Full moon began the week as April reaches its closing days–when the redbuds and ornamental cherries are at their peak and the apple trees bloom. Soon the lilacs will open, and oak catkins will send chartreuse pollen all over the deck. Then there will be peonies and irises. I love the first weeks of May but this year will be missing some of those days. I’ll be traveling.
Because I have to prepare for my trip, attend a friend’s memorial, and prep the garden for my absence, this is my last post for National Poetry Month. I’ve chosen a poem from my book Water-Rites, a quiet poem that has always felt near to my heart. Maybe because I romanticize childhood, who knows. At any rate, I hope your poetry month was beautiful and that you continue to read and enjoy poetry. Thanks for reading mine this month.
~
On Having Lost the Confidence of Birds
Once, I was very small, prone to long silences and spells of aimless drifting in the world's embrace, staring at ants in their grainy colonies, patterns of activity, the slender waists and legs, frantic antennae waving at me so I seemed, for an hour, large. Once, I could skip and sing until dinner time, but chose to lie front down among dandelions, decided to watch the skip and sing of bees, their several kinds inducing me to wonder about categories-- What Will or Will Not Sting-- and marvel at the dark swift birds that lived in the martin house and found bees edible. In those long days I was no threat, a quiet object natural in the grass and breathing at the meadow's pace. I had not lost, yet, the birds' confidence nor learned how not to trust my own body in the world's embrace. ~
I composed this poem during the pandemic not too long after my father died. It’s interesting how one responds to grief. The grieving man in this poem is not my dad; he died, I think, without too much weighing him down. He may have intended to live longer, but he was ready enough. I don’t think he had many regrets, and I know he felt loved.
And the grieving man is not my brother, though it could have been–he had a dog that was a great comfort to him while he mourned our dad, but I don’t think he was as gobsmacked with sorrow the way the person in this poem is; Dad’s death was not a surprise to us. The man in this poem isn’t symbolic, however, much as he may be a creature of my imagination. As the writer of this poem, I sense him as someone quite specific, whose loss was deep and perhaps unexpected–maybe a person whose loved one died from covid-19. A person who, like all of us, needs comfort and compassion; and I suppose this poem implies that the grieving man has someone, perhaps an adult child, who willingly extends that compassion in return: “lean your head/against his shoulder as you used to do/when you were small and aggrieved by/the world’s unfairness, and he sheltered you.”
A year or so later, I returned to the poem to do some revisions. Sheila-Na-Gig published it online and, much to my surprise, nominated it for a 2023 Pushcart Prize (a long shot, but an honor to be nominated). It’s my intention to include it in my next manuscript–the one I am working on now. I’m not holding my breath about when the next collection gets published; could be years. But I decided that this would be the poem to read for the Berks Bards 2024 poem-a-day project on BCTV this April. The link to my reading of this poem is here.
~
Grieving Man
Let him into your house, the grieving man, blind, nearly, and so frail with sorrows he cannot hear your comforting words or move himself from room to room without assistance. Give him a careful bed, a friendly dog, a view of mountains. Let yourselves open yourselves to what he can give, hampered by limitations: yours and his.
In a time of no touching, take his hand in yours. In a time of isolation, lean your head against his shoulder as you used to do when you were small and aggrieved by the world’s unfairness, and he sheltered you. We turn about and find the unfamiliar. When did he become the grieving man and you sorrowful, in pain yourself, aghast at the supermarket, the oil bill, the nation?
He savors the soup you’ve made and strokes the dog’s snow-dampened fur. He asks whether the juncos still hop on frost’s thin crust or if winter has moved on north, a swath of crocuses blooming in its wake. You rally your resources, endeavor to describe the current moment blind as you are and sorrowful, spreading seed for the sparrows.
Headlines. They make us so worried, so anxious, so scared. That was true when I was a child, in 1968; it’s true today. The poem below, which appears in Abundance/Diminishment, is one I wrote eight years ago. It remains relevant. And it is an April poem.
~
At a Birdfeeder
Woodpecker works at sunflower seeds intent on his hunger deaf to blackbirds’ territorial ambitions, wooing robins, chickadee’s agitated perch & dip at feeder’s edge. Woodpecker makes of his head a bright gimlet, his claws anchored on an eyebolt.
