, photographs, paintings, visual images, phrases, music. These are the stars in that particular universe.

Once I have words on a page I begin playing making patterns. I add, delete, rearrange, juxtapose, use opposites. I look for contrast and tension. I listen to the sounds of vowels and consonants. I make sets and sequences. A few sequences become a manuscript. I begin looking at the larger shape of it, and it becomes part of my dream life and I dream solutions. I read sacred books. I read philosophy and study art and listen to music. These all inform my work in some way.

I have learned that letting go is necessary. I have left places and people when I could no longer feel comfortable, have given away many belongings, abandoned things, left my job. This has caused me grief. I escape gatherings, ceremonies, meetings, parties without notice. I flee. I avoid committees. It is necessary, solitude and loneliness and longing.

I believe in the hidden, emerging, invisible, and mystical. I believe in the musicality of language, believe that at some point a door will open and I will cross a threshold.

I believe in a muse and offer gratitude and praise for the poems I've received. I have an altar that is a small table that I keep empty, because the muse likes to have an emptiness to fill.

Migrations Events

2011-10-14T18:09:00.005-05:00

Performances and Readings:

Teatro Zuccone, Duluth, Sunday, Oct 2, at 3:00 pm (poetry, film, cello)
http://www.wdse.org/shows/playlist/watch/sheila-packa-migrations

Two Harbors Library, Thursday, Oct 20, 6:30 pm

Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College, Thursday, Nov 3, 7 pm
(poetry, film, cello) in Room 195, otherwise known as the little auditorium/theatre
Linda Johnson, Jan Chronister, Laura Krueger-Kochmann, Moriah Erickson, Rocky Kuikanpi, Liz Minette, Lynn Fena, Janet Riegle, Julie Gard, Michelle Matthees, Maggie Kazel, Bev Berntson, Ryan Keller, Felicia Schneiderhan, Gary Boelhower, Rocky Kuikanpi

Lyric Theater in Virginia, Minnesota, Monday, Nov 7, 6:30 pm
Margaret Veeder, Jeanne C. Maki, Kathleen McQuillan, Jane Barrick, Kat Mandeville, Lynn Fena, Leah Rogne, Liz Minette

Superior Phantom Gallery, 1112 Tower Avenue, Superior, Wisconsin on Saturday,
Nov 12, at 3 pm (poetry, film, cello).
Featured writers are Jan Chronister, Peggy Trojan, Jasmine Baumgarten, Jill Hinners, Kat Mandeville, Linda LeGarde Grover, Tina Higgins, Lisa Poje Angelos, Karen Keenan, Laura Kruegman-Kochman, Yvonne Rutford, Gary Boelhower, Michelle Matthees, Julie Gard, Maggie Kazel, and Sheila Packa.

Macrostie Art Center, Grand Rapids, Thursday, Nov 17 at 7 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Video Poems

2011-10-04T22:11:00.005-05:00

Video poems are a great way to present your work. For the "best of the web" and a wide range of the work that's being done today, see the website http://movingpoems.com/

spoken word:
"Was It I?" http://vimeo.com/30031642
(poem from Cloud Birds)

spoken word/ sequence of poems
"Immersion" http://vimeo.com/19985791
(excerpt from Echo and Lightning)

Written word:
"Black Iris" : http://vimeo.com/29698643

The abstract visual images and sound are by Kathy McTavish.

Video poems are similar to music videos -- they are very engaging. Some are animations, some are documentary, some are an intriguing amalgamation of visual images, photography, drawing, and what-have-you. Poetry is able to come off the page and into a visually interesting and musical environment that can enhance the work.

The ones that work the least well, it seems, are the ones whose images provide a literal illustration of the words of the poem. As a result, it causes the evocative quality of both the poem and the film to dissipate. The film should work as a narrative or imagistic flow on its own; the poem can be spoken, written on the film frames, or occur like text on a foreign film. I think the best video poems form interesting interstices and gaps between poem and film that allow the reader to enter into the making of meaning.

The Migrations Project

2011-10-01T04:47:00.003-05:00

About the Book: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/210797/

Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions just came out and I've been asked about where the project started and how it developed. Maybe it started with a recent trip to Finland to visit some relatives; my grandparents immigrated to the United States. They had to start from scratch and do so in a new language. They came out of hope for a better life and more possibility, and the change caused great hardship. Maybe the project started with my own changes in relationships and home. Or maybe it was a background in social work and writing; they were two separate careers, but I began to see that engaging in the arts was an effective way to deal with problems. And my own capacity to pay attention as a social worker was improved by my writing.

For me, writing is not about self expression. That is like saying gardening is a physical activity. It's true, but it leaves out the fact that it's an act of faith, an investment and act of stewardship -- the attention to soil, irrigation, and plants results in growth. It creates beauty and sustenance.

My mother's cousin in Finland, Mikko Himanko, was a war orphan. His father died before he was born, and he was raised by his mother and step-father. Now, a retired minister, Mikko spends his time interviewing and writing the stories of many war orphans. I think that's important work.

Writing is a quest to find an image, a metaphor, a pattern that is beyond the self. Like many arts, writing teaches us to pay attention. This is one of the great values of arts education, it increases skills of observation. It teaches us to listen. Writing gives one a greater capacity maybe not to solve the unanswerable questions but to hold them. It solves the question of where to put the hard stuff. To write about the obstacles or the barriers in life is to bring creative skills to the task at hand.

Migration, the annual cyclical pattern of birds in nature, happens to people. So does erosion, storm, and melting of glaciers We are not separate from the landscape; the natural patterns express themselves in human lives. Earthquake, wildfire, drenching rain. Lake turnover. These are very interesting patterns that offer metaphors.

Migrations is a theme of my work, certainly. And because of a Community Arts Learning grant I was teaching writing to people in transition. I'm enthusiastic. Because of being in the role of Duluth Poet Laureate, I developed a community writing project of placemats printed with area writers poetry and given to diners at the Empty Bowl fundraiser for the Northern Lake Food Bank. Because it is my job to promote poetry and increase the audience, the project fell into place.

My project started small and got bigger as I read the beautiful work that people sent to me. Others refer to this as "scope creep." It has certainly expanded my own skills at editing and helped me examine my theme through the words of many contributors. I've learned more project management skills.

I couldn't have done it without help from my partner Kathy McTavish and Wildwood River, our creative collaborative. Art making is at the center of our life, it's our business. She is a composer, cellist and media artist. I am a writer. We inspire and support each other.

It's satisfying to bring the work of a community of writers together into a book. It's like introducing your friends to each other. It shows the community the depth and breadth of the writing here. It offered the opportunity for me to bring together my two careers at the point where I leave social work to write full time. The book creates an opportunity for readers to reflect and to pay attention to the changes going on in their own life.

Making a Book of Poems

2011-09-20T01:34:00.004-05:00

Sequences & Consequences

Since January, I've been at work on new poems. Writing is a daily practice; I keep a journal of images, dreams, encounters, and lists. I write about books, movies, and things that strike me. The journal is a tool I use to pay attention, and it is the source book of my poems. In January, I started a twitter account and began posting writing prompts. It was the writing teacher in me that came up with the idea. Privately, I wanted to write a poem in response to my own prompt...but not tweet it.

I'm fascinated by stories about books and how they come together. I wanted to share my own experience; maybe it might help other writers articulate their own process.

My main goal at the beginning of a new book is to not be controlling, but to let individual poems emerge and then stack them for later review. I share them with a few friends to get feedback, revise, and return them to the stack.

Nine months into this process, I took out my notebook and looked for poems that were related by image or theme and arranged them into a sequence or set as if I were going to present them at a reading or performance. This chapbook size (chapbooks are about 20-30 pages) sequence is the building block of a full size manuscript (a poetry manuscript is about 60-100 pages in length).

There are some guides available about assembling a poetry manuscript. Ordering the Storm by Susan Grimm offers several essays from various writers about their methods. Of course, what works for one writer will not work for another. The best guide for the form of your book is careful examination of the poems inside -- you must listen to the work.

After developing a sequence of poems, I notice repeated words and images. Revising begins. I consider poems' relation to each other. I find a good opening poem. Like the first sentence or paragraph of any book, the opening should be interesting and have a hook. It introduces the reader to your themes or preoccupations. The last poem should be satisfying. In between, if it's a narrative, a rising and falling arc. The work needs an overall title.

While in this stage of the process, I maintain the daily writing practice. In addition to the journal, I start writing about the process of assembling the new manuscript. Writing is not merely a process of recording thoughts; it is a path of discovery. New things will occur to you while writing that would not occur otherwise.

In addition, I collect my current favorite poems and poets, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, music, and objects. If I find a book I love, I keep it. I read and reread it, examining how it is assembled: as if it were a garment, I consider the fabric, the cut, the seams, the finishing. I will do this with individual poems. I will read the poems aloud often and hand copy them in order to run them through my hand, in order to personally experience the words, the line breaks, the stanzas, everything.

These collected works form a constellation of influences over my own new work. I look for patterns and stories in the constellation. This is the time when I write ekphrastic poems (poems in response to visual art). My book Echo & Lightning was somewhat influenced by a painting by Emily Carr that hung in my studio. I work on poems that respond to the other works, that create a dialogue, pay homage or explore a form or an image. This might be called research and development.

One of the ways I further develop a manuscript is to explore memory, myth, and music. Memory both personal and communal, historical. This is a consideration of roots. By writing in this direction, I deepen the work and find ways to connect it to family and historical events. Next, I consider cultural or mythic stories to find resonating patterns. This is the opposite of roots. It's a reaching outward. Religious stories and archetypal patterns are powerful forms; if you connect to them, your work will extend farther. Christianity, Greek myth, Nordic myth, the Kalevala (epic poem of Finland), and archetypes explored by Carl Jung and others might be part of your consciousness. I consider runes, the I-Ching, and Tarot cards for their archetypal images. Often times I write poems that connect with these larger patterns.

The work I do in this process might end up in the manuscript or it might not. There can never be any expectations of new work; it must find its own direction and form. My job is keep experimenting, playing, feeding the work, enriching the ground and the environment.

Preoccupations arrive. For instance, during the making of the last book, Cloud Birds, bears began to visit. In one summer, I encountered no less than seven bears. Because of a childhood terror of bears, I was faced with managing my anxiety. In order to overcome my fear, I decided to write twenty one love poems to bears (I was inspired by Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and One Poem of Despair). As it turned out, the bears helped me identify that one of the themes of Cloud Birds was fear. It's important to pay attention to your life and what is going on; it feeds the creative work. Be receptive.

"Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work," said Carolyn Forche to me years ago at a poetry workshop. This meant that things you might think of as distractions, interferences, or obstacles might very well be the heart of your book. Write about it. Pay attention!

Music is a very important element of poetry and revision. The sound and rhythm of the sequence is a point of consideration. Are these breathless or fast-paced? Are these contemplative? What are the textures? How do the individual lines and stanzas best convey the rhythm and sound?

Other considerations in revision: point and counterpoint. Good art has interesting contrast. This is true of a book of poetry. Design principles used in visual art or architecture are useful. Consider your unique mark, perspective, composition, imagery. Is it collage or painterly? If it were a physical space, what would be its entrances, exits, transitional spaces?

I am interested in creating a world. Some writers might focus primarily on the story. But there are story telling techniques or narrative strategies that can enhance or emphasize certain aspects. For example, the rule of 3 occurs in fairy tales, the character gets 3 wishes. There is the "onion," or "once in a blue moon," or "journey" template. Consider the techniques used by the earliest narratives: Chaucer's Tales, Beowulf, stories of Camelot. It's wise to trust your instinct, and then in revision understand how the choice works for the manuscript.

A book takes a lot of writing and a lot of time. After I have sixty or so poems, I began to consider the overall shape of the manuscript. Everything needs to be deliberate, even if serendipity and accident put it together initially.

I make decisions about sections, as in, how many sections (if there are sections)? what is each section about? what order do I put the sections in? The first sequence I have in Echo & LIghtning is about migration and ascension; the middle section is about descent. It seemed logical, and it was the shape of a wave, which made sense for the overall form, a collection of poems strongly connected to water and sky.

Also very valuable: good readers. If you have good readers to give you feedback, you will be a better writer. If you hear the same suggestion from two or more friends, pay attention. These are my thoughts about my process; your process might be different. I suggest you write about it.

Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life's Transitions

2011-09-11T16:23:00.003-05:00

Performances and Readings:

Teatro Zuccone, Duluth, Sunday, Oct 2, at 3:00 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Two Harbors Library, Thursday, Oct 20, 6:30 pm

Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College, Thursday, Nov 3, 7 pm
(poetry, film, cello)

Lyric Theater in Virginia, Minnesota, Monday, Nov 7, 6:30 pm

Superior Phantom Gallery, Saturday, Nov 12, 3 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Macrostie Art Center, Grand Rapids, Thursday, Nov 17 at 7 pm (poetry, film, cello)

The Community Arts Learning Project has developed into this anthology about changes. You will want to read it! Here are some reviews:

"The Lake Superior area has either bred or attracted an amazing community of poets, and the best are featured in this diverse collection edited by Sheila Packa. While the title Migrations implied any number of processes to me, I was struck by how many delightfully (or darkly) unexpected topics Ms. Packa had included. Love, childbearing, opening, the creative process, Christmas, aging, divorce, the seasons, Paul Wellstone’s death, all and many more are examined in these luminous poems. Open to any page for the gift of a glimpse into the poet’s mind and heart!
Carol Orban, retired teacher, Ely, Minnesota

Sheila Packa's Migrations is the product of a born writer’s craft nourished and shaped by immigrant work ethic and iron will, Finnish music, burning taconite pellets, long northern Minnesota winters, seeing deep patterns in nature and community and literature. With this potent collection of poems and prose she helps us connect with ourselves and one another as a community in the midst of change, movement and radical growth.
Ann Wallin Harrington
Family Justice Center Facilitator

Migrations is a marvelous collection of wide-ranging, in-depth reflections in poetry and prose on major existential transitions and reinventions. It conjures up colorful images of weather, flight, birds, water, air, associated with transformations triggered by experiences such as being trapped, going away, bewilderment, violence, aging, loss, death, trauma, emigration, and departures.
Tineke Ritmeester, PhD, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She is a Dutch immigrant in transition.

In your hands, you hold a unique collection of high quality poetry and prose by favorite & by newer Lake Superior area writers. Don't set it down! Turn the book over to examine the cover and lift it to smell this ink-and-paper presentation of singular ideas. And know that Migrations follows the primary rule of poetry, reframing details of your world in ways that jolt your consciousness.
Cal Benson, author of Dakota Boy

From the Introduction:
Each fall, along the western shore of Lake Superior, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds ride the thermal currents above the dark conifers and bright reds and golds of autumn leaves. They follow the shoreline. Under their outstretched wings, I reach for the language of flight as I gather and arrange this collection of poems and prose.
This book is about migrations in life that all of us make: the embarking, the long journey, the returning — beginnings and endings, irrevocable. We are like birds in migration, traveling between memory and new beginnings. The stories and poems capture the voices of many writers and the landscape of the North and of Lake Superior.
...
In every workshop, I hear new and arresting voices. I've included poems of blessing and transition, polished and unpolished, that capture an image, a turning point, and a unique voice. Each was like a bird inside a larger flock and as such, wide-ranging.
...
Years ago, in the Split Rock Arts Program, I talked with poet Carolyn Forché about the difficulty of finding time to write. It seemed I was always in transition, juggling many responsibilities, and found it challenging to set aside enough time to write.
"Whatever keeps you from your work becomes your work," she said, meaning that I should write about what I was currently grappling with. Along with her husband, freelance photographer, Harry Mattison, she had facilitated the Iron Range Documentation Project. As a social activist and witness to atrocity, Carolyn Forché's own voice became the vehicle of many, and she wrote to reveal the pain and suffering in Nicaragua and other places. Later, she edited an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (WW Norton, 1993).
Poetry can be many things: song, story, memoir, philosophy, image. Poetry can use many narrative strategies: journey, list, prayer, blessing, letter, or quest. Poetry can witness; it can be an agent of change. It can preserve a moment with vivid immediacy. It can awaken. Its purpose is diverse, but it always illuminates.
I followed Forché's advice, and now give that same advice to a lot of writers. If something is an obstacle, write about it. If something is getting in the way of your writing, then you should be writing about that. If you are preoccupied, let your thoughts go into ink on a page.
It is important to create a time and place for writing. There is evidence that keeping a journal improves one's health and immunity, and that it speeds recovery from illness. Writing is a tool of the mind, but I also think it is a tool of the soul. The poet Linda Hogan once said, "Whatever you write will make it stronger." Writing helps one find and use a voice. Writing strengthens identity and allows it to develop and change. Writing about place helps us understand our roots and name our desires, not just for ourselves but for the larger world.
A community that honors and celebrates the arts becomes a community of openness and exchange. Unique voices rise that bring images and stories that stir us. The arts foster diversity not uniformity. The community that invests in the activity of art making is preserving its culture and promoting creativity. We are all strengthened.
These poems, stories and essays form a conversation; I invite the reader to participate. At this moment, something is changing in your life. Find an image or a metaphor to enter the complexity. For me, writing is a type of way-finding, a lamp in darkness.

Poet's Work: Condensery

2011-09-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

My grandmother worked with wool. She raised sheep, and spun their fleece into yarn. She knitted the yarn, and then boiled the knit to shrink and thicken the wool into felt. Felted wool slippers and hats are phenomenally warm, protecting the wearer from piercing northern winters. As a writer, I am more of a wool gatherer, but my process with language is similar to her process with wool.

There is a difference in the language of poetry and prose that can be described by using the word compression. Paul Valery said the language of prose is meant to fall away once meaning is delivered, but this is not so with poetry whose language is meant to recreate the breath, and make the poem new each reading. Reading poetry gives the reader an ear for this, and I recommend reading poetry extensively. There are techniques that poets use to compress the language.

Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker

Grandfather
   advised me:
          Learn a trade

I learned
   to sit at desk
          and condense

No layoff
   from this
condensery

Condensery is an apt term. The poet must condense the language; in the condensing, the language begins to have more substance. My grandmother had her copper laundry boiler, a wood stove, and wooden paddles as tools to condense her knitted garments into felt. The poets' tools also allow one to put the language through a process. Figurative language allows a writer to compress language. Metaphor is effective; the writer talks about two things at the same time. Consider this line from the poem, "Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"And have we room/ for more folded sunsets, still quite warm?"

One word will makes the difference. If the poet had used the word 'blankets' instead of 'sunsets,' then the effect would have been prosaic. Bishop's decision to use sunsets makes the sentence take on more wonder. One can imagine the sunset's colors folded and put away like blankets. Can one take a sunset along, in a suitcase? The sunset suddenly becomes intimate as the blanket on a bed, it has a tactile sense. She did not say blanket, but she has created a physical sense of touch by suggestion. A single word choice made the meaning both intimate and expansive. The compression the poet achieves here suddenly vaults the reader into another space.

Poetry often evokes more than one meaning; Mary Oliver says poetry is language that casts more than one shadow. If it casts a shadow, then it must have solidity and heft. This solidity and heft comes from the five senses, the perceptions of the body. If it casts a shadow, it could be a thing or a being, like cart or a horse. Interesting possibilities, this intensity of poetry. Each word has a history and a host of associations; the poet considers this. Sometimes words come out on paper perfectly, but many times revisions help the poet find just the right language.

Here is another example:

Question
by May Swenson:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

This poem is physically palpable. The form is created by a parallel questioning. The words lend their history and associations to the task; the words are tightly bound together like wool beat into felt. My house, my horse, my hound. The series of words illuminate the body as place first followed by images of horse and hound. Speed, beauty, animality. Hound also invites associations with hunting and baying. Metaphor again. In this spare poem, Swenson also uses sound elements and patterns to compress the poem. The rhymes are tight: ride and hide, I and sky and lie. Almost rhymes: quick and thicket. hound and mount and cloud. Alliteration (same consonant sounds) and assonance (same vowel sounds) occur; everything intense.

The form of a poem lends the poet a tool for condensery. Repetition and variation are built in to some forms like the villanelle, pantoum, or sestina. Other forms have strict limits like the haiku, seventeen syllables, or the sonnet, fourteen lines in a certain rhyme scheme. One must compress and cut the language to fit. In addition, poets add tension. Suspense or the use of opposites add tension. Twists. Line breaks and choices about form can also increase the compression.

Robert Lowell, in interviews, said poems must be high tensile objects. He talked about setting up tension in or between the poem's metrics and in the form or content of the poem. For example, a sonnet form sets up an expectation of rhyme. The poem might use blank verse (iambic meter) and instead of rhyme on the end lines place it elsewhere, internally.

Condensing is perhaps also a process of reduction. One takes away words and phrases, a process Virginia Woolf referred to as ellision. In the taking away, the poet can heighten the effect and create an ambiguity that evokes more meaning. Spareness is often powerful.The stronger the focus, the stronger the poem. Using precise and concrete images adds weight. Staying in metaphor adds focus.

Sometimes I think the form of the poem is a dialectic between language and white space, silence. Dialectics, or the use of opposites, compress. Allusion to other literary work adds weight and meaning.

Add heat. Keep refining. Words are like wool; they have fibers that pull on other fibers. About wool, my grandmother knew about boiling, then ice. She knew how to take fiber into strand into knit into felt.

Poetry is distilled. From language, the poet makes a tincture or an essence. A poet learns to create a distillery to turn grain into whiskey or potatoes into vodka.

Perhaps condensery is akin to the ancient science of alchemy and its quest of turning metal into gold.

Of course, some writers do this is in fiction and essays as well. The writer, Clarice Lispector, created visceral, existential consciousness for the reader via the use of character and setting. Her language is compressed like poetry, compressed to a point of great intensity as if she were at a work bench, cranking the words with a vise. I read her work for its lessons in compressed language as well as for her vision.

This sentence in her book Stream of Life conveys in just nine words her unique voice.

"I am before, I am almost, I am never."

This poetic language uses parallel structure, repetition, variation, and sound in a tight form that conveys psychological truth. It embraces opposites. None of the phrases are subordinated; all are equal. It is tensile and brilliantly evocative.

Niedecker's poem "Poet's Work" expresses the poet's endless search, the quest for the right words and the right arrangement. It is work that is never done.

Sources:
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. c1984.
Lispector, Clarice. The Stream of Life. University of Minnesota Press. c1989.
Alexrod, Steven and Helen Deese, editors. Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. Cambridge University Press, c1989.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Mariner Books. c1994.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. University of California Press. c2002.
Swenson, May   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177225
Valery, Paul. Selected Writings of Paul Valery. New Directions Press. c1964.

The Architecture of Poetry

2011-08-12T15:39:00.000-05:00

The Architecture of Poetry

The Gallery by Tomas Tranströmer
Miniature by Yannis Ritsos

I'm fascinated by architecture and its link with poetry. Architecture offers to poetry the principles of design. One of my favorite poems is "The Gallery" by Tomas Tranströmer. He was a Norwegian poet of great skill. This poem combines a deep interior world with a wide exterior. It is one of the best examples of poetry and architecture that I have seen. The poem is not about architecture; rather the design of the poem uses the architecture of its location as a foundation. Also the poem "Miniature" by Yannis Ritsos is framed by a room where two people are having tea.   Likewise, this poem uses the pattern language of a tea room, the ritual of making tea, to express an inexpressible good-bye.

I've found wonderful books about architecture that I believe have deep links to poetry: Christopher Alexander, Vol I: The Timeless Way and Volume II: A Pattern Language. Alexander focuses on living patterns as a way to think about design; he names these patterns with basic, almost archetypal, images: 'the gate', 'the way,' 'entrances & exits,' and 'spirit places.' He examines the features of various buildings: the honeymoon cottage, teenager's cottage, and the like. Recognizing the human needs of various phases of life, he identifies ways that buildings can help people. Therefore, a teenager's cottage needs to be close by, but have more privacy. A bench near the front entrance of a building will provide the elderly a place to rest and watch others in the community. It's architecture that evolves from the consideration of human needs. These words, which he uses as a language, encourages one to think of a larger patterns. Basically, he urges builders to consider making buildings that are organic, that reflect the life inside, and contain living patterns.

I like to adapt his ideas to poetry. Writers would also benefit from the consideration of a pattern language. Entrances and exits, for instance, can help us think about how a poem begins or ends. There are many ways to create an entrance; considering the larger scheme helps us to make the choice. Not only that, contemplating the rituals or patterns of life is useful. The patterns of life, reflected in a poem, will enhance the structure of the poem and the life of both reader and writer.

Alexander writes in The Timeless Way: "It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it can not be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it." This process is not one of forcing a pattern, but of watching the unfolding of a natural one. It is not about control, but it is about attentiveness.

Tomas Tranströmer's poem "The Gallery" is an example of a poem with beautiful architecture. The title The Gallery is figurative. The narrator in the poem describes a sleepless night in a motel, but each of the images that emerge from the wall are like portraits in a gallery; the long poem is both surreal and deeply moving. Translated by Robert Bly, this is the ending of the poem:

I stayed overnight at the sleepwalker's motel.
Many faces here are desperate
others smoothed out
after the pilgrim's walk through oblivion.

They breathe vanish struggle back again,
They look past me.
They all want to reach the icon of justice.

It happens rarely
that one of us really sees the other:

a person shows himself for an instant
as in a photograph but clearer
and in the background
something that is bigger than this shadow.

He's standing full-length before a mountain.
It's more a snail's shell than a mountain.
It's more a house than a snail's shell.
It's not a house but has many rooms.
It's indistinct but overwhelming.
He grows out of it, it out of him.
It's his life, it's his labyrinth."

The gallery is a word that reflects a pattern language. This word choice gives us an immediate understanding of a night that is spent viewing portrait after portrait of haunting images. Tranströmer uses the architecture of the motel and gallery to keep the poem structured and focused. And like the shifting portraits that emerge from the motel wall, the image of the narrator shifts with each line in the last stanza.

Another book that provides an interesting insights is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. A sampling from the Table of Contents reveals these phrases: House and Universe, Nests, Shells, Intimate Immensity, Miniatures. The phrase 'intimate immensity' perfectly describes a good poem like the one by Tranströmer. It is specific and detailed, and yet it offers an immensity.

