Category Archives: Books

Perspective, again

My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”

“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”

Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.

Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com

It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.

That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.

And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.

~

Here’s an excerpt from James Wright’s poem “Sheep in the Rain.” [You can read the whole poem here.]

Sheep eat everything
All the way down to the roots
And maybe that is why
These explorers of the rain
Seem so relaxed in their browsing.
Someone has freed them only a little while
Into the fields, and they have a good life of it
While it lasts.

Poetry online

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Header image for Canary Literary Journal

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

While I hope there are legions of people who read poems online, I suppose readership of literary journals tends to be niche. I hereby encourage you to Google “online poetry journals” and browse a bit. Look at their archives. Google a new poet whose work you admired. Keep reading!

I love books, but certain aspects of the world wide web enable us to find art, music, writing, dance, and so forth that we might overlook otherwise. I’m reminded of how I used to (still do, actually) enjoy dictionaries and encyclopedias when those were the simplest, most accessible forms of compiled and aggregated information for the layperson. I’d open the tome to look something up, and then find something intriguing or distracting, and read about that, which would get me interested in finding out more about something else…or, I’d look for one bit of information and discover a background far more fascinating or that I was unaware of; yes, the old down-the-rabbit-hole effect has been around since long before we had Wikipedia and its ilk.

And that network of educating ourselves, of defining our terms, trying to satisfy our curiosity, questioning our assumptions–that goes far back into human history. The technology behind the technology is cerebral.



Re-reading, re-learning

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away. And I love her observations and the occasional aside that seems to break the fourth wall:

...Once a squirrel
dropped through the chimney into the whole
ruined civilization of the basement. Here,
I'm taking the squirrel's viewpoint.

That’s from “Small Hours.” How terrific is that–the ruined civilization of basements? And the little comment that suggests indeed, the squirrel has a viewpoint. This poem ends 8 or 9 lines later with the sense of “being swept up/and contained in my bed” but the image she chooses is that of a child on a bicycle, which (to this reader) evokes memory and those hours we find ourselves in the somewhere-else of sleep and remembrance. No statement. No whole-poem metaphor. How did she come to those closing lines? Why do they work so well?

I want to learn that.

~

Brian Turner’s book The Goodbye World Poem is another re-read and feels utterly appropriate for a time of personal losses and deep reflection. And thankfully, it’s also a reminder of joy. These poems were written after the deaths of Turner’s wife (poet Ilyse Kusnetz), his father, and his best friend–truly, how does one find the means to say anything at such times? Yet somehow, Turner produced a trilogy of poetry books: The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, all published in one year (2023). Exploring what grief feels like has a long history among poets, and Turner’s work reminds me, in topic, of such collections as Donald Hall’s books Without and The Painted Bed, among others; Turner’s poetry is quite different from Hall’s, but the pain of loss and the gratitude for memories of the loved one are similar. And his work differs a lot from Terranova’s.

What do I want to learn from Turner’s poems, what is it he can do in these works that I would like to learn how to do? I love that I learn things in his work, information about whales, jellyfish, swamps, science. His work is usually narrative, doesn’t pretend to be anything but personal and memoir-based. Use of the first-person in poems doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is the writer’s experience or even her own memory/story, but it’s difficult to imagine Turner’s poems as being a stand-in persona. The imagery may offer metaphor but sure feels like “I saw this, I observed that.” Real stuff. Real life. That can get old in poems–but Turner keeps these observations new. Again, there’s reflection in the work that takes us past the surface words, tries to get the reader to find a way in to this grief, this loss, this mix of human feelings.

I think what I like in this work is how Turner acknowledges and presents the mix of human emotions and the movement toward compassion for the sufferer, whether the person suffering is a dying loved one or one’s own distraught and agonized self, whether the sufferer is an animal or a place (environment, region, biosphere). His poem “Fallen Giants” just gets to me each time I read it. It can be read almost as non-fiction prose, though it is lineated–long lines–and uses rhythm and repetition carefully. But, in fact, the poet is describing what whale fall might be like as the huge carcass descends through the silent ocean. And knows that whales are intelligent and can grieve:

...They fall into a hunger they cannot imagine,
with the sound of loved ones in their ears, calling to them, sonorous
and mournful, the pathos undeniable, and mournful because called out
for love's sake, the fluid world a conduit for the voices of these giants,
who sound themselves across the globe, across generations, speaking
to their loved ones...

