Category Archives: Philosophy

Play’s the thing

My freshman humanities professor, the brilliant, late Larry Fuchsberg, assigned Johan Huizinga‘s The Waning of the Middle Ages as one of the texts for our course…an unusual choice for American teens in 1975, as was another of our books, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. At 17, I found Burckhardt rather slow going stylistically (it was published in 1860, after all); by comparison, Huizinga (circa 1919) was refreshingly clear. I really enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I kept meaning to read his 1938 book Homo Ludens, but for awhile it was difficult to find in libraries or bookstores. Also, I lacked the time to track it down or read it. The premise interested me, though–that we humans evolved our culture from the “pointless, imaginative” urge to play, and that play is fundamental to our learning and our social structures. Also, we are not mechanical beings–the messy frolicsome-ness of people is as necessary for our survival as food, water, and shelter.

“Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.” 

Finally, I’ve begun to read Homo Ludens, and it’s even on Amazon now; also I discovered that it exists online here thanks to Yale University. Fifty years after my initial encounter with the author, I find his thinking just as interesting as I did in college, and just as difficult. As in his other books, Huizinga uses etymology as one of his methods of examining the meaning and culture of play. He was writing for an audience that he assumed was well-educated in the classics, so there are passages in Greek, Latin, and French that neither he nor the English translator bothers to translate for less linguistically-adept readers like me. Fortunately, such passages are brief and are used as sources for his argument, and I’m not reading to find fault with his material. I’m interested in his argument and insights as a whole, and intrigued by his thinking. He apologizes for his lack of sources (ha! There are hundreds of them) because he was “working in haste.” He composed this book in the Netherlands as Germany began to be a serious threat to Europe, and he wanted to get his ideas in print before he was silenced. In fact, his last few years were difficult. He had used his standing as a well-known cultural historian to criticize the Nazis and was arrested in 1942, basically house arrest; he died in 1945 just before the war was over.

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

I thank Larry Fuchsberg, musicologist, book-lover, and educator, for introducing me to Johan H. Teachers, you never know how much you may have influenced a student’s life, even decades later.

Points of view

I ran across something online that made me shudder–and it wasn’t politics or global tragedies but something sillier and more personal. Apparently there was a trend a decade ago of adults reading their adolescent diaries, aloud, in public (see “Mortified”). Ugh. The few times I have been tempted to read any of my old diaries or journals, I’ve stopped after a few sentences. Shuddering. This is less likely to happen with journal entries I wrote in my 30s or later; at least I hear my younger adult self in those words. But hearing the adolescent me, or the young woman of college age? No, thank you. I embarrass too easily.

Yet I found I was thinking today of this passage of Proust’s, which he gives to the character of the artist Elstir:

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous and unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded…We do not receive wisdom, we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through a wilderness no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

There’s some comfort in that. I would not call myself wise, but I’m definitely wiser than I was at 15 or 21. I suppose I’m still sometimes “fatuous and unwholesome” (whatever Elstir meant by that), awkward in society, and mistaken in some of my intuitions. But I have discovered myself for myself, with all the pain, sorrow, embarrassment, and joys that such discovery requires, and have developed my own point of view. In addition, I’ve learned that each person holds their own point of view. We don’t all think alike or in concert and may never fully understand one another. That makes the world contentious, yes. And interesting.

Reading Old Diaries

When I wrote about the city
it was as though I knew
I didn’t belong there,
would not thrive—as though
I wouldn’t stay long
and so pressed each line
on page urgently, camera
shutter clicks, each image
framed in fractioned seconds
as people jaywalked and
side-walked, as pigeons
or sparrows alighted to peck
at civilization’s least crumbs,
as young men lovely and
unattainable grew ill, as city
failed to succor any of us,
as my ambition floundered.
Years back. So that what
I recall is what I photographed
or wrote, however inconsistent.
Naively urbane, the city 
my youth inhabits lies brittle
in the pages. The past undoes
itself at last. Or I do.

~~
I'm embarrassed to note that I've forgotten where this poem was published. My files are elsewhere at the moment. I'll update if I remember... *It appeared in Loch Raven Review!

Illusions, connections

Reading Proust again returned me to some of my own past reflections on memory and self, the capital-S Self. A decade or so ago I spent considerable time reading in philosophy, physics, and neuroscience in an endeavor to get a grip on human consciousness and, perhaps, behavior. I posted about some of these texts on this here blog, in between writing about poetry, the garden, and my teaching job. Recent coincidences of reading returned me to this topic, “the hard problem of consciousness,” and made me consider how our embodied selves/minds/awareness: use shortcuts to manage the overwhelming inputs of our environments; define who we are using subjective if physically-based perceptions; and fail to see the obvious because of habituation and the apparent need to confirm what we believe we know. Illusions! The Vedic concept of Māyā, Plato’s Theory of Forms…propaganda, Penn & Teller, quantum physics, complexity theory, Marcel Proust, complementarity. I have a lot on my mind.