Reading this list in the table of contents brings to mind another beautiful poem, "Miniature" by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos.

Miniature

The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child's fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

(trans. Edmund Keeley)

This poem is contained by the tableau in this room, yet it contains an intimate immensity.
Poetry is a practice of architecture. A poet might consider what type of dwelling a particular poem provides: a kitchen/dining space, a gallery, a spirit house, a honeymoon place, or a tomb, for instance. Each has different characteristics and expresses a deep human need. The best form or design for the poem is the one that best facilitates the living pattern. In the revision, a poet might discover ways to enhance the living patterns inherent to the work. Repetition, variation, and music offer patterns to the poet. The goal is not to create complexity; the best work creates simplicity.

Alexander says, "The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one pattern to life; and the intensity of the results depends on the intensity of each individual step."

The poems by Tranströmer and Ritsos have the intensity of which Alexander speaks and the intimate immensity articulated by Bachelard. They both are very intimate revealed experiences that are specific to time and place. They are small scale, and the architecture that informs this essay is also small scale. The following link features photographs and a story of a couple who live in a 12x12 cabin, off the grid. It is an example of the poetics of space and attentiveness. And, on the shelves of their tiny home is a lot of poetry.

http://www.innermosthouse.com/#/innermost-house

To Punctuate or Not

2011-08-09T20:58:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, a poet uses punctuation in a poem and sometimes he or she does not. To examine the possibilities, I've brought together four poems without punctuation written by respected poets. In this first vividly realized poem by Lucille Clifton, the line seems to follow the philosophy of "the line is a breath." The line break can be used in a way that gives the reader a chance to breathe between phrases.

miss rosie
by Lucille Clifton

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

She has used two commas inside two lines, each occurs after the same word, "sitting." It seems to help Clifton create a parallel structure, although what follows after the word is not exactly parallel. Another poet might be tempted to use commas after the phrases. However, a comma at the end of a line seems to make a harder "end stop." Some poets who do use punctuation avoid a comma at line end because there is already an inherent pause. A line break without a comma adds a level of ambiguity, a slight pause between words that can add extra meanings.

Other things besides a lack of punctuation are noticeable. Clifton does not capitalize any words except Georgia Rose. She does not capitalize the subject, miss rosie. Neither does she follow the convention of capitalizing the personal pronoun I. One might speculate that she wanted to minimize the "I," downplay the personal narrator in order to indicate that "I" is no more important than "you." The "i" occurs five times however. In such a short poem, five is a lot. One line is just one short syllable: "or" makes an interesting hinge or pivot point in the poem.

The repeated phrases serve to provide a structure for the narrative: "...when i watch you..." "i stand up" clearly communicates respect and honor for the subject of the poem, miss rosie.

So, why then is Georgia Rose capitalized? Is a flower, a state flower, more important than the individuals? The phrase does provide a geographic location for the narrative; the phrase also highlights that the subject's name is rose, miss rosie. It provides an enduring image of beauty, the ultimate ideal, contrasting with subject's apparent destruction. Clifton makes very good use of the senses. The smell of too old potato peelings is such a deft use of detail. The line, "...in old man's shoes with the little toe cut out" is another good detail. She grounds the poem firmly in the body.

The lack of punctuation seems to present a fragment, or a breathless utterance. It might indicate the narrator is placing herself equal to miss rosie; perhaps both the narrator and the subject exist outside convention. Perhaps they don't follow the rules, or live beyond them.   Punctuation or the lack of it can provide meaning in this way.

In the following poem by Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, the poet also avoids punctuation. She does however use capitalization as if beginning a new sentence. Perhaps she meant to signal a new breath or new idea, but not a hard end stop. Not all the lines start with a capitalized word. Niedecker generally used a short line with a tight sound play in the stanzas.   It's a shorter rhythm, almost syncopated. She was born in 1903 and died in 1970; she was known as an avant garde poet. She was connected to a group of poets called 'objectivists' (the word was first used by Louis Zukovsky). William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth are both considered to be part of this group.

Paean to Place
Lorine Niedecker

...
I grew in green
slide and slant
     of shore and shade
           Child-time--wade
through weeds

Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando
    sublime
         slime-
song

Grew riding the river
Books
    at home-pier
         Shelley could steer
as he read

I was the solitary plover
a pencil
     for a wing-gone
From the secret notes
I must tilt

upon the pressure
execute and adjust
      In us sea-air rhythm
"We live by the urgent wave
of the verse"
...
Her poems have beauty and strength in the choice of word and sound. Alliteration and assonance cause a pleasurable sound play along with rhyme and near rhyme. The rhymes are in words close to each other and not at the ends of phrases. With her short lines and tight turns, punctuation may have caused the reader to stop in ways she preferred not to have happen. Her stanzas that are similar in size and line breaks. The use of a capitalized letter is an interesting detail, perhaps a technique that helps the reader find the beginning of a new thought.

In the following poem by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, the reader encounters a capitalized beginning of each line with no punctuation. Without punctuation, all line breaks have roughly the same weight or pause. One continues reading at the same pace throughout the poem.   Without punctuation, the line seems to end in space, without landing. It is as if broken off in mid-breath.

For the Anniversary of My Death
W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

This poem also has the development of consonant vowel sounds that make for a pleasing experience. The poem arrests the reader with its speculation; one always marks the anniversary of one's birth, but the opposite of that, the anniversary of one's death, exists unbeknownst to us. It is a bare shadow that Merwin finds and names.

In the following poem by e.e. cummings, there is no punctuation except for the apostrophe mark and a hyphen. The hyphen is not used in a standard way. Here, he hyphenates words not usually hyphenated.

Buffalo Bill's
e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                        Jesus

he was a handsome man
                                    and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

He does use conventional capitalization for names but not for the personal pronoun I.    e.e. cummings is known for his creative arrangements of the words, spacing or not spacing, stringing together or breaking words apart on a line or across lines. Many poets use the lines and spaces as a form of musical score; the reader can run the words together, read words fast, and then have a long pause for the next line, "Jesus' is far indented, as if hung on the end of the line before it. cummings also avoids using the question mark at the end. I think this adds an ambiguity. It begins as a question, but perhaps offers an acerbic comment instead.   By avoiding the punctuation mark, the poet is able to create more ambiguity and therefore more possible meanings.

Each of these poems would be much different with conventional punctuation. Each poet had internal consistency with his or her approach. Each used other unusual methods with capitalization or no capitalization; they used spacing in a way that also would affect the breath.

When writing or reading poems, consider the uses that punctuation has. Many poets use punctuation just as it is used in conventional sentences. Done this way, the writer can guide the reader toward meaning and rhythm. If the writer chooses not to punctuate, then I think it's important to have or to develop an internal consistency. Without punctuation, one must consider line breaks and other use of white space in the development of structure and rhythm.

It does seem that an unpunctuated poem is closer to a fragment. In my own poems, a series of unpunctuated poems serve as a fragments of a longer arc that usually is marked off in sections. Initially I used it because some poems arrived in dreams, as a stanza. I wrote them down just 'as is.' Later, I began other series that seemed to work better without the conventional stops of punctuation. This added a breathlessness or a speed to the poem that would not exist otherwise. I would never swear off punctuation; like other elements in poetry, it's best to use or not use this element deliberately.

How to Be Creative

2011-07-24T12:44:00.000-05:00

I took Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write from my bookshelf the other day. I don't think I can ever become an e-book reader with my penchant for paper. My paperback copy, from Graywolf Press, 1987, is a worn blue reminiscent of tile borders, framing the yellow ivory front cover. The glue of the binding is getting brittle with age, someday I might open this book and it will snap into sections, and pages that I have lined with a yellow marker will fall out.

There are two photographs of the author just inside the cover, one in 1938 as a young woman and the other in 1983 as a old woman. In the second photograph, Ueland's decorous image has changed to one much more flamboyant. Instead of a solid color blazer, hers has wide vertical stripes. Her hair is no longer neat and carefully combed. Her gaze no longer pensive but direct. I like to think aging is a process of throwing off convention and others expectations to become more oneself.

Today, I notice Chapter IV: The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly. She explains what creative power is and how to use it. Be idle, she says.

Of imagination, she writes, "...memory and erudition can smother it very easily," and "...smart, energetic, do-it-now, pushing people so often say: 'I am not creative.' They are, but they should be idle, limp, and alone for much of the time, as lazy as men fishing on a levee, and quietly looking and thinking, not willing all the time. This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas."

Moodling, she calls it. It is the idle time similar to the play of children, without anxiety or pressure to make something meaningful. It is not using the leisure time to smoke or drink or find endless distractions, but to simply dream. Leave off "measuring, comparing, cautioning, advising prudence, warning against mistakes...anxious doubts" in favor of wandering and searching. Take long walks. Don't be too busy. It's slow work, as Ueland says.

My mother, who spoke English as a second language, used to call social events "doings." This too can become consuming. I used to be so busy with doings. I used to have not one but two jobs.

The photographic images of young writer and old writer remind me of the final destination of each of us: mortality. Life is so brief. We have limited time to do creative work. Why put off a poem or a story until you're done with work, mown the lawn, cleaned the house? Why wait until you've saved more money, retired? Where is the end point of all that busy-ness?

It's a paradox. In order to be productive creatively, you need to give yourself time off. In order to do that, you have to get off the treadmill, avoid debt, re-examine your ambition. Do you really need a larger house or more things? Do you really want to take on more responsibility, work so many hours, if it takes you away from your creative work?

Throughout my life, because I was not wealthy, I thought that one could either have time or money, but not both. I took some leaves of absence, for time, but went back to work. Right now, I've elected time. Before I am like the photograph of an old woman, I've chosen to step away from all "the getting and doing" in order to be in my studio, where like the men fishing on the levee, I will be moodling.

The Umbrella and the Piano

2011-07-03T16:52:00.000-05:00

Story telling is critical for every culture. It links person to person, group to group, culture to culture. It links seemingly disparate things. Stories can heal us. According to Judith Herrmann in her book Trauma and Recovery, telling the story to the community and having the community hear the story helps people cope.

Poetry not only tells a story, but also wields image, metaphor and pattern in the telling. This creates a very powerful tool of transformation. D.H. Lawrence, in an introduction to Harry Crosby's Chariot of the Sun, writes:

"The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers' a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth."

He goes on to say, "Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos."

Lawrence gives the reader an image: an umbrella, our vision. A version of reality. So flimsy, a hard wind will turn it inside out and break its spines. We can turn it into shelter, plaster its ceiling, paint it, use it as architecture, a space to live in. So circumscribed, we eventually mistake it for the universe, until somebody damages the fragile thing.

"Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun."

Even a little research does indicate that many poets are the enemy of convention. Convention can be positive; but it is artificial and eventually oppressive. It's a made thing that is imposed on life. As a genre, poetry embraces both chaos and order. Loss and love. Maybe poets remind us there is not one thing without the other.

Perhaps the sun, a swirling orb of burning gases destructive and essential, is an apt image of chaos. It blinds us with its harsh brilliance and makes things grow. An umbrella offers protection, some shade, a story we tell ourselves. The umbrella reminded me of this poem he wrote:

THE PIANO

by D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;   
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see   
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings   
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.   
   
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong   
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside   
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.   
   
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour   
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour 
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast   
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Lawrence sat beneath the piano as his mother played, and later as an older man yearns for that beautiful ceiling of sound, the splendor and thunder. It is a magnificent umbrella.

One moment suddenly cracks open flood of loss. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "There is a crack in everything God has made." A crack in everything, Leonard Cohen said, is how the light gets in. Lawrence refers to poets themselves as people who will break convention, make a slit in the umbrella, break illusions. Of course, not just poets do this. Damage is done in many ways, by many people. Poets recreate another vision, offer a new umbrella.

Story-telling is one of the best responses we have to the chaos of the universe. One story won't explain it; I believe it is a joint and communal task to tell stories. It makes sense that one story can not carry us, that the story needs to change each time we catch a glimpse of what's out there, in that moment between when our ceiling cracks and falls and we rebuild it, when the chaos inside us sees the one outside.

Between those two things, maybe it is wise to focus attention on the beautiful fresco. Build a fine instrument, have a beautiful song, make a new world. Let's make a lot of umbrellas, even though they won't last. Nothing does.

Read Lawrence's Introduction here
http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/lawrence1.htm

Federico Garcia Lorca & The Duende

2011-06-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

What is the source of power in poetry? What leads one to write it, or causes one to seek it? Some writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin report that the writing was given to her by God; she merely wrote it down. Is there a divine source?

Federico Garcia Lorca has found it in the duende, a dark spirit that is neither angel or muse. Who has duende in American culture? Billie Holiday. Edward Hirsch, poet and essayist, writes of several poets and artists who have a dark and arresting intensity, whose work breathes life and death, and by whom we are transfixed.

Lorca said, "Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard."

This is not a spirit who brings gifts; Lorca puts it in the terms of a battle:

" With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work." To read his entire text, please click here:

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

A wound that never heals appears in many mythic stories. Arthurian legend, Greek myth, Russian myth, Christian stories of stigmata, and many others seem to point to a universal story of suffering.   Perhaps suffering and the writing that springs out of the attempt to heal it will evoke the duende.   The duende, says Federico Garcia Lorca, is the battle pitched between you and death. It is a wound that won’t heal, a wind that blows over the dead, “a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.” From pain, violence or carnage, birth.

