Category Archives: Books

Back to the garden

Late spring weather, mild and pleasant; lettuce and spinach ready and quite tasty, strawberries, asparagus–all the early harvest, with mulberries ripening on the trees and tomatoes starting to blossom. I have weeding to do, and it’s a task I don’t mind when the weather cooperates. Later on in summer, when the days get humid, hot, and blazing–then I am no fan of weeding. But on perfect days in early June, weeding is one of those mindless puttering tasks I can attend to while half-daydreaming.

I’m thinking about task-oriented work and creative work as opposed to wage-based work thanks to Jenny Odell’s second book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock. Weeding’s one of those forms of work one does when it is necessary–the time it takes, and the best time to do it, don’t conform to clock schedules but to environmental ‘schedules,’ which vary. Too rainy? I don’t weed. After the soil has dried a bit and the weeds are sprouting like crazy? Time to weed. Too dry and hot? Not time to weed. Yet if I were a wage-paid groundskeeper and my boss said, “Get weeding today, $14 an hour, don’t waste your time,” I would have to weed, to look busy, to keep busy. Even though it might be a poor time to accomplish that particular task.

I’m no longer on the clock, at least in terms of wage-earning, but that socially-ingrained urge to keep busy and accomplish things and meet deadlines? That’s hard to move away from. Ill with covid, I kept complaining to myself that I wasn’t accomplishing anything. By which I guess I meant housekeeping, gardening, laundry, cooking, submitting work to journals, making plans for summer events, visiting my mother, taking walks, going to the gym…but really, it’s rather strange to think of such things as accomplishments. They’re not even work, per se, just tasks. They don’t have time constraints; doing them only becomes necessary when I run out of clean clothes, or need to eat or harvest spinach before it bolts.

Odell later addresses the sort of care-giving work that can’t really be broken into wage-based tasks, though industries do try that. Nurturing children, caring for livestock, being a teacher, social worker, farmer, artist: sure, some people do wage-work for these jobs, but hourly accountability doesn’t suit such work well, tends to distort the varying needs of the moment and the fallow or less-busy times that are just as crucial to accomplishing “good work” as the more rushed times are.

An artist needs down time. So does a Certified Nursing Assistant. So do farmers and teachers. And parents!

…and gardeners. We have all winter to do less and plan more, and then we have to respond to the weather and the circumstances around us as the circumstances require. Warming trends from climate change, floods or droughts, invasive beetles, viruses, weeds. What cannot be changed must be adapted to; didn’t we learn that from Darwin? If I have a job, as far as the garden goes, it is learning to balance things so that my effects on the earth are sustainable, harming the earth’s balance as little as possible–providing for pollinators and birds and amphibians, and also for my family.

It’s a difficult task and not clock-measurable, but more rewarding than most jobs are.

~

Because I like this song, and Mitchell’s lines about being billion-year-old carbon and getting ourselves back to the garden, here she is:

~

Depth perception

In second grade, I could not see the blackboard from my desk. My teacher noticed; I went to the optometrist, and thereafter began my worsening nearsightedness. New specs annually for many years, broken frames, ugly frames, though–unlike many of my friends–I never lost my glasses because I could not see at all without them. Somewhere along the way, astigmatism kicked in. In high school, I blamed my ineptness at any sport involving a ball on my astigmatism (contact lenses corrected my nearsightedness but weren’t as effective on the misshapen cornea). But my ineptness was largely due to lack of interest in sports.

And now, encroaching cataract formations mean that I’m getting surgical procedures for the removal of those thickened “cascades” that make it hard to drive at night, read street signs, or discern a cat from a fox in the back meadow. I had my left eye operated on this past week, with the insertion of a medium-length lens that gives me 20/40 vision in that eye: a miracle to me after so many years of blur. I have to wait two weeks before the surgeon does the right eye, and in the meantime I’m discovering the true challenges of poor depth perception. My brain hasn’t adjusted to the changes in my eye, and simple things like walking downstairs or pouring tea into a cup pose unexpected difficulties.

Topping things off, I’ve contracted covid for the first time ever. So I am being extra careful as I walk through my house and into my yard–taking a fall due to bad depth perception would be one more problem I just don’t need.

the “perfect tree” as seen from the Joya cortija
the holm oak closer, near dusk
…and from down the hill, in sun

So I have been considering vision lately, and what it means to perceive, to have differences in perspective, focus, framing. Or different cultural and social “lenses,” as we refer to them when we are teaching students to write compositions in college. It is as easy to trip oneself up metaphorically as physically if one pays no attention to such perceptions.

