Author Archives: Ann E. Michael

Mid-March

Tulip poplars begin to plump out their winter bud scales, where they will leaf out later in spring.

A marsh hawk zips overhead, winging above the treeline and vanishing over the northern hill.

Early ornamentals bloom: crocus, snowdrop, aconite, i. reticulata.

Red-winged blackbirds make the mornings noisy–they have so many different songs and calls that three or four of them sound like multitudes, almost drowning out our year-round singers, the song sparrows. Early migrant passerines have returned, but it’s still winter here. Some bugs have gotten active and are emerging from hibernation or incubation. No bees as yet. When I turn over rotting logs, I find amphibians’ eggs and lots of different varieties of soil centipedes.

And, of course, worms. March’s moon is sometimes called the Worm Moon, and tonight there’s a total lunar eclipse around midnight here in PA. Is that auspicious? It’s also when I will be reading at the Lambertville Free Public Library in Lambertville, NJ. I’m excited to participate in an on-site, in-person reading again…I’ve been hibernating a bit from poetry events, but it is time to get stirring.

At the end of the month, I’m packing up for a brief trip to Los Angeles, where I will be attending one day only of the annual AWP Conference (Saturday’s Book Fair!) and spending the rest of the visit with my son. The conference always offers a terrific infusion of writerly companionship, community, and inspiration. Whereas time with my son offers love, cool places to see and eat and hike, a host of things I didn’t know I wanted to learn, and many moments of hilarity and conversation. It’s hard that he’s so far away–hard for me; I don’t think he minds, he is busy and having fun, which is as it should be.

Also, yes, the whole situation here in the USA is something I never could have imagined as a younger person, when I somehow had an unquestioning faith the US Constitution could actually be workable as an enduring rule of law. That careless people who value money over community could indeed disrupt that 1787 document was always a possibility (the moneyed property owners and slaveholders had their way with the original, after all), but most of us didn’t see this coming–naive, I suppose. Busy with our own concerns. I get it, and maybe we deserve what’s coming, but [ugh]. A concerned European friend recently asked me how I was faring under the stress of these first three months, and I told him that since making art (poetry) has generally been an unconventional act/behavior/response even under the patronage system, my response is to keep making art. Granted, it isn’t much, nothing earth-shattering, not gonna change society that way; but it keeps us observant little non-conformers on our toes, creative, and flourishing in the face of weirdness and oppression.

Which is something we can do. Like early bloomers in the cold days of late winter.

winter witch hazel blooming in snow

Unexpected directions

What gets a poem started?

Sometimes, it is a prompt; I depend on those when I am feeling a bit “dry” creatively. Most of the time, though, the prompting comes from some unexpected quarter. The poem below was prompted by something a colleague said–that she’d consider belonging to any religion that permitted red wine and brie cheese. She was joking around, but the idea stayed in my mind. When I elaborated on it in a draft, the poem needed to be in first-person. And then it took off in an unexpected direction. Kind of a world-weary, sardonic direction, a commentary on our society perhaps. No: certainly. The poem changed tone from something rather amusing to something more reflective and serious. I had not seen that coming when I sat down to draft it!

I like that unexpected directions happen when reading, and writing, poems. One thing I have noticed when I see so-called poems “written” by an artificial intelligence program is that they deliver no such surprises. An algorithm’s surprise is called a bug; it occurs when something goes screwy in the code string. But AI isn’t human enough to understand surprise. Not yet, anyway.

~

Luxuries

A five-year-old chianti reserva, recompense enough
for a day of malingering and, yes, loneliness—
as though that were reason to drink, as though drinking
requires reason when, for most of the last few
centuries, wine’s been safer to drink than water,
and I’ve no right to complain.

Aphorisms tell us we choose our own ways
(paths, journeys, lives); anthropologists say we are 
society’s children, which limits our choices.
Religions narrow the decisions further, although I’d
choose one that permits wine, Camembert, and almonds—
I admit a taste for luxury.