I watch a redwing drift on the last morning breeze of April, a spider’s line trimming the porch rail. Woodpecker revels in the easy meal we’ve provided, doesn’t know about the sack of seed in our garage, the price of bulk feed, acres of sunflowers blooming in Iowa, Kansas, Mexico chaff at the processing plants allusions to van Gogh, pollen-packed bees in their yellow jodhpurs.
That’s human knowledge: mine, yet I’d rather dwell on turkey calls vibrating the nearby woods, the labor of wild cherry petals landing on dew, grass, and feeder where the woodpecker— still famished—writes the morning news in bold headlines amid hickories, that being all the news that matters in this moment.
This TV interview was interesting to participate in, and I loved chatting with Marilyn Klimcho! She put me at ease, which is hard to do in front of cameras. I have watched the whole 20 minutes without hating myself or feeling too embarrassed. (Hooray?)
Is the show entertaining? Well…you have to be interested in poetry and poets, I suppose. Feel free to check it out. The link above should take you to the YouTube video.
~
National Poetry Month does, it turns out, raise the public’s awareness of poetry at least a little. Recently, I was invited to be a guest at a weekly online discussion of poetry and spirituality. The participants had been reading and discussing my poem “Deity’s Diary” and asked me whether I’d be available to read the poem and then discuss it with the group members at one of their meetings. They even sent me recordings of previous meetings’ discussions. I find it fascinating to learn how readers interpret my poems, what they get out of the work; so of course I obliged.
The group members asked intriguing, intelligent questions–clearly, they are accustomed to talking about poetry. That was refreshing, and it kept me on my toes. I learned that my poem (which is in four parts, so maybe it is poems) is doing the work I hoped it would do, at least with this group of careful and reflective readers. “Deity’s Diary” is intentionally paradoxical and questions many of western culture’s received ideas about god. It’s also pretty presumptuous, since I chose to write it in the persona of a deity…but, like all poems, it is decidedly a work of the imagination. (No, I do not consider myself a god!)
The discussion ranged from philosophical, scientific, and theological concerns to the nuts and bolts of writing and revising a poem, where I get my ideas, what the major influences on my work have been, and lots of other topics. Seldom do we lesser-known writers get to hear back from readers, especially in such detail–so this event felt like a real treat to me.
One participant said that reading these poems was like walking through an unfamiliar forest, not on a straight path, with possibilities of obstacles and turns in the track and the surprise of wildflowers, mosses, or lovely birds along the way.
It was not a huge surprise–the proverbial writing has been on the metaphorical wall for some time–but the college I attended for graduate studies has announced that it is folding.
In January 2001, shortly after I won a grant in poetry from the PA Council on the Arts, I rallied myself and my work, packed a bag, and took the family car by myself to Vermont for two weeks. In a burst of confidence and enthusiasm post-grant, I’d applied to creative writing graduate programs. There were none nearby enough to commute to, and Goddard’s low-residency model seemed my only choice. Well, I could have abandoned my husband and young children and moved to another area, but that seemed untenable and unkind.
But Goddard was perfect. I met new people and made (so far) lifelong friends-in-writing and friends-in-feeling. The work challenged me; the reading was intense! When I look at the bibliography at the back of my thesis, I admit I wonder how I managed. Hard work, intellectually demanding work, constant revision. Well, I needed less sleep in those days. Many times I read and annotated while waiting for my kids while they took piano lessons or riding lessons or whatever they were doing in middle school.
Sometimes my parents or spouse spent a Saturday or Sunday with the children so Mama could study and write. It is kind of a blur, but the community of fellow students seemed so supportive at the time. It’s not that I was without supportive people in my life–but the folks at Goddard, students and faculty, deeply understood my passion for writing. I found I could spend hours talking about things that matter to writers (which is kind of everything, but also, WRITING), which wasn’t easy to do in other areas of my middle-aged, middle-class, mom-life existence.
Goddard often has been termed an “experimental” college. That term covers a whole host of meanings in the world of education. No point in trying to define it, since one thing that experimental institutions tend to do is change and evolve. The program I attended in 2000-2003 differed from the programs of 1985 or 2015. Which is as it should be–education should not be a static set of activities even when some exploration of canonical texts is necessary. One reason I chose to pursue my education at experimental colleges (The New School, Thomas Jefferson College, Goddard) is that I am a slightly odd bird, an autodidact who did well enough in standard subjects but who got the most benefit from deep study of things I felt passionate about–literature, history, botany, poems, dance, philosophy, feminism, visual art. Experimental colleges offered mentors who could guide me in self-directed learning, recommend books and authors, feed my often-changing interests, offer personal, one-to-one advising and critique. I am 100% sure I would not have excelled in universities that followed more standard educational subjects and protocols, and I’m glad I received good guidance (usually) and a well-rounded, if eclectic, education.