Today, I feel to ill to spend much time pondering. But I have enjoyed looking at the photos–taken from different vantage points and times of day–of the lovely tree on the other side of the riverbed from Joya. Very healing, as trees can be.

Many amazements

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Good w/words

I hear it often from people: “You’re a writer, you’re good with words.”

What I’m reflecting on while in a space where I have the time to reflect is that maybe, some writers are those folks who are not by nature “good with words.” Words, we may have, yes! We love words, love to read, love books, love poetry, love language. But that doesn’t mean that words come easily. We may have to work for and with them, rearrange and revise, check meanings and spellings, consider etymology and new ways of using words.

It may be we wrestle with them and, like Jacob with the Angel, find the process causes injury as well as revelation.

A study by Marc Chagall for his Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, ca, 1963

Writing may be a cat that follows us home when we really have nothing to feed it and our apartment building doesn’t allow cats, but there it is: needy and appealing, sitting on our doorstep.

For many writers, words are hard. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “Oh to be silent! Oh, to be a painter!” Some writers might prefer to be making a non-wordy art. Less energy to expend on how to say.

I know I can speak for a few writers when I state that, at least sometimes, words can be easier to write than to speak. If I’m chatting to somebody about my family or the garden or my opinions about online learning management systems (LMSs), I don’t usually have trouble with words. Those concepts stay within the familiar and the easy-to-express, even among people I barely know. In such conversations, I can be lively, make jokes, have opinions, and tell stories. This is social speech of a casual sort, even when the subjects are often close to my heart (well, not LMSs…).

But many things that are either more philosophical or more deeply reflective, even intimate, evade me when I try to say them in conversation. Questions I have, I may fear to ask. Describing a feeling, sensation, or emergent idea can be so difficult I decide just to stay quiet, listen to what I can glean from others. If my fellow conversationalists are patient and sympathetic and stay with me through more abstract, emotional, or artistic/philosophical topics, I will still find myself losing the thread of my sentences and tapering off into gesture. Gesture covers (badly) what I can’t seem to put into words. Even though I am supposedly good with words.

Later, I may endeavor to express in writing what I wanted to say when I resorted to silence. Writing is not the heat of the moment–there can be revisions, honing of concepts, maybe some research to cover the various vague lacunae during which I’d previously resorted to shrugging. Shall we say: clarification of thought through better words in a better order.* I may never learn to be adept at succinct intellectual conversation, but I can eventually get to compression of language for effect in a written text.

That would be enough. Or maybe it’s as David Kirby writes in his poem “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”— “Writing isn’t hard./You just have to be patient. You just have to get/everything right.”

~

*Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s definition of poetry: best words in the best order.

Close of the cruelest month

Full moon began the week as April reaches its closing days–when the redbuds and ornamental cherries are at their peak and the apple trees bloom. Soon the lilacs will open, and oak catkins will send chartreuse pollen all over the deck. Then there will be peonies and irises. I love the first weeks of May but this year will be missing some of those days. I’ll be traveling.

Because I have to prepare for my trip, attend a friend’s memorial, and prep the garden for my absence, this is my last post for National Poetry Month. I’ve chosen a poem from my book Water-Rites, a quiet poem that has always felt near to my heart. Maybe because I romanticize childhood, who knows. At any rate, I hope your poetry month was beautiful and that you continue to read and enjoy poetry. Thanks for reading mine this month.

~

On Having Lost the Confidence of Birds

Once, I was very small,
prone to long silences
and spells of aimless drifting
in the world's embrace,
staring at ants in their
grainy colonies, patterns
of activity, the slender
waists and legs,
frantic antennae waving
at me so I seemed,
for an hour, large.
Once, I could skip and sing
until dinner time, but chose
to lie front down among
dandelions, decided to watch
the skip and sing of bees,
their several kinds inducing me
to wonder about categories--
What Will or Will Not Sting--
and marvel at the dark swift birds
that lived in the martin house
and found bees edible.
In those long days I was
no threat, a quiet object
natural in the grass and breathing
at the meadow's pace.
I had not lost, yet,
the birds' confidence
nor learned how not to trust
my own body
in the world's embrace.
~

Grieving

I composed this poem during the pandemic not too long after my father died. It’s interesting how one responds to grief. The grieving man in this poem is not my dad; he died, I think, without too much weighing him down. He may have intended to live longer, but he was ready enough. I don’t think he had many regrets, and I know he felt loved.

