Author Archives: Ann E. Michael

22 years ago this week

Here’s another post from some time back, one I have updated to reflect current experiences: the graduation and the 22nd birthday of the subject of this brief reflection.

azaleas by Ann E. Michael

The morning was hot, and I had not kept up with the gardening. I needed to get the zucchini seeds, etc. in the ground before the weather got too hot and dry. We were a little behind schedule with the garden because we had a 17-month-old, and I was 9 months pregnant. I was sowing and weeding as women have done since the earliest establishment of agriculture, heavy with child, my back aching, working like a woman obsessed.

You know, that “nesting” thing you hear about with mothers-to-be? I was a week overdue and sick of waiting around; and  gardens won’t wait. The weather was perfect for planting the post-frost seeds. The time was–of course–ripe. Eight hours later, I gave birth to a daughter.

A couple of years later, too busy to write much, this set of cinquain stanzas arrived in my mind (published in 2001 in June Cotner’s anthology Mothers & Daughters, A Poetry Celebration).

Now, that infant is a grown woman with a  college degree. Happy Birthday, Daughter.

To My Daughter

Early
morning I had
planted seeds, cucumber,
melon, squash—I pressed them into
warm earth.

The blood
in my body
sang and I listened for
a cry to join my own—straining
to hear.

And there
you were, all pink,
unfolding in our hands,
a blossom opening with a squall:
daughter.

© 1994 Ann E. Michael

Fragments…

I just want to re-blog this brief and thought-provoking piece by Michael Klein in Ploughshares:

Notes on Narcissism and the Line

Klein’s musings have inspired me to go back to my drafts of the past year and look more closely at fragments, lines, and the self in the poems.

I’ve also discovered, via Deborah Barlow’s delightful art-centered blog, Slow Muse, the art and prose of Altoon Sultan. Reading and viewing creative pieces and creative critical thinking is a marvelous spur toward one’s own creative endeavors. Although I do risk spending more time online, reading and viewing, than I ought…

Enjoy!

Manet and the Sea: a novice’s view

I wrote this essay about eight years ago while taking a class on writing art criticism with the late William Zimmer. I wrote some more traditional art-crit writing, but I liked this short piece best.

The show “Manet and the Sea” traveled several major museums and was mounted at the Philadelphia art museum in, I think, spring of 2003. My daughter is now graduating from college with a degree in biology.

Manet and the Sea: a Novice’s View

My daughter, Alice, is almost 14. She has decided tastes: a preference for the colors red and purple, for Papillion blue cheese and Belgian chocolates (the darker the better), for anchovy-stuffed olives, for horses, for Gary Cooper and Johnny Depp. She listens to Fats Waller, Tom Lehrer and the Beatles. She has no interest in clothing fashions or in 14-year-old boys. All of this makes her not-your-average teen girl, but she still does not exactly jump at the chance to visit art museums. That’s my department.
Alice therefore exhibited typical teenaged foot-dragging when I bribed her into accompanying me to “Manet and the Sea” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (expensive chocolate desserts were promised). I attended the show with members of an art criticism class, people she referred to as “art geeks”—not a promising start to our evening together; but that’s what people her age are like and I have learned not to take the sarcasm too personally. She spurned the offer, at the gallery entrance, of a taped audio tour. “Those things are always stupid,” she pronounced. The tour was not exactly stupid; but I did decide, after awhile, that the audio part of the program was the least effective aspect of the exhibit. Alice’s intuition is often pretty canny.

My kid is a widely-read, marginally sophisticated teen who’s been to many art museums but never really shown a huge interest in paintings. On the way to Philadelphia, I asked her if she knew who Manet was; she remembered Monet and Renoir, and Delacroix’s horses, but not Manet. I told her about the scandals that revolved around “Olympia” and “The Luncheon,” and we discussed subjects for art and how those change depending on society’s values. She remembered my passion for medieval art, “all those church-y pictures with saints and halos.” Subjects of the times. But this exhibit would focus on sea paintings, I told her. Boats. Harbors. They’ll be pretty to look at, I said.