This poem closes with the image of whales’ huge lungs, how they hold their breaths until they ascend “to the surface/ with a terrific blast of exhalation, a kind of announcement to the universe/that they were here, on planet Earth, a presence in this world, alive.” Compassion for whales that feels like compassion for human beings, for the earth, for the universe. I want my poems to acknowledge and evoke compassion in readers, remind them that the world is complex, beautiful, though often sad. And that it is good to be alive in the world, if only for awhile.

~

From the late summer/early autumn garden, several beautiful reminders of what life on Earth can offer. I recognize very clearly that not everyone has the good fortune to have a life that gives them bright flowers and ripe tomatoes. So I will be grateful today.

Comfort in words

July was a tough month and August is busy, so I won’t be reading 31 poetry books for the Sealey Challenge this year. I have managed to read two lovely collections from Jacar Press, however, that will stay with me for awhile. And Kudos to Richard Krawiec for establishing Jacar and its fine catalogue of books.

When my Best Beloved saw the title of Tina Kelley‘s latest collection, he thought it was a sort of dictionary-field guide and was slightly disappointed that it is poetry. There’s nothing to disappoint in this collection, though, and it really is something of a field guide–it’s full of interesting words that describe what we didn’t know there were words for, and full of speculations about meaning and inquiries into etymology, and a few puns and other sorts of wordplay. Kelley has written more prose and journalism than poetry, but her poetry never overplays the cleverness of her thinking; the balance of thought-provoking and incisively intelligent observations in her work impressed me. It’s the kind of collection that makes you want to review some of the poems again after you’ve finished the book, to go back and see what you might have missed on the first read.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick‘s book Creature feels entirely different but also masterfully achieved. I enjoyed reading each poem twice, which slowed me down a bit but helped me to savor the subtle way she employs rhyme and alliteration, or verse forms, and varieties of said, into her work. What stands out most, however, is an abiding sense of compassion for the world and its beings. I felt very…embraced by these poems. True, too, that the middle of the collection contains beautiful pieces about her mother’s death, which right now hits close to home for me. In “The Bath,” Kirkpatrick writes:

I fall asleep, then startle in
the warm water, or groggy, lift

awake, away from full immersion
as when at night, the memories
come on, and I'm awash again

in grief, not your absence so much
as your going, the last laps of 
it, you making a clean start each

living day, up for it, the past
washed clear away...

...
Now that I never hear it, I
want to bathe in your voice.

~

I have found real comfort in the words of these poets and am grateful I happened to read them just now, when I’m not writing much and just kind of getting through each day with the garden and yoga and housekeeping and reading, though I will be going back to my hospice volunteering this week (I took a month off when my mother was dying). It is important to stay connected to the world and the creatures in it. Even those who are in the process of leaving it, like the patients in hospice, and the lightning bugs that are near the ends of their summer lives.

Imaginary travels

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey” and, in the poetry section, featured a whole shelf of versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey: different formats, translators, paperback, hardback, illustrated, limited-edition–quite a range! Our nephew’s at the age where paintball and nerf-gun battles, fantasy graphic novels, swords, guns, and fireworks interest him. He’s heard about The Odyssey and was curious about it. “Is that the one where all the gods get together and make more gods?” he asked. *

“No, it’s the one about the man who leaves on a ship at the end of a long war and can’t get home because the gods keep intervening and sometimes he makes questionable decisions,” I said. “It’s the one with the Cyclops.” He knew a little about the Cyclops. He wondered if it was too advanced reading for him. But he has been reading the Harry Potter books on his own, so he is used to unusual names and words for things and persistent enough to keep on with a long book. I said he could probably get through it, though he might need a dictionary sometimes. We chatted a bit there in the store, with me telling him about how old the poem is (and it is a poem, I said, though some translations are written in prose) and how it was told out loud for many years but written down into books (and you know, of course, what books were like back then? “On, like, scrolls, right?”). Twenty-four books!