And the grieving man is not my brother, though it could have been–he had a dog that was a great comfort to him while he mourned our dad, but I don’t think he was as gobsmacked with sorrow the way the person in this poem is; Dad’s death was not a surprise to us. The man in this poem isn’t symbolic, however, much as he may be a creature of my imagination. As the writer of this poem, I sense him as someone quite specific, whose loss was deep and perhaps unexpected–maybe a person whose loved one died from covid-19. A person who, like all of us, needs comfort and compassion; and I suppose this poem implies that the grieving man has someone, perhaps an adult child, who willingly extends that compassion in return: “lean your head/against his shoulder as you used to do/when you were small and aggrieved by/the world’s unfairness, and he sheltered you.”

A year or so later, I returned to the poem to do some revisions. Sheila-Na-Gig published it online and, much to my surprise, nominated it for a 2023 Pushcart Prize (a long shot, but an honor to be nominated). It’s my intention to include it in my next manuscript–the one I am working on now. I’m not holding my breath about when the next collection gets published; could be years. But I decided that this would be the poem to read for the Berks Bards 2024 poem-a-day project on BCTV this April. The link to my reading of this poem is here.

~

Grieving Man

Let him into your house, the grieving man,
blind, nearly, and so frail with sorrows
he cannot hear your comforting words
or move himself from room to room
without assistance. Give him
a careful bed, a friendly dog, a view
of mountains. Let yourselves open yourselves
to what he can give, hampered by limitations:
yours and his.

In a time of no touching, take his hand
in yours. In a time of isolation, lean your head
against his shoulder as you used to do 
when you were small and aggrieved by
the world’s unfairness, and he sheltered you.
We turn about and find the unfamiliar.
When did he become the grieving man
and you sorrowful, in pain yourself, aghast
at the supermarket, the oil bill,
the nation?

He savors the soup you’ve made
and strokes the dog’s snow-dampened fur.
He asks whether the juncos still hop
on frost’s thin crust or if winter has
moved on north, a swath of crocuses
blooming in its wake. You rally your resources,
endeavor to describe the current moment
blind as you are and sorrowful, spreading seed
for the sparrows.

~


Photo by Alexey Demidov on Pexels.com

Headlines

Headlines. They make us so worried, so anxious, so scared. That was true when I was a child, in 1968; it’s true today. The poem below, which appears in Abundance/Diminishment, is one I wrote eight years ago. It remains relevant. And it is an April poem.

~

At a Birdfeeder

Woodpecker works at sunflower seeds
intent on his hunger
deaf to blackbirds’ territorial ambitions,
wooing robins, chickadee’s agitated perch & dip
at feeder’s edge.
Woodpecker makes of his head
a bright gimlet, his claws anchored on an eyebolt.

I watch a redwing drift
on the last morning breeze of April,
a spider’s line trimming the porch rail.
Woodpecker revels in the easy meal
we’ve provided, doesn’t know
about the sack of seed in our garage,
the price of bulk feed, acres of sunflowers
blooming in Iowa, Kansas, Mexico
chaff at the processing plants
allusions to van Gogh, pollen-packed bees
in their yellow jodhpurs.

That’s human knowledge: mine, 
yet I’d rather dwell on turkey calls
vibrating the nearby woods, the labor
of wild cherry petals landing on dew,
grass, and feeder where the woodpecker—
still famished—writes the morning news
in bold headlines amid hickories,
that being all the news that matters
in this moment.

~

Interview & discussion

This TV interview was interesting to participate in, and I loved chatting with Marilyn Klimcho! She put me at ease, which is hard to do in front of cameras. I have watched the whole 20 minutes without hating myself or feeling too embarrassed. (Hooray?)

Is the show entertaining? Well…you have to be interested in poetry and poets, I suppose. Feel free to check it out. The link above should take you to the YouTube video.

~

National Poetry Month does, it turns out, raise the public’s awareness of poetry at least a little. Recently, I was invited to be a guest at a weekly online discussion of poetry and spirituality. The participants had been reading and discussing my poem “Deity’s Diary” and asked me whether I’d be available to read the poem and then discuss it with the group members at one of their meetings. They even sent me recordings of previous meetings’ discussions. I find it fascinating to learn how readers interpret my poems, what they get out of the work; so of course I obliged.

The group members asked intriguing, intelligent questions–clearly, they are accustomed to talking about poetry. That was refreshing, and it kept me on my toes. I learned that my poem (which is in four parts, so maybe it is poems) is doing the work I hoped it would do, at least with this group of careful and reflective readers. “Deity’s Diary” is intentionally paradoxical and questions many of western culture’s received ideas about god. It’s also pretty presumptuous, since I chose to write it in the persona of a deity…but, like all poems, it is decidedly a work of the imagination. (No, I do not consider myself a god!)