And they are. Alice was not particularly taken with the early Dutch naval battle canvases, or with Manet’s “Ship’s Deck,” but most of the other paintings appealed to her. She said of “Ship’s Deck” that “you can tell he knew a lot about boats, but this painting is kind of dull and depressing.” More to her personal tastes was one of Manet’s small, impressionistic canvases, which she returned to admire several times during the evening: “Sailing Ships at Sea” (1864). She liked the abstract but sure brushwork, quick-seeming indications of small boats “with their sails moving the right way” (she learned to sail last summer and is full of the hubris of the newly-informed) and the cheerfully-colored bands of sea and sky. This is a painting she wouldn’t mind looking at every day, she said, as opposed to Courbet’s “The Wave” (1869). She admired the Courbet for its power and deep brown hues, its action—“but it’s almost too much; I would get fidgety having it in my room.” Monet’s “The Green Wave” suited her most among the wavescape paintings. She liked the way the small boats were handling the swell.

Her taste for bright colors does seem to affect her choice of favorite paintings. She liked the vivid blue-and-white poles and bright overall feel of Manet’s “Venice—the Grand Canal” and pointed out to me the small, red sailboat and tiny white seabirds that add to the perfect charm of his “Fine Weather at Arachon” (1871). Color is what appeals to her in the Monet paintings, as well, and was what surprised her most in the Morisot harbor scenes. “Look how much white she used! These are so different from the other paintings,” she observed. “Why do you think she chose to paint those scenes?” I asked Alice. She answered that flags must be fun to paint. Color again.

But tedium sets in, even amid the loveliest gallery of paintings. Alice headed out of the show to view the chanfrons (equine face-armor) in the arms and armor gallery and to wander through the European collections. And after a long wait at a nearby restaurant, she was served a warm, chocolate bread pudding with chocolate sauce, whipped cream and fresh strawberries. I opted for the crème brulée. There is food for the mind, and there’s food for the body; we shared a bit of both. On the ride home, Alice said, drowsily, “All those paintings made me want to take a vacation by the sea.” Yes, Alice—life should definitely imitate art.

A William Carlos Williams moment in Emmaus

As the spring semester closes, I am trying to get to some housekeeping of several sorts–literal and metaphorical housekeeping. Yard work, filing, dusting, going through poems and essays and books I meant to comment upon…revisions, half-finished proposals and papers, and folders on my computer that are obscurely titled and mysteriously organized.

One thing I thought I’d do when I have a few minutes at the computer is to upload some past notes from a site I no longer use. Most of them are not worth saving, but there are a few I still like. Here’s one dated Saturday, April 18, 2009:

~

Working in the yard and garden this morning. The peas are sprouting, the asparagus are poking up. Here’s the anecdote of the day for those of you who appreciate a little poetry allusion.

My husband, preparing to move some topsoil, yells to me, “Where’s the red wheelbarrow?”

And I was able to reply, because it was literally true: “Glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens!”

white chickens

[A photo from later in the day–the rainwater glaze had evaporated.]

Re-reading & reverie

Writing a book is a hard job. One is always tempted to limit himself to dreaming it.

Above all, the great books remain psychologically alive. You are never finished reading them.

–Gaston Bachelard

~

In The Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard writes of reveries on words, then moves to reveries on reveries themselves, which brings him to books. Books (philosophy, fiction, and poetry books in particular) are, for Bachelard, a kind of dream made real. Books are places to dawdle and to dream as one reads, places in which the reader can interact with imagination: the reader’s  imagination, not the author’s imagination. The author’s work, if it is great, tempts readers into reverie. For this reason, Bachelard says he likes to read his favorite books many times. Each reading produces new reverie.

The chapter in which he makes his case for literature as reverie is an odd one, less of a philosophical argument and more a blend of literature, psychology–particularly along Jungian themes, and sociology, with side trips into discussions of duality (more on the masculine and feminine), the physiology of sleep/dreaming, alchemy (more Jung!), Strindberg, Goethe, Nietzsche, Henri Bosco, and Balzac.

