Monthly Archives: November 2023

Local libraries

There are two local libraries near my house, and the campus library at the college where I used to work. And yet, until just a couple of months ago, they were rather underutilized by yours truly. I had developed into a bit of a book hoarder. I had enough disposable income to purchase books, and as a writer myself I felt an obligation to buy books–from the authors or their publishers when possible (some books are out of print and then…Amazon or ThriftBooks). Buying books helps to keep authors and publishers afloat. Win-win.

I’m now on a fixed income, however, and also have much more ‘free time’ because I have stopped working 40 hours a week. I can get to the libraries at ten a.m. and browse the stacks and ask for interlibrary loans. The first time I borrowed from the library in town, I received a receipt that said: “You checked out the following items,” followed by the due dates of each item, and then this cheerful little notice: “You saved $65.96 by using your public library!” Look at me, the savvy saver.

Maybe libraries have been doing this for awhile and I never noticed because I haven’t been using them. But I thought it was an amusing reminder. I guess it also serves to let people know they ought to donate money and books since, after all, they are saving so much by opting for the library. And so, while I slowly cull my own shelves for –er– “downsizing” purposes, I’ve been borrowing weekly from my free public libraries, one of so-called civilization’s greatest boons. I am sorry it took me so long to return to the safe and welcoming space of a public library.

ann e michael
The South Whitley Library as it was in 1967, with my grandmother in her Story Lady attire.

~

In most public libraries, the hardest books to locate are small-press poetry titles; but the campus library has a good selection of those and, as a former employee, I can drive over there when searching out poetry collections. This means that I will still purchase the occasional new or hard-to-locate poetry books by writers whose work I feel I simply must possess. It’s a big challenge to get over that hurdle of needing to own books, though. A series of full bookshelves feels somehow comforting to me. I’d much rather divest myself of clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronic devices, furniture, craft supplies, maybe even artwork or gardening tools, than part with my books…especially the poetry collections and the philosophy texts.

I’ll keep those for now. But I will also return this $65.96-worth of books to my local library and borrow another $66-worth of books in their place.

~ And in the happy news department, P.S. see below! The issue should be live soon. Amazingly, this is my third Pushcart nomination this year. The last time I was nominated for this annual prize was 1997. So, kinda gobsmacked…and grateful.

Practice

I have been reading novels, which affects my state of mind, makes me dreamy and distracted, foggy-headed, and full of the conflicts in their plots. Or maybe the weather is what does it–too much lovely late autumn sun and not enough rain, which feels “off” for our region; and once the rain finally arrives, it is a dour and chilly dousing I have to convince myself to feel grateful for. Likely the news cycle has not helped my mood. My nine-year-old self emerges from a distant past, crying, “People are so mean!” My parents can no longer sit down beside me and offer comfort.

Time to switch to the poets. I’m finally getting around to reading Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, a collection that’s been on my to-read list for far too long. The very first poem, “The Bull,” startled me into reading it twice. “I reached–not the bull–/but the depths. Not an answer but/an entrance the shape of/an animal. Like me.” Enough to jolt me out of my fiction-induced haze, especially on a day like this one when I feel the anxious dreamy child in me more than I wish. The prose poems later in the book intrigue me, as well: a very different prose than is found in most novels.

~

“People are so mean!” –I said that often when I was a child. People were mean to me and mean to each other. The news was full of warfare and protest. Grownups were mean, kids were mean, teachers were mean. I had a few complaints, but I also possessed the clueless narcissism of a child. Needless to say, I was not one of those precocious, old-soul children I sometimes read about in books. My siblings could have pointed out a few examples of my own meanness. And I was too much of a coward to stand up for others who bore even more teasing than I did, or to advocate forcefully to right wrongs. As a result, I always feared that my life has been rife with sins of omission.

I wrote the following poem two years ago. I must have been in a similar frame of mind.

~

In Which I Give Myself a Scolding Concerning Compassion

While pruning the quince with its
	twisted thorny syntax of greenwood
	I reflect on errors, mine,
	in the arena of compassion—
the quality and behavior I value most
	and in which I am deficient.

Empathy I’ve got, but compassion requires
	motivating force toward good
	and needs, in my case, practice.
I haven’t practiced enough. I feel the prick
	of quince or conscience through
	my gloves damp from autumn drizzle, 
disentangle stems’ inventive turns, toss cuttings
	on the ground. I disappoint myself.

Perhaps meditation would avail, yet
	I’m incompetent at meditation
	though my friend in her monastery
	by the frigid bay once told me
everyone is bad at meditation for the first
	ten years or so.

Lopping off twigs and branches I imagine
	her sitting on her cushion while
	icebergs converge in saltwater cove
	a wash of pale gray during the short-day
months while she practices one kind of compassion.

My friend who always stops to help a stranger
	change a tire or rescues a loose dog
	from the side of a highway practices 
another form of compassion.

I lack it—that immediate impulse of outreaching,
	kindness. It strikes me as a flaw, the log
	in my own eye it took me years to see.
	So when the late-season mosquito
lands on my forearm to sup perhaps its last
	nourishment, I refrain from flattening it—

a microscopic act of compassion in a world so needy,
	but perhaps a start.
~

Promotional

I keep forgetting to mention a few nice happenings regarding my recent book, so I may as well stuff them all into one post here in case anyone is interested. Have I mentioned how much I hate doing promotion for my poetry? Why yes, I believe I have. And since these days I feel no career ambitions related to my work anymore, why does it even matter?

I think there is an answer to why it matters. Sort of an answer, anyway–that without some form of prompting to the World at Large, my poems will be reader-less. A sad fate for a poem or book, and a common one. I don’t write just for myself: I keep a journal for that. I write as a form of communication, a way to connect with a reader I may or may not know.