Many of the poems in my book Water-Rites are from my time at Goddard, since Water-Ritesin an earlier form was part of my graduate thesis. And a fair number of the poems in The Red Queen Hypothesiswere first drafted during my years there, when I was experimenting with forms. So, having just learned for certain that Goddard will cease to function as an offbeat, transformative, self-directed institution of higher education–thus joining my undergraduate school, Thomas Jefferson College of Michigan, as defunct institutions–I will post a poem that I know for certain I drafted just before I graduated. It’s a response to the events of 9/11 and was not quite ready, nor suited, for inclusion in my first collection; it appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems.
~
Shreds for Judith
We ran, leaves before a bitter wind, & some ran headlong & some in circles, we did not know what to do with ourselves,
& watched, pressed to our windows & could do nothing: streets erupted with people like clustered beetles wakened from dormancy.
We walked, in all directions but mostly north, & we were silent and our mouths were dry. Things like shoes and hats made us human.
We wept and it was not sufficient, & swept, then, for months & recalled mostly paper, the ways we occupy ourselves, the mild wind carrying what lingered. Scraps.
While I await the eventual drying-out of the garden soil so I can plant a few early veggies and herbs, it seems a good time to ready a few more poems. I’m revising, drafting, but not sending out work. That feels comfortable at the moment; anyway, I much prefer writing to submitting poems.
I’ve also reserved myself some quiet hours to read books of poetry and a novel or two. Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature just arrived in my mailbox, and I’m on an Isabel Allende kick at the moment, so I definitely need some time to devote to reading. My husband, who tends to do his reading in the evenings, recently forwarded a Washington Post column by Stephanie Shapiro about why so few people read for pleasure during the day. Its title is “Why Does Daylight Reading Feel So Wrong?” She writes, “Although I am retired, I find it hard to allow myself an afternoon with a book or a long magazine article. Just the thought of settling onto the sofa in daylight hours, especially on weekdays, smacks of laziness and stirs up guilt. If I must sit at all, it should be at a desk or a countertop to do something ‘useful’— answer an email, write a grocery list, look up a recipe, what have you.”
I’m sure this is a common feeling, but it isn’t one I acquired, probably because my dad was ALWAYS sitting around reading a book, newspaper, or magazine–day or night. Reading during the day seemed normal to me. It still does, I’m happy to say.
I drew the night with a number 2 pencil I'd sharpened with a Girl Scout penknife. It was 1969. Night needed blurred edges so I smudged at it with two fingers of my right hand. And then night left its prints on my thumbs and palms, somehow, on the yellow print blouse and blue jeans I wore.
I sketched shadows the way I saw them under beds and outside windows, how they deepened the early hours when Grandmother wakened by gaslight to start her chores-- in darkness which I learned to draw with a pencil and which stayed on my skin the whole day.
In all my born days, I’ve never had a Poetry Month start off with such an abundance of publications–and, as it will probably never happen again, I’m going to post the links here.
“Siren for Somebody Else” offers a mother’s perspective on waiting, unable to get to sleep, for a child who is out late on his own. It appears in RockPaperPoem.
“Interpreting the Conversation from Another Room” shows up in Stick Figure Poetry #13. The poem originated during the years our son lived with us and played online multiplayer games in his room, but it morphed into something a little more sinister.
“Fevered” came almost out of nowhere but resonated with some early readers who contend with mental and emotional challenges. It’s also a poem about love and compassion, I suppose. The journal Philadelphia Stories published it in the latest issue.
Gyroscope Review is a print journal that also offers a Kindle and a PDF version, the last of which is free to download, though the paper book is lovely and only $12 on Amazon. My poem “Bach and Birdsong” starts the issue off…a meditation on springtime.
Whew! This post goes with my “Gratitude” post of last week!
For National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem here every few days…something from one of my books and chapbooks.