I prefer the chapters on either side of this one (on words and on childhood). But this section made me consider the books I have re-read in my lifetime, and the idea of dreaming with literature. And the lovely idea of books as “psychologically alive.” What a terrific observation!

When I was a child, I preferred reading the next book to re-reading a favorite, although there were a few books I read over, more than once in some cases. As I read my way through high school and college, my inclination toward novelty continued. Why spend time reading books I had already read? The dreaming-with the book aspect Bachelard describes did happen for me, but the reflection lasted only as long as my engagement with each text. I was not a “close reader,” and as a result it was easy to get wrapped up in the dream-world when I read fiction. Still, the dream was the book’s dream, not my own. Closer reading is what leads to reverie, I think: re-reading and reflecting.

It was poetry that taught me to read more closely, to re-read, to dream with the text, to find true reverie in the process of reading. Poetry has always felt psychologically alive to me, and I agree that one is never finished reading a great poem. Or a great book.

I find I must also concur with Bachelard that “one of the functions of reverie is to liberate us from the burdens of life.” Nothing like a daydream, or a great piece of literature or art, to free us–however temporarily–from the things that weigh us down.

Interview

“Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain?  It rose:           the scenery of farewell.
Easy to recognize. The well-known garden…”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
~

primrose by Ann E. Michael

Herewith, a recap of my side (much edited) of the ArtsAlive! conversation this past Sunday at Soft Machine Gallery. SØrina Higgins was also reading and being interviewed by Lehigh Valley Arts Council director Randall Forte, but I can’t adequately summarize her insightful comments. You can find her book here, however.

~

RF: What is your favorite poem in the collection Water-Rites?

AM: I hate to try to pin down a favorite poem, by my favorite writers or by myself. I once heard Billy Collins reply to that question by saying his favorite poem is always the one he is currently in the process of writing. That’s kind of cleverly evasive, but it’s also a little true. Though sometimes I hate the poem I’m currently working on…

I like the title poem, but I get a kick out of “Doxology” because it is so odd; and perhaps my favorite poem is “Tailfeathers” or “The Big Umbrella” or, for purely sentimental reasons—not because it is my best poem—“At Bull’s Head Pond.”

~
RF: What was the most difficult poem to write?

AM: The most difficult poem to complete was probably the long poem in the center of the collection, “The Valley, the Whitetail: A History.” That was difficult in terms of managing the length and the purpose of the poem; also, it required some research. Yes, occasionally poems take quite a bit of research—I have no desire to be inaccurate when I am writing about history or geology or botany (though I often am, inadvertently, despite my best efforts). Not all poetry is solely a work of the imagination.

There are other ways to be “difficult” however. A poem that was hard to complete was the elegy “I Shall Never Be Nearer,” which came quickly initially but took a long, long time to revise and to come to terms with. Not all of these poems—or any of the poems I write—are “about” me or my experiences, I mean, not as biographical as they may seem. But this poem does deal very specifically with the death of my close friend. It was the day after I learned of his passing, and, completely numbed and sleepless, I went with my family for a canoe trip on the lake. I titled this poem “Single Lines” for several years while I was revising it, because the images came to me in – well – single lines. Single images. I must have revised little tiny things in it oh, about 14 times. So I guess that means it was “hard to write.”

~

RF: So, the opposite question. Which poem was easiest to write?

AM: Some poems do come quickly and relatively easily. Not often, and sometimes those that come rapidly end up being sort of crappy poems. But “Lot’s Wife” only underwent about 2-3 drafts and mainly arrived, haiku-like, as a visual image that carried with it some cultural freight.

Another poem that arrived rather miraculously is “River by River.” That was the result of a car trip to Indiana with my kids and is kind of a list poem. It spooled out as a result of a kind of inadvertent prompt. Will Greenway and Elton Glaser were looking for poems about Ohio for an anthology. I read the call for work, went back to my notebook about the car trip, and recalled an incident with my son and a roadmap. The editors chose it as the opening poem in the main text of the book—immediately following the preface poem by James Wright. I felt completely graced and humbled.

~

RF: How did you choose the title of the collection?