Lorca evoked the Duende whenever he did a reading; he called to the spirit for both him and the audience; often it held them with its terrible beauty.

The Task of the Poet

2011-06-16T11:47:00.000-05:00

In an interview in the Paris Review, Adrienne Rich said,
     "I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference."

The task of the poet is to remain true to one's own experience. The poem comes from the body; the body should be reflected in the poem. The poem comes out of a particular place in the world. The poet needs to be cognizant of the landscape and also her own position and perspective within it.
A good poet is aware of the underground of the subject and form of her work. This could be the history, context, connections, and language.
A good poet is open to surprise. Is intuitive. Sometimes in the writing of the poem, an accident of language, a juxtaposition of image, an error brings a startling insight.   In the practice of poetry, one strives for a deliberating openness.
A collection of a poet's work reveals vision: a perspective, motivation, goal. A poet's work provides a landscape and a story, different for each poet, and a language that reaches beyond the individual toward the community or the divine or the one lone reader somewhere in the future, paging through a book, wanting the heart, or a piercing light into the center of life.

Why Poetry?

2011-06-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

More than self-expression, poetry is a way of seeing. Robert Henri, in The Art Spirit, wrote:

"The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture--however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by-product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has past. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with a brush, pen, chisel or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trance, the footprint of the state.
These results, however crude, become dear to the artist who made them because they are records of states of being which he has enjoyed and which he would regain. They are likewise interesting to others because they are to some extent readable and reveal the possibilities of greater existence."

Doreen Gildroy presented this quote in an interesting essay ("Poetry and Mysticism," American Poetry Review, May/ June 2011). A "greater existence" is an experience of dissolving boundaries, meaningfulness, or a sudden perception of connectedness; a mystical experience with poetry often comes unbidden, by accident or by grace. One can invite it, certainly. The state of flow that happens during creative work may be the state of being that Robert Henri describes. Writing is one way to enter a state of flow; in the state of flow, perceptions shift. Time goes by without notice. Focus is enhanced. The ability to see is increased.

The poem becomes a record of an experience; it is a dual experience. The first experience is the subject of the poem, and the second experience is the making of that particular poem. Each poem offers a new possibility, a new way of seeing, and it engages one in "a making." In the making of a poem, one finds images, sounds, and patterns that develop and come to fruition. The plying of the language leads one forward into new insight or image or story. I like this way of seeing; this is why I write.

Community Arts Learning

2011-05-30T18:27:00.000-05:00

Writing captures the voices, the history, the landscape into a piece of art; it serves to build and strengthen community. It is not true that only a select few are capable of making great artistic work. Great writing happens everywhere. In every class I teach, I hear new and arresting voices. Not all of the writers want to hone their skill or pursue publication, but if they did, they in all likelihood would achieve success.

Reading a good poem, story or essay enhances our life. Besides offering beauty, it fosters empathy and understanding. Writing a good poem, story or essay gives us the opportunity to use an image or a metaphor to enter complexity. For me, writing is a type of way-finding, a lamp in darkness. This is the experience with writing that I want to share with others.

With an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning grant through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the willingness of some nonprofit organizations (The Women's Shelter, Family Justice Center and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, MN) I began to teach writing for people in transition. Since I began the project in October 2010, I've logged 40 classroom hours of teaching “Writing for Transition.” I have worked with diverse levels of experience with writing. Many were moving through violence; many were moving through ordinary life changes.

The Depot - Community Arts Learning Group: monthly group Dec 2010-ongoing
Womenʼs Shelter: January 8-February 12, 2011 (weekly workshop for 6 weeks)
Family Justice Center: monthly group, January 31 - ongoing
Domestic Abuse Intervention Project: June 20

And the culmination of this effort will be a publication, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions, pub date October 1, 2011 (Wildwood River Press).

In my role as Duluth Poet Laureate, 2010-2012, I've also focused on the same themes. I've taught a workshop "Change, Change, Rearrange: Writing for Transitions" on November 15, 2010. Also, in an attempt to reach out to an audience that is not necessarily an arts audience, I made a call for submissions of poems on the topic of transitions or that were blessings, and created four placemats that present the work of 35 area writers; these were given away at the Empty Bowl, a fundraiser for the Northern Lakes Food Bank. The Empty Bowl provides a hand-made bowl made by an area potter; the event sells about a thousand tickets and serves a thousand bowls of soup donated by local restaurants. The placemats fit into this setting very well; when diners sat down with the bowl of soup, they also had the opportunity to read the work of regional writers. These placemat poems also will be published in the forthcoming book.

Besides the Empty Bowl project, I've had the opportunity to present workshops to students and community people in the following settings:

Unity School (the alternative high school in Duluth, 10th grade) workshop: March 21, 2011

UWS Young Authorʼs Conference (7th and 8th grade): April 5, 2011. Two breakout sessions.

Fondulac Community College, Cloquet, MN: April 6, 2011 workshop and reading

Grand Rapids Library: April 12, 2011 a childrenʼs and an adult workshop about writer's voice.

It is my goal to share the experience of writing I've had with others, to help others create poems, stories or essays using the material that their own life provides. I'd like help others access their own way-finding, in order to be able to listen to the inner voice. It's the best guide through life. In my opinion, personal expression is therapeutic but there is another, more important goal: to access a larger vision that connects the self to the community, and then brings the community to other communities. This exchange happens in the social space, between reader and writer, between one person and another. What I want is not just one insisting voice, but a dialogue, a circle of conversation that invites other voices.

Creative work is essential. It doesn't matter where one begins; it does matter that one begins.

Poetry & Landscape

2011-04-30T16:23:00.000-05:00

I write in the context of many good writers. I'm referring to friends of mine and those who I only know through reading, writers of the past whose work seems as current as ever, writers whose work has shaped my own. Writing never occurs in a vacuum. Those writers form a constellation of stars. They are the points that I reach toward and sometimes, navigate away from. As writers, we are informed, influenced, inspired, and intrigued by the images and language of other writers, singers, storytellers, sacred texts. Besides the work of others, we are influenced by our place in the world.

Poetry rises out of landscape. Of course. Landscape is inescapable; it is the ground beneath our feet, the air that we breathe, and it shapes us in profound ways. It is the enduring thing and yet it also changes.

     The birds have vanished in the sky,
     and now the last cloud drains away.
     We sit together, the mountain and I
     until only the mountain remains.        --Li Po

This beautiful poem by Li Po resonates. It speaks of the timelessness and constancy of the mountain, but also says so much more. Poetry can not and should not be reduced to a single meaning. We need its ambiguity and multiple meanings. We can come back to the poem again and again. Poetry has the capacity to renew, to make new meanings, to resonate in deeper ways than we initially know.

In his book Crossing Open Ground (First Vintage Books, 1978), Barry Lopez has a wonderful essay "Landscape and Narrative."   He traces the stories we tell, saying we learn about the external landscape by understanding the connections within it.
Landscape, wilderness, the outdoors always calls us out of ourselves. Sometimes talking about the weather is a way of keeping a superficial level of communication, but I'm not referring to that. I'm talking about recognizing the connection to a specific landscape, finding context physically as well as in other ways (culturally, for example).

Lopez describes the internal landscape as the one that we grow up in or live in that becomes part of our psyche. Here, "...the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as 'mind' are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person's thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature--the intricate history of one's life in the land...."    Our personal landscape is integral to our writing.

As a writer living in the cold north, on the coast of Lake Superior, near or in the wilderness, witness to wildlife, I have a story that is different than the writer living on the prairie, in the desert, or on the east or west coast. The hawk migration along the edge of the Great Lake and the increase of the bear and wolf populations mark my consciousness. To take my road home, I cross over several rivers and pass by the sheer drops of granite outcroppings. The blue rim of Lake Superior forms a crescent to the east and north, the forest dark with shadow, fallen limbs, broken trees, and spruce and the lake light is always changing.

The animals that we encounter, the experiences that we have in the wilderness or in a city park, the life that we live within landscape contains a poetic element that renews, reanimates, recreates meaning in our lives. Landscape contains the things we don't know we know. The patterns of nature, for example, tell us about our human experience. The confluence of two rivers, for example, is turbulent. So is the joining of any two people or cultures. Change can happen gradually, as in erosion, or it can happen precipitously, as in earthquake or storm. Mary Oliver is a poet known for her attention to the landscape, sea coast, marsh, dune, and woods.

I search for the geologic. A good poem isn't about lessons or wisdom. A good poem has at least a few layers of meaning. It's about depth.

Writing is intuitive. It's wise to cultivate skills. As a writer, I know that I can get in the way of good writing by trying to insert ideas or explain or control the writing too much. Concepts usually get in the way and ruin a good poem. Poems that are ideas often don't work out as well as poems that are images and metaphors. "No ideas except in things," advised William Carlos Williams. This is the way forward. The best writing is a process of discovery. We might think of revision as form of orienteering, navigation using both compass and landmark.

In the poem by Li Po, the mountain's image is the most compelling. A poetry grounded in the landscape will take on the spirit of its beings and the shapes and structures where we live. The poet and writer Linda Hogan once told me that whatever we write about will make it stronger. If you write about a bear, it will make the bear stronger. I believe it's true. Writing about animals expresses how we value them. Animals and landscape are not mere figures of speech; they are beings and aspects of life that exist around and beyond human experience. I can speak of the bear, and the bear will speak of more things.

Good writing is in the body. The visceral body. The five senses. The physical body. The changing body. Increasingly, I'm aware of how much we are like that cloud or bird that so soon disappears.

The compass marks true north, magnetic north. For direction, there are maps. Markings. Natural boundaries. Landmarks. Stars. How does one travel as a poet?

Poetry, as Mary Oliver says, casts more than one shadow. In poetry, the landscape is internal. In it, we can trace a history. In it, the universe with its simultaneous creation and destruction. In it, pleasure and pain, awareness and blindness, hunger and sustenance. It offers maps. Erosions, eruptions, echos.

In its tensions, poetry has physics. Opposing forces, weights and counterweights, rising and falling. It contains the rhythm and breath of being. Language with its mellifluous, elastic, and startling juxtapositions of sound and image, with its literal and figurative capacities, delivers us from one to another, from root to seed, from wing to mouth, moment to moment.
When we develop relationships with the landscape and the other beings in it, or when we recognize those relationships and understand our context, we are stronger.

Cloud Birds

2011-04-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Cloud Birds

For me, this book of poems grapples with fear. I've arranged the poems into three sections: 'bear,' 'wing,' and 'cloud.' The poems in the first section are about encounters: fear of the wilderness, especially bears, fear of women, and fear of relationships. The pomegranate, the myth of Persephone, and the migration of Persephone between her husband in Hades and her mother enter into the book. Some of the poems in Cloud Birds are about women moving through violence; all of the poems are about moving through fear.

This is not about victimization, but about learning how to walk through violence and fear and get beyond it. My grandmother on my mother's side survived spousal abuse. I had a brief marriage, at age 20, to a man who, on our honeymoon, kicked me because the suitcase was not packed correctly. I have known so many who have suffered and even lost their lives to this violence.

The painting on the cover of the book by visual artist Cecilia Ramon is called "Refuge I/ Refugio I (in homage to Ana Mendieta). Cecilia Ramon, the visual artist, migrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina. When she was young, she witnessed violence on the streets. During that era, many people 'were disappeared.' The concept of refuge is apt. Ana Mendieta was an important visual artist. She was born in Havana, Cuba, and she came to the United States at the age of 12 without her parents. She became an environmental artist with striking work. Click for info about Ana Mendieta, visual artist. Her death was mysterious. She died from a fall from her apartment window in NYC. Her husband was charged with murder, but acquitted. Perhaps she did commit suicide. But that too is the extreme act of violence toward the self. I wrote the poem "Spilled" for her, for many others, who don't survive.

The section, Wing, is a migration through the Iron Range and the places in northern Minnesota where I grew up and lived. The Iron Range is a place of iron and taconite mines. It was a working class culture--sexist, racist, and homophobic. Drinking was a major preoccupation. But it is also a beautiful landscape with people, native and immigrant, of great resilience and strength. This section has stories about love and about my parents and immigrant grandparents. They never achieved English literacy; my grandmother and I weren't able to converse across the language divide. Some poems pay homage to my father; the first protector in my life and the first to threaten violence. He loved me fiercely. When one steps back from the family and looks into the landscape, one sees violence in nature, predators and prey in a relationship phrased as "the way life is." I mull over these things. In the section are poems about factory work and an underground mine, dangerous work with horrible health consequences. Recently, studying cosmology, I read that the creation of the universe was a simultaneous creation and destruction. It's everywhere. There is every reason to have fear and every reason to live one's life fully.

The last section, Cloud, is a sequence of poems about dissolved boundaries: between lovers, between walls that one puts up, between the immigrant past and the present, between the self and the landscape. In this section, the poem Persephone speaks of returning. When my mother was alive, I went home to her a few times. When relationships were difficult. Now that she is gone, I continue to revisit her origins.

In order to overcome my own fear of bears (because I had moved into the woods and shared the landscape with several), I decided to write twenty one love poems to bears. This is the origin of the manuscript--and its end--the decision to love what I had feared.