First, though, musings on why it matters to me that my poems get collected in book form. I’ve been asked about this by a few people recently, sparked by conversations about the changing technology of “print,” and also artistic purpose, and even the concept of legacy. If I were a visual artist–say, a painter–there would be objects my hands had produced. Even a mediocre painter creates something apparently lasting or worth something. You die, and your paintings go to family members or to flea markets where people can purchase them (for the frames if nothing else…). A ceramicist may make truly useful things such as bowls and mugs; those items can last and be used, even if they end up in thrift shops or post-apocalyptic archeological digs. Maybe the painter or potter isn’t remembered, but the product endures for awhile.
But poems? So many people leave behind sheaves of unread, unpublished, perhaps private writing, much of which won’t resonate with anyone. Even if it could, the chance that anyone would care enough to sort through before burning or recycling and uncover a heretofore unknown genius is vanishingly small. I, for one, am not writing for eternity or for the future. I write for the now. The main reason I want to get books in print is that the product (a book! I love books!) matters while I’m here. After I die, no one will want my pile of drafts, old journals, revisions, false starts–not even my children. And why should they? Will future society value archives of anyone, let alone very minor poets of the early 21st c? Maybe the demise of technologically-based societies is right around the corner. All the more reason to work in and for the present moment. If I garner a few readers today, I feel blessed.
~ Today’s poem is from my 2011 FootHills Publishing chapbook The Capable Heart.
No Long Farewells
The weedy field. On the rise beyond, armies of brown corn, ready to fall. Willow looses streamers, yellow kites floundering in tall grass. I look at my hands, fingers gold. We walk past grapevines.
Later I think of this day as a drafty barn, sun on its walls, clouds high beyond rafters: roofless. Nothing blocks our vision for once. No blinders.
There is little time for long farewells. A light goes on. Your bus is leaving now. Moon follows you home.
Fountains of gratitude are flowing in my heart today despite the gray, humid weather that seems to set off every imaginable ache my body could have. ❤
Wow, that was a sentence of hyperbole and cliché, for which I apologize; let me begin again. I’m grateful for a number of reasons that I want to mention so I can give appropriate and public thanks to the people who have added to today’s happiness. The list starts with Dave Fry of Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse & Listening Room in Bethlehem PA, who hosted an evening of poetry–with musical interludes and conversation–this past Wednesday evening. Two members of my long-time writers group and I read our poems and talked about a few poetic forms (haiku, waka/tanka, tanka prose, and short forms generally). Dave supplied some comments to encourage audience reflection and performed interludes on guitar. One observation he made is that the classic blues song follows a structure that has similarities to a short poem form: Line, Repeated line, Commentary line (often like a poem’s “turn”).
It was a lovely event and great to share the writerly camaraderie of a long & successful critique group onstage: Marilyn Hazelton and Susan Weaver are often the first readers of my own poems. I’m grateful for their support and for the way Dave gave us the opportunity showcase poems and maybe teach a few audience members new things about poetry. Another plus was that I sold a few books! Grateful to those folks, too. That’s one way to support the arts.
Thank you as well to my Best Beloved, who attended despite feeling a little lousy from allergies, and to those of my local friends who came out to hear us. The venue charges a cover, and not everyone’s willing to shell out for poetry. Therefore, I bow deeply to you all who do.
Today I also received a kind gesture from poet, scholar, educator, and blogger Lesley Wheeler. On her blog (which you really might want to follow), Lesley wrote a mini-review of my book The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems, last summer. I’m thrilled that this week she included a mini-review of my brand-new book, Abundance/Diminishment (“ectoplasmic micro poetry reviews“). My book was in such good company! See the link above, between parentheses, for her comments on books by Diane Suess, January Gill O’Neill, Elizabeth Savage, and Jen Karetnick.
For promotional reasons, (ha!), I’ll close with what Lesley says about the collection:
“I have a similarly eerie sense of connection with a sympathetic mind reading Ann E. Michael’s Abundance/ Diminishment.This book tallies losses and bounties: it’s full of mathematical and scientific language, but what it counts and categorizes is deeply emotionally freighted. In ‘Filling Out Forms at the Gynecologist’s Office,’ she subtracts the number of her children from the number of times she’s been pregnant. In ‘Tongues,’ a child of six, mocked by classmates for the tongue sandwich in her lunchbox, prices out peanut butter–even as she loses her immigrant mother’s language. Also like Seuss’s book, this is poetry of maturity, from a time of life when a person has to begin giving it all away. I’m especially grateful, these days, for books from midlife and beyond. I learn what I need to know by reading them.”