The discussion ranged from philosophical, scientific, and theological concerns to the nuts and bolts of writing and revising a poem, where I get my ideas, what the major influences on my work have been, and lots of other topics. Seldom do we lesser-known writers get to hear back from readers, especially in such detail–so this event felt like a real treat to me.

One participant said that reading these poems was like walking through an unfamiliar forest, not on a straight path, with possibilities of obstacles and turns in the track and the surprise of wildflowers, mosses, or lovely birds along the way.

That made my day.

Au revoir, institution

It was not a huge surprise–the proverbial writing has been on the metaphorical wall for some time–but the college I attended for graduate studies has announced that it is folding.

In January 2001, shortly after I won a grant in poetry from the PA Council on the Arts, I rallied myself and my work, packed a bag, and took the family car by myself to Vermont for two weeks. In a burst of confidence and enthusiasm post-grant, I’d applied to creative writing graduate programs. There were none nearby enough to commute to, and Goddard’s low-residency model seemed my only choice. Well, I could have abandoned my husband and young children and moved to another area, but that seemed untenable and unkind.

But Goddard was perfect. I met new people and made (so far) lifelong friends-in-writing and friends-in-feeling. The work challenged me; the reading was intense! When I look at the bibliography at the back of my thesis, I admit I wonder how I managed. Hard work, intellectually demanding work, constant revision. Well, I needed less sleep in those days. Many times I read and annotated while waiting for my kids while they took piano lessons or riding lessons or whatever they were doing in middle school.

Sometimes my parents or spouse spent a Saturday or Sunday with the children so Mama could study and write. It is kind of a blur, but the community of fellow students seemed so supportive at the time. It’s not that I was without supportive people in my life–but the folks at Goddard, students and faculty, deeply understood my passion for writing. I found I could spend hours talking about things that matter to writers (which is kind of everything, but also, WRITING), which wasn’t easy to do in other areas of my middle-aged, middle-class, mom-life existence.

The iconic Goddard College Clocktower

Goddard often has been termed an “experimental” college. That term covers a whole host of meanings in the world of education. No point in trying to define it, since one thing that experimental institutions tend to do is change and evolve. The program I attended in 2000-2003 differed from the programs of 1985 or 2015. Which is as it should be–education should not be a static set of activities even when some exploration of canonical texts is necessary. One reason I chose to pursue my education at experimental colleges (The New School, Thomas Jefferson College, Goddard) is that I am a slightly odd bird, an autodidact who did well enough in standard subjects but who got the most benefit from deep study of things I felt passionate about–literature, history, botany, poems, dance, philosophy, feminism, visual art. Experimental colleges offered mentors who could guide me in self-directed learning, recommend books and authors, feed my often-changing interests, offer personal, one-to-one advising and critique. I am 100% sure I would not have excelled in universities that followed more standard educational subjects and protocols, and I’m glad I received good guidance (usually) and a well-rounded, if eclectic, education.

Many of the poems in my book Water-Rites are from my time at Goddard, since Water-Rites in an earlier form was part of my graduate thesis. And a fair number of the poems in The Red Queen Hypothesis were first drafted during my years there, when I was experimenting with forms. So, having just learned for certain that Goddard will cease to function as an offbeat, transformative, self-directed institution of higher education–thus joining my undergraduate school, Thomas Jefferson College of Michigan, as defunct institutions–I will post a poem that I know for certain I drafted just before I graduated. It’s a response to the events of 9/11 and was not quite ready, nor suited, for inclusion in my first collection; it appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems.

~

Shreds
	 for Judith

We ran, leaves before a bitter wind,
& some ran headlong & some in circles,
we did not know what to do with ourselves,

& watched, pressed to our windows & could
do nothing: streets erupted with people
like clustered beetles wakened from dormancy.

We walked, in all directions but mostly north,
& we were silent and our mouths were dry.
Things like shoes and hats made us human.

We wept and it was not sufficient,
& swept, then, for months & recalled
mostly paper, the ways we occupy ourselves,
the mild wind carrying what lingered. Scraps.


                   (after “Exhibit 13,” Blue Man Group, 2002)


~

Toad night

Because April is National Poetry Month, here’s an April poem from my latest book:

~

Toad Night

Soft rain, or
humid fog—mild
and after sundown

when the driveway’s
puddled or
the blacktop’s slick
they emerge.

It must be warm
enough to stir
their dormant
blood, speed
the small hearts &
waken senses in
the porous skin.
In the headlights

they can be
mistaken for
last year’s leaves

tumbling over road
but there is
no breeze.
Their eyes gleam.

Give them time. 

You do not need
to rush tonight

with the small
beings of the world
awakening
around you.