AM: Early on, while I was working on my graduate thesis project, I chose the title for the book. I’d written the title poem but hadn’t really thought of it as the title poem until I recognized how many of the poems dealt with drought or with bodies of water or rain or artworks that portrayed water. And spelling the second word as “rites” as in ritual, rather than as an other interesting aspect of water—the “rights” to water that have caused so much conflict over the centuries—seemed fitting given that there are also rites associated with death. Funerary rites, religious rites. And rites in the form of chants and dances people have done to invoke rain during times of drought. So there’s a pun there, rights and rites, and I love literary puns.

I wanted to use Steve Tobin’s sculpture as the cover art, and Steve granted the rights for that photo (more rights, legal rights) and Keith at Brick Road approved of the image for the book cover. So I am gratified by all of that. The sculpture is an early work of Tobin’s, when he was making art using surgical glass piping. It’s environmental, site-specific art that really looks like a splashing creek. But it isn’t—it is glass.

~

RF: Tell us about your publishing history and about how and if poetry publishing has changed over the years.

AM: I had my first poem published in a tiny literary journal back in the days of Xerox-ed micro-magazines, 1981 or 82. I’ve been publishing pretty regularly since then, regularly but not ambitiously. Lots of individual poems and essays in individual journals. I had no academic reason to get a book out, and I had no real direction either. It didn’t seem to be on my to-do list when I was in my twenties. Then, at 30, I had my children. Most of my creativity went in the parenting direction, though I continued to write. I didn’t really work toward book publication until about 1999. Then I began to think about it—after David Dunn had died. In fact, I got a chapbook and a full-length collection of his work out after his death. This is hard to do—to convince a publisher to put out a book posthumously. After all, the poet cannot promote his work. That’s hard on small publishers. But I succeeded. So I thought, I guess I can get my own books published. Maybe. And my first collection was a chapbook Spire press published right after I graduated from Goddard, 22 poems about building a house, sort of ecologically-invested nature-type poems.

Things have changed in the world of poetry publishing, but it is still hard to get your work into actual print—ebooks and POD self- or partially-self-published options, as well as the web and blogs, have changed the spirit of the poetry world only marginally, though I do think these options have made it possible for more people to read and encounter poetry. The absence of critical, discerning, well-read editors & proofreaders is a loss, in my opinion; but poetry is finding other ways to deal with that. And those editors are still out there. Underpaid and overworked and cranky, but out there nonetheless. MFA programs, perhaps. Critique groups have maybe replaced salons and absinthe cafes. I don’t know.

~

RF: Any advice for aspiring poets who want to get published?

AM: I’d advise aspiring poets to be ambitious. But there are many ways to be ambitious. I’m a bit of a plodder, but I hang in there. I’m not great at networking or schmoozing or even being sort of normally assertive—I’m quite shy with strangers and hate to ask even small favors…like asking an editor to consider publishing my work. Or asking people to host readings. I mean, that goes with the job, but it’s taken me a long time to get good at doing that. I hate that stuff lots more than I hate being rejected. I don’t take the rejections hard at all. My weaknesses lie in other areas. So I can say, if you want to get published, you might not want to do what I did…anyway, if you are eager to see print soon, you might want to be more assertive and organized. On the other hand, I have been self-promoting rather badly for thirty years; and I’m okay with that because the poems are better after thirty years even if my publicity skills are not.

I’m kind of outside the box as far as the “po-biz” goes. I do my job at the college, which is only marginally poetry-related, and then only when I am teaching a section of intro-to-poetry. (Mostly I teach remedial comp and tutor students in English; I like to remind myself that Kay Ryan has the same kind of job!). I attend conferences when I can get away and when I can afford them; I have taken seminars and workshops over the years, but not religiously or frequently. The “big thing” I did for my so-called career was to get an MFA from Goddard College in 2003. This was after I had won a PA Council on the Arts Fellowship—back when the council was giving those out. Please lobby your congress people for an increase in federal and state arts funding. That was so crucial for me, earning that grant. A great confidence-builder.