We looked at the various books…some in prose, some in poetry, some in prose but broken up into lines like poetry for academic reasons, some with footnotes. The proprietor was eavesdropping, amused, I think; he leaned over to show us a copy that had Greek on one page with the English verso, so that my nephew could see what the Greek looked like. He thought it was pretty cool. He chose a modestly-priced copy in flex-cover (see above left) because he liked reading the excerpts on the cover and because this one–the Butler translation from 1900–was written in prose. He thought he would find that more familiar, like reading a novel or a history. I said it might seem a little old-fashioned in style, but he’d probably be fine with it. “Old-fashioned like Shakespeare, or old-fashioned like ‘The Turn of the Screw’?” he asked. Precocious little fellow, no? More like Henry James than Shakespeare, I assured him. So he went home with a new book thousands of years old.

* If you happen to know which book is about the gods getting together to make more gods, let me know! 😄

~

The journeying trope is so ancient and always seems relevant. It must be we are nomads right through our genetic inheritance to the earliest human days. That reminds me of this poem, which is imagined but foretells a trip my siblings and I have a duty to make, probably in the coming spring. Now that both of our parents have died, we’ve promised to make this final journey with them.

~~~
Driving to Northeastern Indiana with Our Parents’ Ashes

I’m lazy, worn flat by August’s heat haze 
with a feeling of impending grief, unable to sleep, 
and I find myself imagining a last road trip 
with my sister and brother, carrying our parents’ ashes 
to a Midwestern graveyard.
My sister will compulsively update 
our calculated arrival time and our brother, 
who appreciates geography, will remind us
how many rivers we’re crossing, how many wetlands lost.
There will be a few remaining barns painted 
with Mail Pouch Tobacco logos, but will we pass
Sinclair stations, cows pastured beside the highway? 
More likely the rabble of off-ramps with their 
abundant franchises, gasoline $3.29 a gallon. 
It’s easy to imagine us driving I76 west, 
Sheetz, Stuckey’s, McDonald’s, as we pass Akron, 
Lima, Van Wert, our parents nestled together 
in boxes beside the luggage. 
I think of them shifting quietly there.
They’ve only briefly been apart, and it is time now 
to intermingle them again, at their request, 
which is why the three of us, in my imagination, 
traverse the backroads of our shared childhood, 
cross the new bridge and pass our grandmother’s 
old house on the riverbank. 
We’ll head for the municipal cemetery, 
singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain”
at the tops of our lungs, as the five of us
used to do, laughing until we cry.


~

photo by Joshua Buckmaster

Workshops

Ah, summer. Historically, not the best season for writing as far as I am concerned. The garden, yard, and outdoor activities tend to take precedence over sitting with a notebook or in front of a screen. Sending out or revising work gets shunted to rainy days, or to days so blisteringly hot and humid that I’m forced to stay indoors with the dreaded air conditioner going. So it is a bit out of the ordinary that I have participated in not one but two online poetry workshops this June. And they were worthwhile.

First was a workshop sponsored by One Art online magazine (Mark Danowsky and Louisa Schnaithmann, editors) in which Erin Murphy read, defined, and gave examples of demi-sonnets, a form of her own invention. She discussed using the form and offered suggestions for revising poems using the demi-sonnet; she had us writing to a prompt and revising one of our longer drafts to “fit” into a 7-line stanza–an excellent practice for learning to be more concise. The practice is fun and was useful to me. I had already tried my hand at demi-sonnets and at 7-line poems, but using the process and form for revision was enlightening. Readers, you must check out her work! She has published lots of poetry collections.

~

Later in the month, Lesley Wheeler‘s “Poetry from the Underworld” was a 3-hour online workshop sponsored by Sara Ann Winn of Poet Camp. I’ve been a fan of Lesley’s work (and of Lesley herself) for some time now, and thus jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop with her. Wheeler had us explore the variety of ways we can consider the Underworld and write about it, or use the concept as a starting or ending point (or metaphor) for our work. Think about it: Hell, Persephone, Inanna, spelunking, oceans, tunnels, subways, archaeology, burrows, mycorrhiza, drilling, depressive episodes, digging, death, Sigmund Freud, the unconscious. Yes, the possibilities are nearly endless for poets.