Cloud Birds is published by Wildwood River Press and is available at your local bookstore, or at Amazon.com

Poetry & Change: Journaling, Pablo Neruda, and the Past

2011-03-20T15:07:00.000-05:00

Journal writing and memoir provide a starting point for poems. Journals especially are excellent places to generate poems and to grapple with changes that life brings. Poems are especially built for grappling, and the poem by Neruda, "Past," shows us how well it can be done.

Ira Progoff, author of At a Journal Workshop and founder of the Intensive Journal® process offers an in-depth and interesting method to explore life experience. His technique of a multi-sectioned journal that records steppingstones, intersections, dreams, daily writing, and dialogues (with body, self, others and even society concepts or norms) offers a helpful tool to navigate life. Not only does it increase awareness, it aids in decision-making. I like what he says about phases in life:

"...many people are able to live through two or three distinct cycles of life. In each of these, there are a different person with different values and lifestyles. To be able to look forward to such successive developments opens a large potential not only for the later years of one's life but for the fullness of meaning in a human existence as a whole. The main difficulty lies in the period of transition between two major units in a person's life. When the old period has ended and a new period has not yet been substantially established, the emotional burdens of anxiety and self-doubt may be heavy to bear. That is the time when it is especially important to have a progressive and organic method for enabling the perspectives of one's life to reshape themselves." (p 115)

Progoff also refers to the writer and public statesman, Dag Hammarskjold. He kept a journal that was eventually published, titled Markings.   The term 'marking' he borrowed from his habit of walking mountain trails. Marks upon the trail help us find our way and avoid difficult spots. The term is evocative; I like to use it when I teach writing. We are marked by different things, good and bad; those things shape us. These are places that we should go to when we sit down to write.

I would add that writing is an excellent way of coping. It is quiet and similar to meditation; it relaxes the body at the same time that it gives the mind a place for preoccupations and concerns. Not only that, it costs next to nothing. All that is needed is a notebook and pen. For people who don't have a safe place to keep a journal, the internet offers a password protected online storage of files (see http://www.google/docs and http://www.zoho.com). To anybody who wants to begin journaling, I suggest short writing exercises that focus on particular details: a pair of shoes, a hand tool, or a particular person.   When journal exercises delve into such exact details of one's own particular life, over-generalization and sentimentality is nicely sidestepped.

Another way to approach journaling or writing exercises is to focus on images. An image, often the foundation of a poem, is vivid and powerful. It transcends languages and offers immediacy.

However, writing is more than a repository of memory or experience; it is also a tool of the mind and gives us a method to get past both memory and experience. It is not about "dumping." Even among friends, dumping all the negative experience can burden others. A journal offers the ability to contain difficult experience. Once written, we can stand back and observe our own experience. Writing allows writers to discover insights and shape the story, a profound and necessary step in taking control of one's life.

This brings me to consider the poem by Pablo Neruda, "Past."   The poem begins:
"We have to discard the past" and this is followed by image after image of demolition and construction. It ends in this way:

"Now the heavy eyelid
covers the light of the eye
and what was once living
now no longer lives;
what we were, we are not.
And with words, although the letters
still have transparency and sound,
they change, and in the mouth changes;
the same mouth is now another mouth;
they change, lips, skin, circulation;
another being has occupied our skeleton;
what once was in us now is not.
It has gone, but if the call, we reply;
'I am here,' knowing that we are not,
that what once was, was and is lost,
is lost in the past, and now will not return."

(click here to read the entire text: http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/N/NerudaPablo/Past.htm)
This poem captures the anguish and loss; it holds the contradiction of saying we must 'discard the past' and the impossibility of doing so.   It is an example of the way that a poem, in very few words, goes right to the crux. It may have begun in a journal, I don't know. But out of the images he draws from, he pushes out into the deep heart of experience: it is always and forever changing.

Poetry is particularly an effective way to express this truth--any moment that we write about is a moment we can not hold. It slips away, becomes something else and so do we. By writing, we can bring it close, see it and feel it, even though it has changed and perhaps changed us. Poetry offers an intimacy that is hard to describe or experience anywhere else, it is a body experience but it happens in language.

What is it about the language of poetry that makes it so powerful?

More than any other type of writing, poetry is shaped. Memoir also is a shaped form. A memoir might capture a segment of someone's life, and it might select certain experiences. An artist's memoir, for example, might contain only the experiences that were formative to that person and his or her art.

Poetry focuses on image and provides patterns of sound and form that make it memorable. Neruda's poem relies on the construction and demolition. "We go on throwing down/ first, broken tiles,/then pompous doors."   The word doors becomes not just wooden panels that allow entrance and exit in a building, but entrance and exit to other states of mind by use of the word "pompous."   It conveys memory, image, story, but also casts many shadows, as Mary Oliver says. It offers multiple meanings and it does this with the choice of words and their placement. A line break is a way to nuance a sentence or phrase, to pause in a certain place and thereby add more meaning. Neruda repeats words within the poem: "There is nothing, there is always nothing" and "It was all alive,/ alive, alive, alive/ like a scarlet fish..." Repetition and variation within a poem also create meaning in a way similar to waves on a lake, a score of music, a cloud of birds.

Does poetry change the writer or reader? The reader most certainly can be changed by reading, the reader takes the poem inside of his or her breath, and can be in-spired, a profound exercise in empathy. I think it does change the writer; as the writer becomes more and more adept at craft and learns how to ply the language more skillfully, he or she is changed. As one writes, one begins to observe more, listen more, and consider more.
Success as a writer might or might not bring positive changes; but I do think writing itself brings the ability to find context and to connect to others.

Revision is a necessary part of writing. In revision, we develop an initial image or pattern to its fullest and strengthen the context and connections. Revision is also necessary in life; we may not be able to change the events or incidents that mark us, but we can change what they mean for ourselves and others.

Perhaps like Neruda, we would be able to hold the contradictions.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his great essay, "The Crack Up," wrote, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." This is what writing and especially poetry offers.

Progoff, Ira. At a Journal Workshop. c1975. Dialogue House Library, New York, NY.

The Practice of Poetry: Emptiness

2011-02-20T22:35:00.000-06:00

What does it take to write? I believe it takes emptiness. In 1928, Virginia Woolf said it took a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year, the space and time to write. Helene Cixous, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, says loss often triggers a writer to write. First loss, then emptiness occurs that only writing can ameliorate.

Writing is perhaps a compulsion, a solution to an ache. I’m not sure what brings it on. The cure is writing, but soon after having written, the ache or urge returns. Instead of a vicious, I’d call it a spacious cycle.

One makes time for writing by clearing a schedule and rearranging obligations to allow oneself a block of time. It doesn’t have to be a lot, even just an hour or two daily. One does the same to create space. A room of one’s own is wonderful, but for many years, I have worked in a quiet corner of shared bedroom or living room. Time and space are the prerequisites for a fruitful emptiness.

One becomes a good writer by being a good reader. They are two sides of the same coin of quietness. In order to write poetry, I read poetry. I believe that poetry is a language within a language, and that reading poetry opens a door for me to enter in.

More importantly, the emptiness or clearing must be interior. Empty the self by pouring regularly onto the page, and then share what you write with supportive others. Lewis Hyde talks about the concept of pot latch in his book, The Gift. This is a spiritual wisdom: by giving the gift away, one will keep receiving. Emptying helps clear space inside the mind that can then be filled with what the muse brings.

A writing teacher, Kate Green, recommended visualizing the muse. In a writing exercise, writing students were asked to give a persona to the muse, to describe physical characteristics and then to identify their muse’s wants and needs. Let yourself by guided by this useful exercise. If your muse wants an empty chair, give her an empty chair. If she wants an orange wall, then by all means, paint the wall orange. Find ways to please the source.

The material--what the writing is about--is given. One writes from the imagination. Writers write what we write, we write from our observations, obsessions, experiences, longings. Finding ways to tap the subconscious is useful: write from dreams or associations or intuition. Try aleotropic techniques. Chance. Play.

When I say that writing comes from emptiness, I don’t necessarily mean loneliness, a feeling of being left or abandoned. These can certainly be important sources of writing, but the emptiness can also be peaceful, an emptiness that is pure potential. One cultivates a receptivity. Without anxiety. One can learn to be present with peaceful non-expectation and gratefulness, aware of being. It is a state of listening.

Writing practice helps with this type of listening. It is not so different from Buddhist meditation practice that helps train the mind. The mind is fretful, afraid, preoccupied, distracted. Many internal obstacles must be overcome with patience and compassion toward self. In time, with intention and steady practice, this gives way to peaceful emptiness.

All of writing is process. First comes receptivity, openness, willingness. Next, vision and re-vision. One must be able to recognize potential in the material and develop and hone it. One must be able to write with an eye for image and an ear for sound. Revision is a form of letting go.

Poetry and process are actually the same. The practice is the discipline of regular writing. It doesn’t make sense to wait to be inspired, because it is usually in the process of writing that one receives the gift. One listens to the work and let’s oneself be guided by it in the process. For me, poetry springs from and feeds the spirit. (The Latin word spiritus means breath.) The breath of the poem is distilled, intense. For me, it is a beautiful sound meditation that achieves both emptiness and the presence of Being.

The Body of the Poem

2011-02-17T13:33:00.000-06:00

It is productive to consider the form, or body, of individual poems. The body perceives with the senses, as does the poem. I consider the “eyes” of the poem--who is gazing and at what.    I consider the breath. The poet has created a sound and rhythm that will recreate in the breath of the reader. In addition, the poem listens to something. As a reader, I listen to the world the poet has given me. Next, the poem employs touch in the textures of the poem. There may be a scent or a taste. The five senses are common elements to each poem. The form or pattern that manifests visually and aurally might be lyrical, narrative or dramatic. The form may call up ritual, or it may create its own pleasing combination of forces and frictions and conjure many associations. The variations are fascinating.

Consider this:

I Am the Great Sun
   (from a Norman Crucifix of 1632)
by Charles Causley (from Union Street, 1957)

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
     I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
     I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
     I am the city where you will not stay,
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
     I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
     I am the lover who you will betray,
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
     I am the holy dove who you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

This poem has a deep and clear pattern. It is a sonnet and also a form called an anaphora (the lines begin with the same phrase). Each line has ten or eleven syllables. The words are short and plain. The rhyme is not just end words but in the second to last end words: see/free, believe/leave, hear/cheer, name/blame. The sonnet form has 14 lines, roughly iambic pentameter (the iamb is the basic unit of breath in English, an unaccented syllable, followed by an accented syllable) (pentameter is 10 syllables). The stanzas are quatrains, four lines in each with alternate lines that rhyme. They are consistent in size except for the last couplet. The anaphora form is used a lot in the Bible and in other poetic works (see Walt Whitman). It is an arresting and beautiful form.

One notices the sound: long vowel sounds (a, e) and short o sounds, and the v consonants in captive, leave, believe, lover, victor, dove, never.

This poem is also a persona poem. It seems to take the persona--it speaks from the Norman crucifix. Sometimes this method is called “a mask.” The poet puts on the mask and speaks as if from that object, person, or place. The body of this poem is very striking and powerful.

Consider this:

Why I Need the Birds
by Lisel Mueller

When I hear them call
in the morning, before
I am quite awake,
my bed is already traveling
the daily rainbow,
the arc toward evening;
and the birds, leading
their own discreet lives
of hunger and watchfulness,
are with me all the way,
always a little ahead of me
in the long-practiced manner
of unobtrusive guides.

By the time I arrive at evening,
they have just settled down to rest;
already invisible, they are turning
into the dreamwork of trees;
and all of us together —
myself and the purple finches,
the rusty blackbirds,
the ruby cardinals,
and the white-throated sparrows
with their liquid voices —
ride the dark curve of the earth
toward daylight, which they announce
from their high lookouts
before dawn has quite broken for me.

“Why I Need the Birds” by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press.

This poem, in contrast to the “I Am the Great Sun,” is free verse. However, it still has form. It still has its own pattern. The lines are about 5 or 6 syllables each with a longer line coming at regular intervals. The sound element is well crafted, the ‘a’ vowel resounds with a long ‘i’ sound. There is a narrative arc to the poem that is circular. it begins in the morning, goes through the night and ends right before dawn. There are two stanzas, roughly the same length, one has 13 lines, the next 14. The design is pleasing.   The figurative language, the bed traveling, and the precise details swiftly take our imagination.    When we enter the body of this poem and perceive with its eyes and ears, we experience a breath-taking circuit around the earth.

Real bodies have a skeletal and muscular structure. They have hearts and minds. They have nervous systems and circulatory systems. In the same way, good poems have these. In fact, the shape of the poem has both external and internal dimensions. The form of “I Am The Great Sun” borrows from the crucifix opposing directions. In the poem, the poet has worked out sentences that include assertion and negation. The opposing forces or tensions around or within the work create a powerful dynamic.   The circular form of “Why I Need the Birds” also pleases with its circle of day and night, circle around the earth, and circle of bird’s flight. The “eye” of the poem that sleeps appreciates the birds that serve as sentinels and guides.

When you write a poem, you also create a body for the poem. In revision, pay close attention to the five senses. Give precise details. Find your pattern and let the pattern connect to the larger pattern of which we are all a part.   Let the body of the poem reinforce and even expand the meaning.