In my milieu, chianti and Camembert are luxuries and
I haven’t had my house bombed, my family sundered, the water
turned to poison in the reservoir, not yet, though sixty years
may not be an entire lifetime. And no quantity of wine erases
the wrenching violence done in the name of my society,
of keeping me secure

and those like me. As though we deserve to be kept, and not 
others, so we can purchase a more than palatable wine
and French cheese and almonds, to ensure the economy’s
robust, and money—that expression of magical thinking—
can continue to pour itself into the stock market’s statistics,
somehow to save us all.


~~
Photo by Josu00e9 Antonio Rivera Vallejo on Pexels.com

Febru-dreary

I try not to hate on February. The days do get longer; there’s often some early blooming or greening, a little more birdsong in the mornings, days that aren’t too miserable for walking. But. A lingering malaise of the spirit often natters about in the background of my days. This year, I am trying an infusion of art.

I’ve enrolled in an art class–visual art–drawing, sketching, experimenting with different media such as gouache, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils. I just want something to do with my eyes and hands that isn’t reading, writing, photography, social media/texting. I think of it as an exploration. The workshop I took with Anita Skeen and Cindy Morgan Hunter in October made me realize that using other forms of art might feel good to me, body and soul. This year, starting now (February), I’m taking an 8-week art class with Helene Parnell of Blue Church Art. We shall see how that goes. I am not doing this to create a good “product” but to enjoy the less-intellectual, more freeing aspects of the art as process…the way I did with the collages and book-making in the New Mexico workshop.

In that frame of mind, I accompanied my Best Beloved to Philadelphia to visit PAFA, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. It’s something I have been meaning to do for, literally, decades–even though we are often in the city, somehow I haven’t gone back to PAFA which I recall from a visit (in my teens!) and kept meaning to see again.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Here’s irony! The historic 1805 building I recall so well is closed for renovation until next year, and many of the paintings are “traveling,” i.e., on loan to other museums, through a show called “Making American Artists.” Most recently, to Albuquerque NM, though the exhibit closed there in September. The Academy, however, has employed the large, windowed, modern gallery spaces across the alley from the old building as temporary museum space and curated some fascinating exhibits for viewing and learning from. We enjoyed the Philadelphia-themed historical and cultural arts, crafts, and objects that came from the Atwater-Kent Museum. The mix of mostly-20th c. American paintings, prints, and sculptures in the upstairs galleries showed us how little we know about more contemporary US artists (outside of the super-famous ones like Hopper, Hockney, de Kooning etc). The plaster casts of famous European sculptures which students used–and still use–for drawing practice are now located in the lower level.

That brought back memories of when I was a teenager in love with art. I will have to go back once the renovations are done, because I remember the building as I visited it in the early 1970s, a strangely decorative place where students could be found sketching one of Michelangelo’s carvings or painstakingly drafting the composition of a painting by Winslow Homer. How I longed to be one of those art students!

PAFA interior, pre-renovations

That desire has been much altered by time, but my love of “the visual and plastic arts” stays with me. I enjoy writing ekphrastic poems; perhaps my foray into making artwork will energize me these last weeks of February and keep me going into spring.

Paper files

Frankly, I have never been much of a fan of organization. I don’t mind planning, in brief and purposeful bursts, but getting things in shape after the fact–once the mess exists–well. I know people who truly enjoy pitching in and re-organizing, but I am not one of them. Besides, I’m also facing similar tasks in my household, rooting through the kids’ rooms (they left years ago) and our attic and basement to cull, straighten up, and organize. The tasks are mutually distracting. And often tedious. I’m working on my attitude, though, trying to find some method of making these chores, er, “creative” in some way. (File under “Lying to Self”).