She then covered quite a few revision process options and let us hear how her poem “Sex Talk” developed; a moving, personal, and craft-based discussion that all of us learned from, I think. Kudos and gratitude.

Writers, or at least I, need interaction with others who understand the purpose of and necessity for feedback, fresh ideas, process notes, and further learning about the complicated work we try to do. When in-person meetings are not easily available, I’m grateful that there are people like Mark and Louisa and Sara Ann who are willing to make the effort to create online, virtual spaces for workshops and critique groups–meeting places for introverts and quasi-hermits and gardeners and older folks or people with disabilities who cannot easily get out much. I know how much coordinating and planning and PR is involved, and I send love out to all of the humans who are willing to do this job. I might also add that both of these workshops were “very modestly priced.” Not free–teachers and facilitators need to be paid for their work. That’s important. But not out-of-reach for those who haven’t got lots of extra spending money. It’s a challenging balancing act. Thank heaven for people who care about the arts.

<3

Not a luxury

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes:

“…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies…without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.” [Salman Rushdie]

There are others who’ve said this. I think immediately of Audre Lorde: “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.”

What makes a person really a writer, really an artist, is–in my mind–this quality of necessity. And of the right to exist, regardless of whether the nation, state, government, religion, or other ideology suggests that one ought to shut up. For many years, I questioned whether I was, or would ever be, “really a writer.” Now, I feel that I am. Regardless of what the academy, the current aesthetic, the powers that be might say. There’s a deep contentment that accompanies this feeling: somehow or other, I got here; it has little to do with publication or public acknowledgment, and even less to do with remuneration.

Maybe it’s age. (Crone wisdom, anyone?) So, for any of my readers who are younger people, by which I mean under 55, who feel like impostors or dilettantes or who question whether they deserve the title of “a serious writer,” I’m going to suggest that you keep writing and endure. And maybe stop asking yourself so many questions about your worth. You don’t have to be famous or acknowledged to be a writer, you just have to be dedicated to writing and to learning about writing. There’s value even in that, in looking hard at the “rock experiences” of your daily life and endeavoring to make something of those experiences. Stay curious, stay unorthodox.

A recent anecdote to illustrate: For a few years now, I have been revising and revising a challenging poem that says something that is important to me, even though the idea came from someone else. I finally realized it would have to be a persona poem and would need to use the person’s actual words as a starting point. It’s a poem about a major breach of faith, a sad piece that questions orthodoxy in a significant way, in a way that is braver than I would be able to do myself. Once I finally got the poem to work, I had no idea who would want to publish it. (My Best Beloved found this poem “troubling,” which is a reaction I’m happy with because it should be troubling to readers, that was the point.) And then I saw a call from a journal I have admired and read online for quite awhile…looking for thorny pieces on this sort of topic. Working with the unorthodox isn’t easy.

Anyway? The poem’s been accepted. I’m thrilled! I’m a writer!

(The poem is here. Scroll down quite a bit or, better yet, read the work in this issue of Persimmon Tree!)

Ghost metaphors

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

~

An aside: I just read a curated selection of Ursula Le Guin’s blog posts, No Time to Spare, written mostly between 2010 and 2015. I find her clear-eyed and curious view of being “really old” pragmatic and refreshing…something to emulate, should I live so long. And her continuing interest in reading and writing and thinking about the world–I definitely want to emulate that approach!

And now, back to the garden. We got some rain–hooray–but it made the weeds as happy as it made the tomatoes.

Rainy-day reading