Writing is My Shelter

2011-01-09T18:50:00.000-06:00

Writing has a way of transforming experience. There is evidence that keeping a journal improves one's health and immunity, and that it speeds recovery from illness. Writing is a tool of the mind, but I also think it is a tool of the soul. Through writing, we can explore life's events and changes. The page offers a place to put the things that are difficult to bear; once it's has been placed there, one can shift roles from victim or witness to one that is more active. Instead of being done onto, one is a doer. Psychologically, the change is profound.

The New Yorker magazine featured an article written by Joan Acocella about the Swedish mystery writer, Stieg Larsson.   It's a peek behind the scenes, a look at the writer who seemed to have started writing recently, in his mid-forties.   The article examines some questions around authorship and editorial changes of the three manuscripts, but I was also interested in the connection between his fiction and his real life.   He founded a magazine, Expo, that is similar to the one, the Millenium, in his trilogy. The Expo office, like Millenium, was threatened and vandalized. As a young man, Larsson witnessed a gang rape of a young girl. He never forgot it. He insisted the first book of the trilogy be titled, Men Who Hate Women (as it was, in Sweden). Larsson was able to transform the act of violence that he witnessed into a story about a strong, female character who survives, even wins.   Read the article.

This week, I facilitated a writing group at the women's shelter for women who have survived domestic abuse. I'm very glad to have the opportunity to create a time and place for writing for them; in my twenties, I experienced violence in my first marriage. Writing helped me. Not only did I have the opportunity to find and develop my voice, but my writing connected me with people who gave me strength and support. It changed my life for the better. I know it will do the same for these women.

We sat down and did three timed writing exercises in session. First I read a brief example, and then we begin the exercise. The first assignment, after Sandra Cisneros chapter called "Names" in her novel, The House on Mango Street, I asked the women to write about their name. I never demand that participants read their work aloud, but they all volunteered. Each one wrote a moving piece. The next assignment was to write an anaphora (a poem whose lines begin with the same word or phrase) based on the poem, "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon. The last exercise was after Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, "I Am Waiting." I was interested in exercises that could be either poem or memoir. Writing about identity helps to strengthen one's identity. Writing about place helps us to understood our roots.   The last allows us to name our desires, not just for ourselves, but for the larger world. We spent about an hour and a half in session, and I left there feeling grateful to the women for sharing their stories, and to the art of writing for the gifts it brings.

I've asked my friends to donate extra journals and notebooks that I can offer women at the shelter and at the Family Justice Center. Many writers teach writing classes at homeless shelters, jails, women's shelters, and other places. To allow a place and time for writing is to honor the experiences and lives of others. I found a blog entry on Mira's List about her project, "My Words Are My Shelter." Read the article here

I've also made a call for submissions for writers in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota to send me poems or short pieces about transitions.* I want to publish the work on placemats that can be used at the Empty Bowl community dinner (a fundraiser for the local food bank) and at the Thanksgiving Dinner at the DECC (both events are in Duluth, MN). I will help the women at the shelter share their experiences in a small publication (published in October 2011) with other poems of transition. Changes in life are often difficult; it's heartening to hear about others who have gone through similar changes, or even more difficult ones. Writing is my shelter, and with others, we can make the world a better place.

*Blessings & Transitions
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:   Invitation to writers in the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota to send poems, prose poems, flash fiction, or brief essays (500 words max) that illuminate life transitions and/or that are blessings.   This is a project of the 2010-2012 Duluth Poet Laureate, Sheila Packa. These will be considered for a poster & placemats (to be created for April poetry month and for an anthology of work to be published by Wildwood River Press in the fall of 2011.   Email submissions are okay. 5 page limit.   Deadline March 31, 2011. Paste into an email to sheila@sheilapacka.com or mail up to 5 pages to Wildwood River, 1748 Wildwood Road, Duluth, MN 55804.

Ecstatic Poetry

2010-12-30T22:31:00.000-06:00

What is ecstatic poetry? For examples of ecstatic poetry, I can name names: Rumi, Kabir, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud, Ginsberg. It is poetry that is visionary, reveals spiritual wisdom, crosses beyond ordinary boundaries. The self dissolves. The poem is a ladder that the reader climbs. The poem is a lightning bolt.

Rilke's poem, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15814) is an ekphrastic poem, a response to visual art. The poem grasps not just the art but the god in a sudden flash of beauty.   I consider it an ecstatic poem; at the end, Rilke writes in the final line: "You must change your life."

In a brilliant flash of light, ecstatic experience changes you. This is often described as an awakening, like in this Rumi poem (translated by Coleman Barks)

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

An ecstatic poem, in my opinion, is an intersection with the divine. Falling in love is ecstatic; one's vision expands. The poet Anne Carson has an interesting essay about women and ecstatic experience in her book, Decreation. The essay can be found online at this web address: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.1carson.html

This essay was pivotal for me while I was revising the ecstatic poems in Echo & Lightning. In the poems of Sappho, and in the writings of a 13th century female mystic, and in the writing of Simone Weil, Carson examines the 'dissolving of the self.'    I believe it is the point of profound change for an individual, to leave oneself is to let go of the past, to let go of an investment in one's identity, to let go of attempts at control and enter the present moment.

The ecstatic is best expressed in poetry. Poetry has its roots in religious ritual; poetry has the immediacy, metaphoric capacity, and compression that best creates the divine flash.

The poet Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture about the Duende, a dark spirit that he called before each poetry reading. It was a spirit close to death and sexuality, he explained, that infused his work with power and beauty. Poetry that can evoke the power of the gods is ecstatic poetry. To read his lecture, click on this link or paste it in your browser:
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

Other resources:

Women In Praise of the Sacred, edited by Jane Hirschfield (Harper Perennial)
Holy Fire - Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment, edited by Daniel Halpern (Harper Perennial)
News of the Universe Poems of Twofold Consciousness, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly (Sierra Books)
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, by Edward Hirsch, Harcourt Press

New Work

2010-12-29T02:30:00.000-06:00

It's a double-edged sword, seeing one's work into print. Simultaneously, the writer must embrace the text with clarity and purpose to achieve the best re-vision (after all, once published, the work enters a fixed state) and also, at the point of the greatest obsession with detail, let go of it.

Putting a manuscript of poems together is a process unique to each writer. It begins for me in disorganization. Because I reside in individual poems that I write, in order to see the poems as a group, I must pull myself up to achieve and see them in a larger perspective. Not easy. I start by sorting the poems into sets and build sequences. This takes time. It does help that I do regular performance, and each time, must create a set list with a beginning, middle and end. The practice of creating a larger story begins in performance, definitely. The poems are like pieces of a mosaic that I've found will create different stories depending on how they are arranged.

I should add a lot of work happened on a subconscious level. I'm often working with dream images, and follow an image in and through collaborative projects, visual art, other poets' work. I write a lot. I write to process my life experience and to develop my imagination.   In a relationship break-up, I was thinking about "don't look back" and I wrote the poem, "Salt," about me and Lot's Wife. It is only later that I connect my own poems of experience and imagination with mythic stories.

The new book, Echo & Lightning, came together out of three well developed sequences. The first was a set of love poems I had called "Fearful Journey." The title is from a poem, "Blindfold." It was an erotic poem exploring Hildegard Bingen's concept of erotic justice, published in The Mother Tongue. This poem was triggered by an invitation to participate in an art exhibit at Northern Prints Gallery. The gallery owner and printmaker Cecelia Lieder, who later published my collection of poems The Mother Tongue, invited me to write poems for this theme. After some contemplation, I realized that the image of blindfold was appropriate for both justice and erotic. While writing, I begin in image and follow it.    This sequence of poems became the last section of the book.

The first section of the book is concerned with ecstatic experience, intersection with the divine, cleaving. Cataclysmic grief and joy. The set begins in migration and follows the image of flight into the story of Zeus (in the form of the swan) and Leda. These poems were written over a period of a few years. I was curious about mystical stories. I'd found the Gnostic text, Thunder, Perfect Mind. As a piece of writing, it was electric: a female God, the intense combination of opposites. I began contemplating the stories of myth and the Bible: Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot's Wife. Each story involved a woman's intersection with the divine. What happened to her, what did she give up? Because I'd been reading the cosmic story for a solstice celebration, the story of the universe, I was thinking about the origin of the universe, simultaneous creation and destruction.   Finally, the poems followed a sequence of ascension.

The poems in the mid-section of the book I'd recorded on an audio cd with Kathy McTavish.   I called the set "Undertow" because the poems were underwater, submerged. It was all subconscious. Curious to me, at first, but then they made sense. I realized these underwater images fit well after the sequence of ascension. It was the form of a wave, climbing and falling. That overall image was important to the book. One doesn't have ascension without descent.

It was a stroke of luck to find the book's cover image, a painting called "Dawn" by my friend from Argentina, Cecilia Ramon.   The image perfectly expresses the themes of migration, love, ecstasy, and undertow.

Now, that book is out. I'm working on a new one, Cloud Birds, that will be out in 2011. This one is now under intense scrutiny as I proofread, re-vision, and develop its final form. Once new work is at this stage, it's time to look ahead to the next project.

I'm generating new poems, playing really. I am focused, but one must also take writing lightly as new work starts to percolate. I'm curious and not too attached. I started a twitter account, and have been using it to assign writing prompts. It's a personal challenge to make an assignment for others and then follow the assignment myself.   All teachers should take up this practice in order to stay humble. I like to be entering unknown territory, to be exploring images from experience and dream and artistic works I encounter, to discover ways to tap the subconscious mind.   Writing isn't just what I do, it's how I live.

The Dragon

2010-12-09T19:53:00.000-06:00

Creative work can be satisfying, but most often it puts you in touch with the feeling of inadequacy. In fact, most writers will tell you that they love "having written."   Afterward. Writing usually presents the challenges of what some people have termed "monkey mind."   The mind offers up all sorts of anxieties, fears, distractions, and difficulty. The self is one of the great obstacles in writing.

The visual artist Agnes Martin addressed the feeling of failure in her book Writings (c2005 Hatje Cantz). The following is from a lecture, "On the Perfection Underlying Life," delivered to art students:

"Why do we go everywhere searching out works of art and why do we make works of art. The answer is that we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it. The difficulty lies in the fact that it may turn out well or it may not turn out well. If it turns out well, we have a tendency to think that we have successfully followed our inspiration and if it does not turn out well, we have a tendency to think that we have lost our inspiration. But that is not true. There is successful work and work that fails but all of it is inspired. I will speak later about successful works of art, but here I want to speak of failures. Failures that should be discarded and completely cut off.
"I have come especially to talk to those among you who recognize these failures. I want particularly to talk to those who recognize all of their failures and feel inadequate and defeated, to those who feel insufficient--short of what is expected or needed. I would like to explain that these feelings are the natural state of mind of the artist, that a sense of disappointment and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work."

In other words, embrace the feeling of inadequacy, defeat and failure and do your work anyway.

The discipline of work allows one to continue despite the feeling of failure. She recommends the Chinese sage Chuang Tau's concept of "free and easy wandering."   No attachment. Let yourself wander.

Along with this, she recommends solitude and acknowledges that in solitude one encounters both fear and a self-destructiveness she refers to as "the Dragon."   As an artist, one must strive to become independent of judgment and familiar with the "ways of the Dragon."

Self knowledge is valuable. If you know how you subvert your own process or create obstacles for success, you will more likely be able to overcome the destructiveness. Agnes Martin didn't think it was possible to actually slay the Dragon. For her, it was more a matter of working while it slept.

Talking to other artists and writers will provide encouragement and support. Also, I learned a good maxim from a writing teacher, Carolyn Forche. She said, "Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work." In other words, if you find something interfering, then write about that. It is perhaps one of your important subjects.

Practice open-mindedness. Maybe you want to write about x, y or z but whenever you sit down, you start writing something else. My advice: go with it! Learn to honor the resistance and accept what comes. Artists and writers often believe that we have very little choice when it comes to our material. It is given. Craft and skill come in during the development and final draft.

Samuel Beckett said: "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail... failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.... "    Like Agnes Martin, Beckett urges the writer to continue on despite failure. "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

Artistic work is difficult. One needs to suspend judgment of the early stages of a project and manage the interruptions and distractions that arrive. One needs to accept what is given. One needs to develop writing into a discipline. The practice of meditation may help one develop skills to let go of the mind's chatter and be still. Walking usually helps. After reading Agnes Martin, I'm wondering if it might work to create a nice comfortable place for the dragon to sleep. Sometimes it does work to write or draw the image, to make the intangible manifest.
Another teacher, Kate Green, suggested that we write about the Muse. This was a writing assignment: What does the Muse look like? what does the Muse want?   Where does the Muse want you to write, what sorts of things should there be around you? In the spirit of "free and easy wandering," you might extend this exploration and find out from the Muse what to do about your personal Dragon.

How to Teach a Poetry Workshop

2010-11-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

Recently, grants have been available for Community Arts Learning. This is a wonderful opportunity for artists/writers and members of the community to develop their skills. The key to successful arts workshops is a lesson plan.    Lesson plans are simple, but they will help the artist stay focused and organize the time so that the experience is productive. The younger and larger the group, the more essential is structured time.