Call me old-fashioned, I’ll readily admit to it; but lately I have decided that the most efficient way for me to keep track of my own writing is by using a physical filing system. I have experimented with various spreadsheets (I have no patience with Excel, however and alas) and computer folders. I do use the latter for a year-by-year archive of my work, but I cannot easily extract what I am looking for that way. Now that I’ve retired from my 40-hour work week, I have wanted to manage my creative work better and keep track of what needs revision, what seems finished, what has been submitted, what’s been published. That strikes me as a necessary part of tending to myself as a writer. The past year has been a time of working through options, with accompanying irritation and tedium.

Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels.com

After years of endeavoring to use electronic files, it came to me that there’s nothing wrong with old-fashioned paper systems, organized alphabetically by title, with the computer-file names and draft number at the bottom of each poem. This is how I think about the poems when I want to work on them or submit them, so it feels natural to me. Why operate against one’s own operating system?

I suspect one reason (oh, there are many, but let’s start with one) I am so angry about Elon Musk’s “DOGE” initiatives is that efficiency is never all it is cracked up to be and is also not the be-all and end-all of any society’s best organization. Of course those who push AI believe that algorithmic calculations can make the world run smoothly, but said people are egregiously uninformed about human nature and the myriad forms of individual thought processes. We are non-standard. Averages account for almost nothing, really. We do not think the same thinks. (And yes, I meant thinks not things, autocorrect). Diversity is what keeps evolution going. There is no change without it; and without change, we die.

So: I’m inefficient, to a degree, when it comes to keeping my creative work in order. However, the paper filing system, with a notebook and index cards and files on my hard drive, assisted by my still-useful memory (a human brain!!), have so far been working pretty well. It has taken me several weeks to put my stuff together, but now it’s far easier to fetch what I want to work on, send out, or collate, which I need to do to prepare for upcoming reading [I have two online readings coming up–one on Feb. 18 and one on May 2]. I’m also grateful that the task kept me busy while I was anxious and worried and grieving over recent not-so-terrific experiences in my (physical, real) life. Real life, which is not averaged. Seldom predictable. Inefficient. And something to celebrate for all its strangeness.

Something like hope

Wintry weeks grind along like the noisy snowplows tearing through sheets of ice this morning. At least we are having a winter, unlike some years. I may not love winter–especially the short, grey days–yet I live in a region that needs it. Indeed, it is February (alas); but in a few weeks I’m liable to notice snowdrops emerging from the dirt. Anticipation stirs my heart. It feels something like hope, although hope is something I feel less inclined to believe in every year. I guess my problem with hope is that it feels like there is human agency invested in the concept, and as I age I recognize how little effect our wishes, hopes, and prayers have upon anything.

Photo from Feb. 9th of last year; as of now, no blossoms yet!

The snowdrops emerge all the same, until such time as they can no longer withstand changes in their environment. There is some comfort in that, for me.

~

Dave Bonta recently reposted (on his Substack and Bluesky accounts) a post by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez called “Why Keep Blogging in 2025?” It’s a lengthy piece (for a post) but brings up some worthy points. He closes with this paragraph, one that I find I heartily agree with–it is why I do what I do:

“Before they became walled gardens, social networks were great places for discovery, and although posts with links don’t get the visibility they used to on the bigger platforms, you shouldn’t be blogging or socializing for scale anyway. Defy Big Social and share those links to your own posts, and to posts you’ve enjoyed. Blogs only die when they’re abandoned by their owners.”

~

Not all of us need to be blogging for scale. That’s a capitalist, celebrity- and status-focused thing that sucks the love and beauty out of poetry, prose, and the arts. We shouldn’t be creating for Big Bucks or Pulitzers but because writing/art is what we love and what we do.

~

Speaking of art…here are three ekphrastic poems of mine, just published in Unleash Lit, which is an online journal that uses a Substack platform.

https://www.unleashlit.com/p/ekphrastic-poems-by-ann-e-michael

So many losses

–For a dear friend, requiescat in pace. 