Since then, I’ve earned my MFA and have four chapbooks and this full-length collection coming out and a job in academia that I probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for my graduate studies and a certain amount of dogged persistence of a sort of quiet variety that I seem to possess in abundance. I still send out individual poems for publication in print and online, though not as often as I should if I were really eager to stay on the po-biz radar. I keep up a blog and a Facebook page for “promotional purposes” but don’t expect to see me on your Twitterfeed anytime soon. Technology takes me away from my reverie zone and is, generally, bad for my poetry. What’s good for my poetry are long walks, gardening, and genial loafing, visits to museums, viewing architecture and geological formations, long face-to-face chats with friends, and reading reading reading.

The quote that opens my book, the Rilke quote, kind of sums that up for me. It’s really the well-known garden that makes me recognize where the poems are coming from. The scenery of farewell, in this case, opened up the place this collection began, in loss and later in fullness.

Reading & discussion

Sunday, April 29th, at 2 p.m., I will be reading at Soft Machine Gallery in Allentown PA, at a special program hosted by the Lehigh Valley Arts Council. The event is described below:

Poetry: Getting the Word Out!

Location: Soft Machine Gallery, 15th & Green Sts., Allentown, PA

Arts Alive series event. Local poets will read selections from their new books and unravel the mystery of getting published. Hosted by LVAC director Randall Forte.

~
Ann E. Michael, author of the upcoming (June 1, 2012 release date) poetry collection Water-Rites and
Sørina Higgins, whose poetry collection Caduceus was released late last year.
Books available for sale. Refreshments provided. Sun 2 pm. Admission $10.

Reverie

“The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie.” ~Gaston Bachelard

I’m immersed in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie, which has a subtitle I adore:  “Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.” In the book’s first section, however, I felt myself a bit bogged down because the reverie of words (language) he describes deals with word gender. That works for French, and for most languages [or so I understand], but not for English.

Initially, then, I found myself wondering why I was reading the text. But I like Bachelard’s style, enthusiastic and looping and always replete with inquiry upon inquiry; and I love his dedication to and defense of poetry. Not all philosophers have been so kind to poetry.

As I was driving to work one morning, however, I found myself dwelling upon the above chapter about the reveries words can inspire. I fell into a recollection of myself as a very young child, the way I loved to peruse the dictionary. Even before I could read, the heavy tome with its onion-skin pages and glossy color plates of the flags of the world or of gemstones appealed to me as a room in which to become lost, a forest of leaves in which to cover myself or to lie upon, a river of language in which to be immersed. When I was older and a more capable reader, I browsed the examples, the multiple meanings and uses, the parts of speech and the etymologies of the words.

Ann E. Michael

Bachelard, I realized, is correct. The contemplation of words themselves leads to reverie, to thinking about thinking, to making dreamlike concatenations that chug through the consciousness and lead to imagination. His example involves contemplations and imaginings about the genders of words and how they suggest all kinds of interweavings and reactions, but noun gender need not be the motivating inspiration. For me, etymology accomplishes the same ends.

Contemporary adult life offers few chances for reverie. My commute to work is often the only time during the week when I can daydream a bit. My best opportunities for reverie are during a walk outside or while gardening, but I don’t get to do those things every day. I agree that reverie or daydream leads, very often, to poetry or to philosophical innovation or understanding; and Bachelard’s initial chapter on the rambling, amusing, aimless process of reverie makes me wish to go back to my childhood days of less responsibility and more imagination. Of course, that is impossible, but of course, that is part of what the philosopher intends (there is a later chapter on childhood reverie…I will be reading that pretty soon).

Boredom invites reverie. Who, in these busy times, with the many entertainments we carry in our pockets, is ever bored? So many of us, when bored, simply turn off the iPhone or the TV and sleep.

“It is a poor reverie which invites a nap.” ~Gaston Bachelard

My upcoming musings on this book will probably include garden reveries. Or memoir. Or etymology. Who can tell?

Haiku impressions

The reading Friday at Blind Willow Bookshop, a lovely used bookstore specializing in literature and unusual or rare books, combined the voices and perspectives of three poets who are exploring Japanese poetic forms.