Here is a sample lesson plan for poetry workshops for children. This can be adapted for adult learners as well.    Children who are 4th grade and younger developmentally may not grasp the metaphor but they can learn to use sound patterns and the five senses.

The Lesson Plan for a Children's Poetry Workshop

Age:   grade 4-6 (often it's been about 20+ students)
Time: 1 hour (and it could be 1:15 min)
Goal:   Students will practice poetry and learn to use the 5 senses in description and use figurative language.

Materials:   the workshop leader should bring good example poems. The writing prompts that you plan should relate to these examples.
It's helpful (preferred but not absolutely necessary) to have another adult in the classroom if you have a large group. This person can assist with some students' needs (esp if there are special needs kids)--a little one to one coaching.
Students should have paper and pencils

Introduction to Poetry:

I begin by asking students to tell me what poetry is.    They have interesting answers. Praise any interesting observations.   I will talk about 5 minutes about what poems are: they create a picture and sound for the reader. They can be a story, a list, a letter, a blessing, or a memory.

I'll read an example poem and ask the students to tell me what they noticed about it...to reinforce the definition of a poem.   We will also notice sound elements: rhyme, alliteration, rhythm, etc. I point out figurative language and define the word metaphor.

Practice Poetry:

The goal is to teach students to use the five senses when they write description and to use figurative language.    I approach the project lightly to make it fun. I give them rules: 1. write fast, 2. don't worry about spelling or punctuation 3. write about what is important to you and 4. be specific.   Students are writing first drafts. I tell them not to expect it to be perfect. We are just going to play with words. (These rules of flow writing are adapted from Natalie Goldberg's book about generating new material, Writing Down the Bones)

Writing Prompts are then used in the classroom. Each writing exercise is given about 5 minutes for students to write.

Prompt 1. Metaphor: Students will hear an example of a persona poem.  (I'll read them a poem I have by John Haines).   They will then be asked to choose an animal and write at least 3 descriptive phrases related using as many of the 5 senses as possible.    Next step: write the poem.  Begins with "I am....."    The students will be asked to pretend that they are the animal.   They will use the phrases to help them build the poem. We are looking for a poem of at least 8-10 lines.

Prompt 2.   Learning how to use specific details.    Students will be asked to write a list of short phrases, specific details, about the area around where they live.    In can be a backyard or a place that they frequently go to play.    Next, students will hear an example of an autobiographical poem called "I Am From" by George Ella Lyon. This poem is a list poem.   It begins, "I am from clothespins/ from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride./ I am from the dirt under the back porch./ I am from the forsythia bush/ the Dutch elm/ whol long gone limbs I remember/ as if they were my own."      Students will then use their own details to write an autobiographical list poem of their own.

Prompt 3.   Students will use their imagination to write a poem that begins with one of these prompts: (often I decide the prompt during class when I learn about their interests or other classroom projects). I ask them to use a sound element--either rhyme or alliteration.
a journey poem that starts with "If my arms had wings..."
OR a list poem of excuses or reasons that starts "Because"   (they are asked to use the word because at least 3 times)
OR   a letter poem that is written from a pet or from a favorite object.

Reading Out Loud:

After students do 3 writing exercises. I like to offer them an opportunity to read the new poem to the class. These are all rough drafts, so nobody should expect polished work. It's "work in progress." I give some short instructions about posture and breath for the best projection. Students enjoy sharing their work. I don't force anybody to read. It should always be volunteered.

Whenever a student reads, observe the strengths that they have.   "That poem has wonderful vowel sounds," for example.   "That poem uses alliteration. That poem is a vivid picture. That poem has a strong beginning or a strong metaphor."    This is essential. Avoid negative feedback in a short workshop, it will dampen enthusiasm and cause self consciousness. Avoid laughing at the efforts. If participants feed judged or self-conscious, they will withdraw their willingness to read rough drafts.

Reading the work is a fun closure for the poetry workshop. I help the students read if they need that, and I remind them how to be good listeners.   I often get amazing and great poems from the kids.

Feel free to use or adapt my lesson plan to your own needs. Each writer/artist should teach from their own strengths.

Poetry & Change

2010-11-21T20:53:00.000-06:00

Poetry comes of direction and indirection.   In order to write, I need to do a fair amount of staring out the window. It's helpful to do some mindless tasks like cleaning and laundry. Somehow the sound of water running into the washing machine helps me find my way to the page.   Dreams help; this morning I climbed out of bed with a phrase delivered to me in my sleep. Some poems I've written began in just such a way. Daydreams, reverie, and music help.   Good conversations, reading, and especially walking or yoga help me make the transition from conscious mind to subconscious. Spending time by the lakeshore or near the river, journaling, writing letters. In my studio, I find the process of making a fire in the woodstove very conducive. It is a journey that leads inward.

The process of artistic submersion is similar to the process of planned change. As a writer, I've learned to invite the meditative state that leads into artistic work. In the field of social work, research about the process of change reveals a parallel: a premeditative state, followed by contemplation, preparation, and action. Now, an evidence based practice (one that has been proven to be effective) called motivational interviewing is used to support and encourage the process of change; the social worker affirms the point in the process, no matter what it is, and discusses the process of change and possible scenarios of changing, or not changing. Amplifying ambivalence often leads to taking action. In creative immersion and change, talking about process is so important to help you find your way, your own unique way.

Consider what you do to help you enter into contemplation and preparation. An artist friend of mine has a strong Buddhist practice. Meditation, silence and contemplation of the words and writing of teachers has been very helpful to her. Another friend works in more than one medium; besides writing, she also does visual art and music.

Writer's blocks are perhaps an earlier stage of the process and can be investigated. Perhaps more contemplation or more preparation is needed. A block may represent fear or a resistance to change. The social work response to these two obstacles is acknowledgment and affirmation and then a consideration of how staying stuck affects you in the short and long term. Practicing respect of the internal and external obstacles is a skillful tactic. The use of force doesn't work. Controlling responses don't work. In artistic counseling, Anne Paris, PhD, suggests three solutions; mirroring (finding somebody to reflect on your work with you), eliciting creative work in relation to a hero that you have (another writer or artist), and working with peers. These relationships with others help us stay connected to the source of our own inspiration.

In the action of creating something new, we must stretch and rise in ways not otherwise called for. Consider the language we use for such experiences; we say a person is consumed by their work.   At times, I've been consumed by writing and afterwards, I was not the same.   Artists are perhaps marked by their changefulness, like Merce Cunningham.   We are willing to enter in again and again, to create something new.   And of this new beginning, the artist or writer creates an experience with a beginning, middle and end.

Each new work has a different constellation or different set of principles, in order to engage with it, an artist or writer has to let go of the past. What has worked before might not be what works in the new project.   Adjustments are needed.   Perhaps this is also what Rilke meant in his poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo: "...you must change your life." (To read this poem and poet Mark Doty's critical analysis of it, click on this link http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19707.

Besides writing, I work with people who are affected by mental illness and I help facilitate recovery. Once I had the opportunity to attend the Creativity and Madness Conference in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It is a conference that examines the psychology of art and artists. Many artists have transformed very difficult life experience and mental illness into astonishing artistic achievement.   (http://www.creativityandmadness.com/)

The artistic process engages us with the process of change in a very intimate and personal way.    Not only does creative work relax and help us feel centered, it is a profound act of change in the world. We all know you can't change anybody else; it is possible to change oneself (and that is difficult enough). Creative work allows us to make small alterations in the patterns of the self, allows us to follow an image through to a completed work, and sets in motion a beginning that reaches farther than we realize.

Arts learning is so important. The wisdom we gain from working artistically is valuable. Artists can help others learn how to overcome obstacles, especially the difficult obstacles that one's own self can erect during the process of change. Music programs, theater departments, art departments, and creative writing classes not only help students improve their math scores; they give an individual an important tool that might save him or her, and maybe the world.

Notes:
If you are interested in artistic process, check out this book by Anne Paris, PhD: Standing at Water's Edge: Moving Past Fear, Blocks, and Pitfalls to Discover the Power of Creative Immersion (New World Library, c2008) If you want to know about the change process and motivational interviewing, read Miller, William R. & Rollnick, Stephen. (2 edition) Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People For Change . New York: Guildford Press (2002).

How to Revise Poems

2010-11-09T22:30:00.000-06:00

Re-vision is an opportunity to come to the emerging work with attention and deliberation. The rough draft will reveal things to the attentive writer about how to best develop and hone the poem. No rules are hard and fast; these are simply guidelines.   The goal at the end of revision is to have every element of the poem (the voice, the images, the metaphor, the word choice, the punctuation, the line and stanza breaks) all choices that have been made for the best possible effect.

Paul Valery wrote that the language of prose is meant to fall away once the meaning is delivered. In a poem, the language is a physiological device that recreates the breath of the writer in the reader.   Each time the poem is read, the experience is created anew and can reveal new meanings.

1. Begin with a strong line.   A sense detail or an action is best.   It must be arresting in some way: either make it musical or sensual or surprising or make it an action.

2. Poems are a pattern language. Sound patterns or visual patterns are pleasing. Look for ways to enhance the emerging patterns of a first draft. Pay attention to vowel sounds, consonant sounds, almost rhyme, rhyme and rhythm and repetition. The best way to hear this is to read it aloud. Consider the overall shape of the poem.   Repeating words greatly emphasizes those words.   (So make sure you aren't overusing the pronoun "I" or the word "the.")

3. Focus. If you begin with a metaphor, continue to stay in the metaphor throughout the poem.    Avoid simile. It just isn’t as effective.   Writing persona poems is good practice for staying inside a metaphor.

4. Make sure that you have employed the five senses. Good poems are rooted in the body.   Write from your heart, and write about what is really important to you.   You are creating an emotional experience.   Longing belongs in a poem, but not preaching.

5.   Consider context, juxtapositions, simultaneous occurrences, the landscape. Consider some storytelling conventions, like journey or the rule of 3 or circular forms.   Consider mythology and Biblical story. Is your poem somehow similar to a wider cultural story?

6.   Use active verbs and SPECIFIC, concrete detail.   Vivid description. Avoid the use of the words "is, are, was, were, has, had, have, been, seem, being." In words, create a vivid picture in active voice. Like Mary Oliver says, nouns and verbs are worth 50 cents, adjectives and adverbs are worth far less.   They can clutter up the poem, deaden it.   Try to build tension into the lines (maybe by the use of opposites or juxtapositions or by the use of an antagonist; consider what the poem is up against or irresistibly drawn to). Evoke a feeling, but don’t tell the reader how to feel.

7.    Stanzas are like paragraphs.   Stanza breaks offer an opportunity to cross time and space, to free-associate or free-fall, surprise the reader.

8.   Line breaks offer an opportunity to make the poem more evocative.   See if you can increase the meanings. Sometimes ambiguities enhance the poem.   The end word of a line, a stanza, and the entire poem is important.

9.   Value the resonating image.   Sometimes an image lingers or resonates for a writer.   Use
this and keep it central to the poem. Let the poem lead you. Listen to the work.   Allow yourself to work intuitively.

10. Often beginning poets can be heavy-handed with the conclusion. Do not summarize what you just said in the poem. Don't tell the reader what to feel. End strong. Think of your last line as a phrase of music. 

A Poet's Voice

2010-10-31T12:57:00.000-05:00

Curtains by Ruth Stone

Putting up new curtains, other
windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams NO PETS! NO PETS!
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

from Second-Hand Coat (Boston: Godine, c1987)

The voice is so singular, so strong. In the space of just a few lines, we are completely connected. It is intimate, immediate, and sweeps us into her world. A memoir in a few associations. In two lines, we have a history of a marriage and a widowhood. "Now cold borsht alone in a bare kitchen." Stone has nailed the reader with an inescapably vivid detail. The taste is something the reader knows. A stanza break and a question, "What does it mean if I say this years later?" The stanza break here allows the writer and reader to make a transition. What does it mean? I like that the question is not answered in the poem, but the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. The next stanza presents a dramatic scene and a memory of another scene. The final question nearly stabs the heart with its poignancy. The title is so well chosen. It begins by putting up curtains, but the shadow meaning of curtains, meaning the end in a drama, also comes in.

Each writer's voice is singular and unique. It's important to preserve it through the drafts of the poem. One's voice is made of the way that you talk, your word choice, the things you notice, the place you live, the intimacies you have.

The Poet's Power

2010-10-17T19:40:00.000-05:00

Greeter of Souls
by Deborah Digges

Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off rivers.
Here souls pass, not one deified,
and sometimes this is terrible to know
three floors below the street, where light drinks the world,
siphoned like music through portals.
How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless.
A memory of water.
The trees more beautiful not themselves.
Souls who have passed here, tired brightening.
Dumpsters of linen, empty
gurneys along corridors to parking garages.
Who wonders, is it morning?
Who washes these blankets?
Can I not be the greeter of souls?
What’s to be done with the envelopes of hair?
If the inlets are frozen, can I walk across?
When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,
do I put on the new garments?
On which side of the river should I wait?

from Trapeze (Knopf, 2004)

Lately, I've been thinking that poems are made of desire. This one, for instance. yearns with a dark intensity.