Sometimes no one connects because the poems don’t work for them. Sometimes no one connects because no one knows the poems exist. The first lack is unavoidable–there is no kind of artistic creation that works for everyone. The second lack I cannot do much about, but I can do a little. Hence, this post.

Some months ago, a current student at one of the colleges I attended called to ask a few questions about my new collection. I did not expect it to be more than one of those “here’s-a-thing-an-alumna-did” paragraphs, and no one got back to me to make sure the piece is accurate (and, yes, a fact or two are incorrect and no, I didn’t say I believe “anyone can write poetry because anything can be poetry; people just have to look for it,”); but it’s a nice little promo bit all the same. Link here.

Then, Michael Escoubas of Quill & Parchment reviewed The Red Queen Hypothesis. Somewhat to my surprise (I don’t think of myself as very “edgy”), he writes, “Michael’s latest collection is edgy; chock full of poems that challenge everyday assumptions about life.” He does recognize that often what I try to do in poetry is exactly that: confront assumptions, observe from different angles. Less surprisingly, he adds that my poems are “sensitive to analogies between the natural world and human experience.” Um, that would be me. That review can be found here.

I know that in a previous post I mentioned Lesley Wheeler’s generous mini-review of the book, which can be found here; she’s an especially insightful reader. I’m thrilled that she writes: “Michael’s second full-length collection is meditative, witty, and smart, with a scientific and sometimes philosophical bent. Also like her blog, it’s closely observant of the more-than-human world in flux…The Red Queen Hypothesis suggests the advantage of sexual reproduction, and there are plenty of seductively “soft persuasions” in this collection. Like the “Stew Cook” speaking to her beloved, this is a book to “fill nooks with aromatic hours.” Shout-out to all the tasty slant-rhymes amid a profusion of traditional forms.” Thank you again, Lesley!

Another little thing to celebrate is Highland Park Poetry’s nominating my poem “Game” for a Pushcart Prize. By the way, that poem appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis!

Finally–or maybe, down the road, there’ll be more to add to promotional posts–I have been getting out and around to readings a bit, in person and virtually. The latter is easier, since many readings are in the evening; these days, I am not too terrific most evenings thanks (ha! as if!) to fibromyalgia fatigue and symptoms. But I do enjoy in-person events and have been glad to read at the Easton Book Festival, at Nowhere Coffee in Allentown PA, and at Bethlehem’s Sun Inn, to mention a few. I was featured in a Mad Poets “OK Zoomers” online reading (love the pun) virtually and will be participating in a group launch of Inlandia‘s most recent issue online on November 19th (info below).

That’s about all the energy I can spare right now for self-promotion. And no, I don’t use Instagram or Tik Tok or Substack or YouTube, at least not yet, so this is all I got, folks. Thank you for bearing with me. Less promotion and more poetry and philosophizing and nature/gardening next time.

If you join the Inlandia event–make sure you account for the time zone! That’s 1-3 pm PACIFIC time.

Untethering

I’ve read many memoirs and non-fiction books about cognitive decline and living with a beloved person who has a neurodegenerative condition; from Oliver Sacks to the recent biography of Terry Pratchett and many of the books we’ve read in my “morbid book group,” information in these texts connects with the personal emotions involved in deeply complicated human ways. There are also quite a few poetry collections themed around this type of loss, and I ought to compile a list one of these days, because poetry has been helpful to me as my family and I contend with elders dealing with forms of dementia (and there are many forms). That fact has led me to wonder whether readers even need another poetry collection centered around cognitive loss. Since so many of my poems during the past four or five years intersect with or explore that topic, I have considered making a manuscript of them. I hesitate. Too much sadness?

Yet while the circumstances that evoke such poems are usually sad, the disease progression differs, as do the personalities of the persons with cognition loss and the personalities of their loved ones. Perspectives on the persons and the diseases also vary a great deal. Similarities exist–enough to make a reader feel recognized–but situations and value systems mean there are as many ways to write about dementia as there are to write about anything else. My mother-in-law and my mother both were diagnosed with the same thing, vascular dementia, but their living situations, support, and the ways they responded to the aphasia and the cognitive effects create two different stories about the disease.

These days, my mother sometimes seems unmoored from the present moment, but not absorbed in memory either–just kind of lost in the ozone. Self, language, memory…sometimes they slip away from her physical body. In this process, though, she has things to teach me. Just as my hospice patients do, and as their families do, by helping me to widen my understanding of human beings and how we get by in the world. Or how we flounder differently from one another. Or how we rescue one another.

Adiamo unmoored photo: Thane Grauel, 2023

I take this gradual loss into myself–that’s what most of us do–and it’s hard, it’s painful to keep myself open to learning and love when what I first notice is untethering and loss. But yesterday when visiting my mother I noticed she has a cobbled-together notebook in which she sometimes writes (in tiny, indecipherable script). Some pages she had divided into three columns, some have scraps of letters or newspaper clippings stapled to them. Are her pages a record, or a practice? She cannot tell me. Yet it was kind of amazing to realize she does this with apparent intent. She has her reasons, if not her reason in the classic sense.

For all that visiting with her generally means a slow amble down the hall or sitting beside her while she sighs, eyes closed, drifting–despite the emptying hours–she is a Self, and she interests me. So I grieve the loss of who-she-has-been and anticipate the sorrow I’ll feel when she dies, but not everything either of us experiences is sadness. Of the poems I have read about losing a beloved person to neurodegenerative conditions, the range in scope covers a vast continuum of human existence, from misery and resentment and sorrow to revelation and even joy. Why would I avoid the full experience life offers?