~

Ironies

She asks herself how likely it is she will vote
in the next election, how long she will endure
under this administration

how it feels to be dying as this
president begins his term, the candidate she spurned
more than once before

to think he might outlast her wasn’t what she or
anyone expected, yet here we are and, she says
she won’t suffer all of it

I consider that a blessing, she says


~
photo: David Sloan.

Curriculum vitae

My year has begun with half a dozen literary journals declining my poems, but it has also begun with a proliferation of new poems–which makes me happy. There are several reasons for a prolific spurt, some of which involve sad events that have turned me toward reflection. While sorrow isn’t a reliable prod for writing in my case, reflection almost always is. Also, attending a workshop is generative for me.

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

I’ll be brave and post the practice poem, one of many versions of my autobiography.

~

CV, after Lisel Mueller

1.	Three weeks before summer solstice, I enter the world. My father considers me the first perfect thing in his life.
2.	Underfoot, meadow grass and church aisles. 
3.	We move from the manse to the city, where my sister goes twice to the hospital and I walk two blocks to school.
4.	Suburban house, square and white as a die. We learn to ride bicycles in the street.
5.	Bussing and gas shortage, algebra, barefoot girls in summer. My embarrassment at growing too tall, too thin, too bookish, too moody.
6.	Early entry into college. When the only thing I wanted was to get away.
7.	In Michigan, snow like I had never seen before.
8.	Some years of misery, tedious, purposely omitted. But I meet the people who most encourage me to write.
9.	Back to my parents’ kind embrace. Celibacy, recalibration, writing.
10.	We meet one summer. I write you so many letters. It might be love.
11.	Two children 18 months apart, vegetables in the backyard: it is love.
12.	Autodidact in the garden, in the world of literature, in child-rearing. There are cats, chickens, guinea pigs, a beloved dog, but I need to return to study and poems.
13.	Loss and joy keep me writing, teaching keeps me busy, children grow and travel far. My books see print.
14.	Pandemic. 
15.	My father dies, my mother loses her power of speech, friends start failing, there are dark weeks. Many hours in the garden, growing and grieving. We hold on, uncertain, but whole. 

~

Promptings

I have mixed feelings about poetry prompts. There have been times when using prompts has really got me writing and feeling inventive about poetry. I’ve had instructors (and read books) whose prompts seemed terrific for me; but maybe I felt already ‘primed’ for writing, anyway, and it was not so much the prompt itself but the circumstances that led to fruitful drafts. At other times, prompts appear useless, or even–dare I say–insipid. My current belief is that, for me, circumstances and instructor matter more than the cleverness of the prompt. Any prompt can be delightful if only I find myself situated in the mood or feel an urgency to write.

The virtual workshop I’m taking with Anita Skeen opened with a discussion of poems (by Roethke, initially) and then moved to some list-making and prompts. This is not unusual for workshops, and lists are a fine way to begin thinking about poems. The prompts we were assigned employed both lists and a method for drafting a poem. So far, I’ve drafted four or five poems in a week: therefore, success (!) even though only one of the drafts seems to have legs.

I think what happens is that after many, many years of writing poetry (or making any kind of art) one begins to feel a rhythm that is almost circadian–as analogy–that informs a person about flow. I ask myself, “Am I ready to write today?” The answer may not be yes. But if it is yes, then I can just write. No expectations, and it’s okay to use a prompt, or re-write an older poem, or just free-write about whatever moment I happen to be in. Usually, in this frame of mind, I don’t get concerned about writing well. I just start on in.

If the am-I-ready answer isn’t a definite yes, then I may procrastinate or distract myself by cleaning the house or reading a book. I can overcome the “maybe” by turning to work by a poet whose work I find interesting or by experimenting with a prompt. Sometimes, it helps to give myself a deadline of some kind–this is why workshops are often useful!

But the answer may simply be, “No, not today.” Sometimes we have those non-creative days. It is alright to have them. Art shouldn’t be about pushing out ideas to get to a “product.” I’m suddenly laughing to myself, thinking of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”

At least with writing, one gets a chance to revise.