It begins in the natural world. After the first line, it falls into another world, the one you might enter after death. She uses the images of a hospital parking garage, a dark recess below healing, or past it. Delightful is her fusion of sense details: "...where light drinks the world,/ siphoned like music through portals./ How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless." The alliteration of f sounds, "framed faceless" seem to reinforce the earlier f sound, in "siphoned." There are many f sounds: deified, fed, frozen. The word siphoned is an interesting choice. One thinks of muzak played in elevators, drawn off, stolen from its rightful source. The word means taken away from, and 'taken away from' is the topic at hand. Is it the narrator that is taken away from, or is it the others? The language shifts from literal to figurative and back as she wanders across the line between this world and the next.

She writes from the body: "What's to be done with the envelopes of hair?" Vivid detail. It haunts us. "When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,/ do I put on the new garments?" Perhaps the narrator is speaking of her own death. It seems so. She is on a brink, desiring still. "Can I not be the greeter of souls?" This sentence with the word 'not' seems to cast two shadows. "Can I not be....." is a heartbreaking choice of words for this poem. It speaks to the mystery we face, after being, can I not be? "Can't I be" would have more correct grammatically but would not lend the additional meaning. The 'not' reinforces the angst. She is witness to death--others and her own, and she expresses the poignancy and confusion.

Poems like these reach into the subconscious, use both memoir, myth, and music, and release both deep wonder and awareness.

For more information about this poet, click on this link: Deborah Digges

The Muse

2010-10-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

I like to have two chairs at my desk, one for me and the other for the spirit that joins me at my work.   That is how it feels--the work is not just mine, it comes through me; so I must acknowledge this unnamed spiritual help.

When one person, by herself, even in self doubt and confusion, sits down to write, something happens. She listens to herself and this other. A world can rise up out of nothing at all, out of piece of blank paper and a pen, and it can hold such vivid life that it can change everything.   Writing can change the writer and it can change the reader.

A writing teacher once suggested a creative visualization in order to create a guide for yourself in your work.    I recommend this. Consider who your literary influences are and choose a persona for your own muse. Let your muse help you create the work and present it.

As a child, my life was changed when I read Louisa May Alcott. She gave me Jo March, and ever after, Jo March lives inside. Since then, many other texts have amazed me, shaken me, awakened me, and gotten me through changes. I think of recent ones I've read: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Gnostic Book, Thunder, Perfect MInd and many, many poets, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Yannis Ritsos, Cesar Vallejo, Rilke, Anne Carson. Generally, it is never all the work of one person, just certain work by certain writers at a certain time in my life, as if a light falls just right sometimes and the illumination is unforgettable.   Two very powerful influences on my own work are the poets & activists, Meridel LeSeuer and Audre Lorde.   I like to recall and call upon their powerful presence.

Lorde said: "... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

Poetry illuminates experience. It's particularly effective at getting me through changes. It is about changes.   Poetry gets past the conscious mind (we like the conscious mind but its anxiety and self absorption does not always help) and goes into the subconscious.   This is the place of intuition and image and pattern, the place where art finds deep knowing. I aim for it and let it guide me through my writing and my life.

Synergy: Poems & Music & Film

2010-09-25T18:48:00.000-05:00

"(immersion)

water resists
breaks without breaking
flows along invisible scores
courses between continuous
ends, begins

doesn't resist
touches, touches, turns
over the same skin...."

Click on the link to view a sample of collaborative work. In this piece, I have written and read the poems and Kathy McTavish has composed and performed the music on cello. The video images are selected collaboratively; Kathy has made the film.

Immersion: poetry on video

In performance or in video, my poems are often joined to music and image. Poems are often created in silence and solitude, and sometimes they are created while listening to music. My poems have strong images, and they are a painting with words. The poems reflect my landscape of northern Minnesota and the body. I use memoir, myth, and the patterns in nature to tell a story of change. Yet it is not 'nature poetry.' I tend not to write wisdom poems. Not that those are bad, but they aren't what I'm after artistically. I seek to evoke multiple meaning and in the interest of that, pare down the language and have rapid "turns." In the patterns of nature, migration, erosion, flood, storm, I find meaning that lends itself well to human experience.    A good poem is vivid and immediate. I like the poem to be an investigation that breaks open emotion. I have no ready answers nor do I trust that there are any.

When Kathy McTavish and I perform together, we do not seek to illustrate the other's work. Poems are made of figurative language; we love the imagination. We strive to 'push off from each other' and present a sound that has a creative tension and dialectical meaning. We begin, but the sounds are like two people in conversation who are not necessarily talking about the same thing. This technique makes a much more interesting dialogue and story. It is improvisational.

In hand, I have more poems than I will read that I've arranged into an arc. The individual poems are pieces of mosaic that create a larger story. My choices in performance are spontaneous and in relation to the sound of the cello.   The cello sound that Kathy has developed is done by a technique that we call "deep listening."   Deep listening demands a concentration and being in the moment.    In the moment, the changes of intonation and color are responded to immediately. We do not erect rigid barriers but are open to the subtle and sometimes not so subtle changes in the environment, the instrument, the voice, and the setting. We have learned that relying on intuition is best.

The voice of the cello and my own voice are similar. We are doing a duet. It means that we can flex and alter and shift and build on each other.   The video work that we create also seeks an independent flow. We have learned that interpreting the words of the poem literally in video image also does not work well for our purposes.   It must evoke meaning, and continue to be able to provide new meaning. Therefore the still motion images create an abstract expressionist painting in motion. The film has gestures and movement and color, and by itself is a shifting and beautiful story that invites the viewer to participate. There are glimpses of character in shadow or mirror or other oblique means. The viewer interprets the meaning. This is the same for the poems and music.

The still motion images are created by the use of DSLR camera, a Canon EO5.   Kathy has been exploring Bokeh effects. It is an artistic technique initially used by some Japanese photographers who enjoyed the aesthetics of blur.    She comes to this work by way of music; in fact the images are created in the same way that she creates music in her studio. Her echo pedal and harmonics perhaps are a musical expression of blur. She likes the 'infinite between.'   She began using images in her search for techniques of writing scores. The images evoke meaning; to her, they create a synesthesia and seem to have their own sounds.

The creative work that occurs simultaneously in performance will draw more shades of meaning and energy in proximity. We seek to share this synergy with the audience and are pleased to talk with people about their own 'invisible procession' of images that arise in their imagination while they listen to our performance.

Poetry works well with other media. See this website for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany.
http://www.zebra-award.org/index.php?id=779&L=1

From Duluth's Poet Laureate: A Community Wide Poetry Assignment

2010-09-13T21:20:00.000-05:00

Since becoming poet laureate of Duluth, I've been considering ways to invite the community to write poems.   Poems are marvelous little machines.   They are made of sound and image and if poems are good, they will touch you. This kind of touch is especially important during times of transition: a loss or a death, a departure, a journey, a union like a marriage, a new job, new home, an illness, a recovery, a birth, a new beginning.   Poetry has so much to offer everybody.

So on this blog, I've decided to offer some writing prompts. I've gathered three examples and invite you to write a poem that is structured like the example.    "Copying from the masters" is a good way to learn the craft of poetry.   But instead of recreating the master's work, make a parallel poem. Try adapting one of the master's features to your own. Make a poem with the same number of lines or stanzas.   Make a poem on a related topic.   Use language in a similar way.   Play with it 'fast and loose.' In this way, you can use the master's poem as a scaffold of sorts to build your own poem.

The following suggestions are drawn from the following poem examples. When you begin writing, detach from the internal critic. Avoid perfectionism. Focus on details and the five senses. Experiment, play, follow your instinct.   Make a first draft without much thought. Save that for later.

Writing prompt: Write a poem about a piece of clothing
Writing prompt: Write a list poem about something you've lost or found
Writing prompt: Write about a first lesson

In this poem by Connie Wanek (from her book of poems, On Speaking Terms, Copper Canyon Press, c2010), Connie focuses on a rag, a sleeve of an old shirt, to express changes:

Rags

I dust with a sleeve I loved
to look at on my arm.
Blue is gray now, like a patch
of sky filthy with clouds.
Why is piano dust always so gray?
Something about sound waves
and day
that science could explain.

I didn't need scissors
the cotton was so rotted
by sun and sweat, the salt I made,
the sticky seawater. I was glad
to actually wear something out,
to have seen one thing
completely through,
even though I'd miss
being the person who wore it.

Poetry has such an economy of words and yet conveys volumes.   This poem focuses on just one object, a dust rag that she'd made from a worn shirt.   The last line is so striking; one understands suddenly getting older.

In this poem, Elizabeth Bishop talks about loss. It is from her book The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, LLC).

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next to last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This poem is a form called villanelle that features 3 line stanzas and repeated lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza. It uses figurative language like many poems.    It starts out with simple losses but with each stanza, the loss becomes greater and deeper.   Bishop's tone is light and ironic, but she conveys the devastation.   Poems like these bring the reader gifts of solace and beauty.

Poems are gifts. To receive a poem is an honor.   Consider writing a poem about a person, a place, or a thing in your life. In the example by Connie Wanek, she shows us how writing about the sleeve of a shirt can reveal a life. Wanek's poem is tightly focused.    In the example by Elizabeth Bishop, she creates a list. Lists are very good ways to build a poem. Bishop's losses were very important ones to her. It is essential to write about what is important.

This poem by Philip Booth (you can find it at www.poemhunter.com) is a memory that also becomes a blessing:

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

This poem concentrates on the details of learning to swim. Booth does allow the poem to open up, past the particular day of the swimming lesson, but he remains in the metaphor of swimming. Metaphors allow the writer/poet a longer reach. Booth is talking about swimming, but we all know he is talking about life as well.

I invite you to try these exercises and share your work with others.

Information for Writers

2010-08-03T21:09:00.000-05:00

Check out the National Writers Union website for information about copyright, negotiating contracts, publishing, and many other important topics.

https://nwu.org/node

How to Facilitate a Writers' Group

2010-07-25T20:53:00.000-05:00

A writers group provides support, encouragement and critique.   It is a great way to give structure to your writing project and to get good feedback. The group does not have to be large; 3 people is great.   Over 6 people will require more time for the meeting and to read manuscripts.   I've used the following guidelines to facilitate groups.

Guidelines for Writing Groups
for a critique group: 3-6 people

Plan your group process with the members of the group.

Are you a closed group or an open group? Multi-genre or single genre? How will you take in new members? When and where will you meet?   I've found that it works well to meet at a coffeehouse or restaurant, especially if you can reserve a quiet corner.   It's a neutral territory and eliminates worry about housekeeping or managing pets or displacing family members at home.   Decide the length of time that you will meet. One hour is good for a small group. Over two hours is too long. What is the primary goal of each person in the group? (This is important. Some people find having a deadline is what they need. Some just want to get started and don’t want a lot of critique that might be discouraging. Some have a large manuscript or past published work and want “deep critical examination.”

This is a good time to decide if you want to designate one person as a facilitator or time keeper.    This person can help manage the group process.

Prepare for your writing group session.

Make a clean, readable copy of your writing.   Format it in the same way that you would if you were sending it to an editor or publisher. Bring enough Xerox copies of the work you want comments on—hand these out.

Be courteous. If you will be late or must miss the group, notify the facilitator or other members. Don't bring uninvited guests. Writers are often reading works in progress and might prefer to have more private sharing.    Also, writing tends to be personal. A new person might cause others to feel uncomfortable.

Learn to detach from your writing.

Read the work aloud (or an excerpt of the work aloud) while members read along with you. Don’t apologize or dismiss your work. Reading out loud in itself will reveal some flaws or things that need to be added or omitted. If you have specific questions about the work, you can ask your reviewers to consider those.   It's a good practice for the writer to remain silent when members are giving feedback.   Resist explaining your decisions.   The readers must rely on what is written on the page and should respond only to that.

Let your work stand on its own. Members of a group should practice ‘detachment’ from their own work when it is reviewed. Remember it is the work that is being scrutinized, not you the writer. Don’t take things personally. The feedback is an opinion and you don’t necessarily need to follow any advice or suggestions. Simply hear the feedback and then deliberate on your own.

Don't monopolize the time.   Each member should have roughly equal time for reviews.

Give good feedback.

Reviewers should make observations about the work. Notice what works well. Identify the strengths. In poetry, you should be attending to the sound, rhythm, pattern, imagery, metaphor, word choice. Be specific. Avoid general or vague comments like “this is good” or “I don’t like it.” Explain what exactly works for you and why. Note the shifts or confusing things. Reflect about what doesn’t seem to work. In prose, give feedback about dialogue, setting, action, point of view, and other aspects.    Note discrepancies or things that don't make sense.   Sometimes reviewers will disagree—all the better! The writer should sit back and listen to the feedback.

It is not necessary to tell the writer how to “fix” the work. This might feel supportive, but it also might feel overbearing. Recommended solutions may not reflect the writer’s own style.   Ultimately, the writer will need to make the decisions to bring the work into line with his or her vision.

Check in with each other regularly.

Take time to review group process. Your group will want to discuss how much time to spend on each work, and you will also benefit from talking about the individual writers process as well. Try to avoid distracting yourselves with personal information or experience. It’s easy to get sidetracked. Perhaps assign somebody to be a time keeper or to remind people to stay focused on the written work.

Set up an email list. Notify each other if you can’t attend. Respect each other’s time.