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Whenever I read poetry, if I enjoy the work, I try to learn what the poet is doing that makes me like it. Sometimes it’s the perspective on a topic that surprises me, sometimes it’s the way the poet handles language or forms. Some writers have memorable phrasing or startling imagery, and some poets lift a lot of emotional weight with incredibly spare, condensed, or common words. Which is kind of amazing. Writers like Rebecca Elson, Martha Silano, and Tracy K. Smith create art out of physics and astronomy so that science enhances expression in new ways, or at any rate ways that are new to me. Tyehimba Jess’ Olio rocked my world with the possibilities of nonce forms, shape poems, historical narratives, and the ongoing tragedies oppression and racism have perpetrated.

I’ve always loved pondering and thinking (as a child, I was often accused of daydreaming but it isn’t the same), and poetry moves me into that happy space. Being curled up with a cat doesn’t hurt, either.

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Learning & yearning

photo from ebay, asking $199.00…

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts.

Though I can’t clearly remember the “how,” I can say my topics and perhaps instincts and inspirations have definitely changed as the decades accrue. I wrote fewer poems during the years I was raising very young children, for obvious reasons, and my main topic at the time was mothering. The poems tended to be short. Mothering did affect my approach to poetry: brevity and swift sketches of imagery were all I had time for. It was necessary to be more concise compared to my earlier narrative lyricism fused with imagism and surrealism. As the children got older, I started reading a bit more widely into less-contemporary poetry and attempted a few formal approaches, such as sonnets, blank verse quatrains, and haiku. I wasn’t terribly good at it and needed some instruction, so I started attending short workshops when I could arrange childcare. The West Chester Poetry programs were helpful to me in the mid-90s and piqued my interest in going back to college for my MFA.

My advisors at Goddard observed that no matter my topic or method, environmental/natural images populated my work. I’d known this was the case but wasn’t aware of how prevalent the garden, fields, animals, and woods were…basically, always present. Even in some pieces I wrote when I was 19 and living in a city, there are sparrows and pigeons, dogwoods blossoming, spring rain. Some things don’t change.

~

Other aspects of the writing life morph, however, as circumstances alter and we get older and more experienced in dealing with said circumstances. Mothering continues even though the children have grown up–I still love and miss my kids, think of them often, and worry now and then, not that they need anyone to worry about them. I’m much smarter about how to grow things in the garden as well as more knowledgeable about the flora, fauna, and weather in my region. I’ve read reams of poems by excellent writers, studied what they do and how they do it, and felt excited by new work. I don’t miss being young, though I miss the stronger physical self I once took for granted. These experiences change the topics and the emotive aspects of what I write, I suppose.

It’s hard to explain what that means, though, so here’s an example. I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me.

Later, when I actually loved a person who lived further from me that either of us liked, I’d listen to Mary Black, who was then with Planxty, as she sang the plaintive and beautiful tune “I Live Not Where I Love.” The ballad seemed accurate. Ah, young love.

The point of all this (and no, I haven’t been concise, sorry), is that while I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

[[]] ~ [[]] Here’s a poem of mine that appeared 44 years ago in Painted Bride Quarterly #20. (Autumn 1983). I can see some structural things I would revise if I were writing this now. But let it stand as is:

House with a Red Roof

The house with the red roof makes a beacon
in the hills. We watch it constantly; it 
tricks our eyes.

The storm is bold behind it, an unsettled
feud of red and blue; heaven has its slate-
colored roof, its Chinese fire. It mounts 
hills, and before it, the house stands out,
a ruby in a charm.

The roof gems back summer sun, red hot, ablaze
and searing white siding: when we look away,
a yellow house with purple about it blurs our vision.

Autumn, red roof flanked by trees which hold
their color against it, slanting westward,
northward, ever lower.

A shadow bends the hill. The red roof hangs
on winter sky, the only bright for miles.
~
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