Carol Kaine & Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride (20th Century Fox, 1987)

If you are a writer, what do you think about the use of prompts?

Breathe

2024 closed with “thundersnow” in my neck of the woods, a weather phenomenon that I find rather thrilling in its strangeness. And the year commenced with the conflagrations in California, not to mention everything else that goes on daily in the cosmos. Oh, the difficulties of life in interesting times.

Photo by Sabian Symbols on Pexels.com

It so happens that I had made plans, and purchased plane tickets, to visit my son in Los Angeles during the week that AWP is holding its annual conference there, in March–that is, assuming the situation in Los Angeles County doesn’t get even worse and assuming his apartment building survives the fires; it hasn’t been easy to keep myself from doom-scrolling and watching updated fire maps. I remind myself that there is not a thing I can do beyond sending money to charities and such, perhaps, and waiting for the winds to change, and that making myself stressed will actually do harm. But I am not one of those Pollyanna types (now termed a “toxic positivity” person, I have recently learned). I’m aware that the world can be hard, and that we may suffer. So, as my yoga and tai chi instructors would tell me:

Breathe.

There’s no point in trying to decide whether this start to the year is auspicious or inauspicious, though if I’m going to go with signs and auguries, I might choose to follow the Chinese year and move my year’s start to January 29, Year of the Wood Snake–and get all this awful stuff (including January 20th) packed into LAST year.

As I noted in my year-end post, a year’s end–or beginning–is arbitrary.

~

As for writing-related resolutions, I make them all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. But in that one respect, the first dozen days of January are going surprisingly well. I’ve been spending more time on revising older–sometimes much older–work, and I have been drafting some new poems. I even submitted just a few things to lit journals and have been making minor progress in the monumental task of culling and organizing my writing files.

Best of all, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop with Anita Skeen through the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, which starts this week. And I registered for an art class in February, so my plans to focus more on my creative work post-retirement are proceeding more or less apace. We balance fear and misery with art.

~

Cloud sketch in acrylics

Year-end with raven

Last day of the year. Though when the year ends or begins is an arbitrary thing, calendars being a human invention so far as we know, this is my culture’s end date for the approximately 365-day cycle Earth makes around the sun–so I may as well stick with it. Here’s what the close of the year has brought me so far:

A sunny and mild morning post-frost, not uncommon at this time of year.

A Cooper’s hawk calling, hassling the songbirds, as they do. This one’s been hanging about our yard for a week now, sometimes perching right next to the leafless shrubs–it is amazing to watch how they can maneuver through the branches to grab at a finch or sparrow. A lithe and handsome raptor.

A solo Northern mockingbird, boldly eying me as I stood watching it (six feet away) while it gobbled up oriental bittersweet berries.

This surprised-looking tree, framed by horizontal branches–

Mutual disturbance among me and the mourning doves huddled on the ground amid the hedgerow’s vines and leaf-rot. Their sudden flurry startled me as much as I startled them.

Walking along with my Merlin Bird App turned to “sound identification,” I expected to hear the usual characters this time of year: finches, song sparrow, field sparrow, mourning doves, bluejays, crows, starlings, nuthatches, chickadees. Then I heard what sounded like…a raven? Indeed! The app noted “Common Raven,” with the little icon that indicates the bird is a vagrant or may be misidentified. I watched it fly north, over the house. Solo, (whereas early in my walk there was an entire “murder” of crows and they tend to hang about in groups this time of year). This bird was also very large, but too far off to see its beak or the color of its eyes. However, it sounded exactly like the third call recording here. I’m gonna call it a raven.

I found some collages the environment made on its own, much more lively and well-composed than any collage I might try to make.

~

The inner environment today has been focused on yet more revision. I much prefer it to sending poems to journals. It’s playful and creative, if occasionally irritating when a poem refuses my attempted improvements. At present I’m wrestling with a sonnet. Not a bad way to end the year, I reckon.