If it IS on (or in) “my” “mind.” For there’s even some question about that, as proposed by Neil Theise in his book Notes on Complexity. Just as light can be a wave or a particle, depending upon perspective and viewer (see: complementarity), it’s possible that our minds or selves can be individual and separate but also connected and boundary-less. The subtitle of this text is what appealed to me: “A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being;” so far, I’m enjoying it and finding inspiration.

It’s needed, inspiration. Despite a few plunges into new drafts (see here), I have not been writing much for at least two months, and I miss it. The ideas from physics and neuroscience that intrigue me include potential metaphors and terms such as quenched disorder, endosymbiosis theory, and holarchy. These–along with the hard problem of consciousness–all have some relationship to complexity theory, and Theise does an elegant job of writing about complicated science concepts for the non-expert.

I ran across Notes on Complexity right after finishing Sleights of Mind, a book about the neuroscience behind the sort of illusion we call entertainment magic: sleight of hand, sawing people in two, mentalist “mind-reading,” and other performances; the authors, Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen Macknik, and Sandra Blakeslee, are trying to discover more about how brains work (or filter, and sometimes don’t work so well) by studying how we get fooled by illusionists. This is a fun book, even more fun for me because one of my Best Beloveds has long been an enthusiast of magic shows and magicians. Martinez-Conde and Macknik are neurologists, so–unlike Theise’s text–this book is very body-mechanics in its basis. Their work reminded me of how amazing the human physiological system is. And it’s entertaining.

Before these non-fiction reads, I was finishing up with Proust who, in his own creative way, was exploring the interiority of the human self and carefully observing human interactions, behaviors, assumptions, prejudices, and aesthetics. Not neuroscience, because there is no science to it, but definitely related to how our brains and bodies process experience. My sense is that poetry works that that way for me: it’s not an abstract stream of thought but something inextricable from bodily experience, maybe even, through the environment in which we exist, something deeply connected to everything, a global being-there.

The way we process experience (and is this consciousness?) is largely what leads us to the arts, to make art or to appreciate it, and to decide what feels compelling, important, beautiful. And it’s not all in our heads.

Blue

At one of our local used book stores,* I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess? It cheered me! [I will caution the reader who avoids the use of “bad language” that Gass employs such words in this essay, for purely intellectual reasons…]

Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.

And I’ll get over feeling this way. That’s what moods are: feelings that come and go, transitory. It always seems as though low moods stay around longer than neutral or cheerful ones, but many scientific studies show that it is our perception and memory of the negatives that make us think we are sadder for longer. Even Wikipedia has an entry on negativity bias, with some sources if you want to check things out yourself. As I age, I realize that bad moods and sad events and past mistakes don’t need to stick around as much as I used to think. A bit of mediation, some practice and readings in Zen and in psychology, a lengthening perspective on life’s vicissitudes, some counseling and even some medicine; whatever it is that’s brought me here, I recognize that before long the depressive hours will lift. Also I know some methods of thinking that assist me to move to more neutral ground.

I will note there are many kinds and hues of blue, enough for Gass to write 112 pages on it and for the word to appear in 85 files of my own poetry during the past 12 years–I did a quick word search just to find out. That is in the files alone, and each file contains many poems. so I can only imagine how much I have over-used the word in my writing life! Certainly, not all of those blues are sad. Many are beautiful, sunny, the blues of blueberries and balloon flowers, the New Mexico sky, mountains and oceans; teal-blues and turquoise, the bright royal blue I like to wear, the pale color of robin’s eggs.

Blue. It has always been my favorite color.

~~

*The bookstore is Apport, in Emmaus, PA. Ben has an active Instagram feed and really cool catalogues of odd books, art, and ephemera.

*The first “blue” above is an encaustic painting by Deborah Barlow; the second is at Bandolier National Monument; the third is of the Blue Ridge Mountains; the last was taken at an inlet bay, maybe in Delaware–I’ve forgotten.

Speaking joy

When my children were learning to talk, I remember finding the process of language acquisition so amazing that I briefly considered going back to college to study it. I have two children about 18 months apart in age; many of my friends had babies the same time I did, so I had a range of small children to listen to and be amazed by. Each child seemed to develop their own method of learning to talk, beyond the general similarities among human beings that many scientists and linguists have studied. I wondered what made those small differences–the way parents spoke to the child or to one another? The temperaments of the children? Exposure to music or grandparents, older siblings, the radio??

I can admit that I was an exhausted young(-ish) mother, but also so intrigued. I wanted to learn as my children were learning. There was such excitement and joy–it seemed as though every new day brought further leaps in communication as my kids discovered pronunciation, verbs, adjectives, vocal stresses, and body language to convey what they were noticing, experiencing, needing, complaining about. As a lifelong learner, autodidact, and amateur researcher, I found myself reading up on language and its acquisition and history.

A few moments stay vividly in my memory. One summer day when we had a sun shower, my barely two-year-old son pointed up to the sky and announced, “Sun out. Rain coming down.”

I think of that with joy every time we get a sun shower. Over 30 years later.