Here’s a summation of my own remarks, though Marilyn Hazelton and Ann Burke had much to share. I’m not including the poems we read, either–Ann Burke’s haiga-like tanka poems coupled with art work or photos were lovely, though, and I wish I had files to post. Marilyn included work from the tanka journal she edits, red lights.

~

I learned about the haiku form long ago, but I can’t remember exactly when. I think it may have been during my junior high school years, though I certainly didn’t learn it in school—there was no poetry taught at my schools. I was exposed to poetry through other means: church, nursery rhymes, my own reading, relatives, song lyrics.

Initially I learned the syllabic approach, 5-7-5 syllables in English. That is the way the form was taught in the USA the 1970s. And it was clear to me early on that haiku is visual or physically-based; the imagery is sensual and real—in other words, what is in the world is in haiku, and vice versa. So it is not imaginative in the sense of fiction or dream. It engages the imagination in other ways, which means the poet has to corral quite a bit of compressed and specific imagination into a few words. The intense compression of these brief forms requires the poet to work hard at expression through the tightest possible means in language without employing what we in the Western traditions term symbolism. Classic Chinese poems often used symbolism, but Japanese poems relied more on allusions of several types (historical, poetic, seasonal). We tend to term these “symbols” (ie, cherry blossom equals spring romance) but that is not actually an accurate way to define the way concrete imagery is used in Japanese poems.

Later, after more study, I learned some details and contexts for the seasonal allusion, the references to previous poets or poems, the cutting word, the reasons haiku in English may need to be briefer than 17 syllables for maximum effect; and I found out about related forms of Japanese poetry such as haibun, renga, tanka. I met Marilyn Hazelton and learned through her, as she studied and taught the forms, in English, to other aspiring writers. Japanese poetry forms may seem to follow arbitrary rules, but that is no more true than asserting that western sonnet forms follow arbitrary rules.

My study of this poetry brought me a better understanding of the Imagist poets of the early 20th century in the sense of how they were influenced by, and how they misinterpreted, the haiku poem, crafting in the process some critically important poems for western readers. Poetry is a marvelously flexible art, elastic and willing to morph as its authors are willing to experiment. I think of much of my work as based in a ‘haiku moment’ for inspiration or image.

I will be the first to assert that haiku is not my métier, nor is tanka form. My poetry—and I’ve written a great deal of it—is generally more Western in style and tone, no surprise given my cultural and educational background. Yet haiku appealed to me immediately because, I think, of my interest in visual art and in the natural world.

~

My attraction to haiku is therefore image-based. My interest in Japanese poetry also increased after I studied Zen. The two are inter-related, also no surprise. In my notebooks, and on random pieces of paper I use to jot down ideas for poems, nine times out of ten the phrases I want to capture are physical images. Later, I may try to craft these jottings into a haiku. More often, they get employed as lines in other types of poems.

Sometimes, a poem I attempt to write as haiku becomes a tanka…or a longer poem in some other form (free verse, blank verse, etc.); in any case, the sensual first impression is usually what I first observe and note. My own interest in nature and my physical environment make haiku-type poetry sort of an inclination. So the inspirations and influences for me include Zen, visual art, physical or concrete imagery, nature and season, brief observation, compressed or concise language use, and a quality of universality in the poem.

~

For writers who have done Westerners the service of exploring, interpreting, and explicating haiku and the Zen practice that leads to the haiku moment, I suggest Jane Hirshfield, Robert Aitken, William Higginson, Penny Harter, Hasegawa Kai, Earl Miner, Richard Wright, Gary Snyder.

Another poetry event

To anyone living in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania, a reminder about my two upcoming readings–one this Friday (April 20, free, at Blind Willow Bookshop) and one on Sunday the 29th. The event on the 29th is a fundraiser for the Lehigh Valley Arts Council, so there is a $10 fee.

Details are on my Events page.

This weekend, after the bookshop event, I plan to post a recap here. Meanwhile, enjoy the blossoms of springtime.

azaleas by Ann E. Michael

redbud

photo: Ann E. Michael