~

Now, I’m trying to find the same fascination, the same learning-endeavor, with my mother’s loss of speech. I want there to be some joy or benefit in this reversal of language, something I can take away from it other than a deep sense of losing the person she was. This has meant reading books about dementia, aphasia, aging, and all the rest. It’s meant trying ways to get her attention and jog her memories when visiting her; talking with her caregivers; and reminiscing with my siblings, as well as conferring with them about her current situation as it evolves.

It’s meant finding some humor in the inevitable mix-ups that happen when communication gets woefully impaired. It has also meant finding peace, or comfort, in just sitting beside my mother in silence, holding her hand in her quiet room. She was always a fairly reflective person–capable of hilarity and chattiness, but more often keeping things to herself. Maybe revealing her thoughts some time later. Now? Who can tell. I find that I return from my visits with her feeling increasingly reflective myself, wondering where she “goes” when her attention seems to wander, wondering what she would say, if she could. I find myself wanting to research, even more than I have, information on neurology and cognition and what happens when the neural synapses that lead us to language begin to get trimmed away.

Not everyone who gets past 90 experiences such neural shut-downs in the language-generating parts of the brain; I know several folks who were, and are, quite fine with speech and thinking into their late 90s! Alas that my mom isn’t one of them. My task is to find joy in whatever her moments of being are at present while she is still physically among us. Not always an easy task, it sometimes saddens me. But joy tempers sorrow, just as sorrow so often tempers joy.

Momma. If you could only read this, or understand me when I say it: I love you.

Transformation & intention

During the past few weeks, I have been reading–one at a time, with pauses–the essays in Ross Gay’s book Inciting Joy. His earlier book (The Book of Delights) was easier, a bit less complicated. About, you know, gratitude–even though he describes his father’s death in the first essay of that one. He gets to something about grieving in the 13th “Incitement” of this book, however, that made me put the text down and say to myself: This is what I have been trying to get my poems to do for some time now.

(I did pick it up again and finish reading it, by the way.)

He insists that we remember how transforming grief is. Not can be, but is. Always: “When that one thing [that we grieve] changed, everything changed. Light through the trees in October now different. The sound of the playground…cooking a meal. The future. The past. All of it changed. That is what the griever is metabolizing.” He points out this metabolizing can’t be timed, that grieving pays no attention to whether it has been a day or a year or decades: “It seems to me that grief is not gotten over, it is gotten into. And the griever teaches us, or reminds us, there is no pulling it apart. Because grieving, alert to connection, is never only one person’s experience.”

Maybe we grieve for one person, or one beloved companion animal. Maybe we grieve that our youth is over, that our children are grown, that our favorite mom & pop store has been razed to make way for a Starbucks. Or perhaps we grieve for our planet, as Greta Thunberg does: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.” There are so many reasons why we feel loss. Loss is what life offers us, loss but also transformation. I think what Gay tries to say in his recent essays is that because there is something to sorrow that we all can connect with, our grief itself can connect us, give us understanding–maybe even joy.

A complicated kind of joy. A joy that acknowledges that life can be tough and sad. And instead of reeling away from people who are clearly–and sometimes not so clearly–suffering, we could connect instead, even though we are also terrified of suffering. Maybe that is another reason I became a hospice volunteer years ago, after my dad had been in and out of the ICU frequently, even though I had spent my childhood and many of my adult years being frightened of death and dying.

Good poems offer readers that sense of connection, which Gay and others sometimes refer to as mycelial (Lesley Wheeler in her poems, Robin Wall Kimmerer in her books and Merlin Sheldrake in his, the movie “Fantastic Fungi”…among others). My favorite poems by my favorite poets, now that I think about it, have always had that effect on my heart: recognition of connectedness with other humans or with other beings, with the environment, with the past-and-future, with (thank you, Walt Whitman) the Kosmos. The recent interactions I had and connections I found at the Joya residency cemented this fundamental awareness, that all of us are part of our huge, interconnected experiences in life.

Of course, writing strong work isn’t easy, doesn’t often happen; but here’s the place in our mutual social connectivity where intentions really do matter–because the intention impels us to work, practice, and dream. The intention is to create and, through whatever we create, to extend our human network. NOT our much-ballyhooed “social networks.” Those can go to hell (and we can’t take ’em with us).

Anyway, such are my intentions for working in the world of words, of poetry. And that’s also the reason I read so much poetry, in case you were wondering.

~

https://www.smallwoodlandthings.com/ Heather Brooks, artist

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:

~

In residence

It’s been some time since I was away at a residency with other artists and writers. Conferences, yes, but residencies are different–more intimate in scope, less social-life activity, more one-to-one conversations, and a great many overlaps in interests, inspirations, and approaches. The intensity doesn’t feel at all like the intensity of a large conference such as AWP, where I often feel I must cram my schedule with panels, meet-ups, and attendance at presentations and where the exchanges, while often intellectual, generally require the context of careers and situational details. At a residency, we certainly don’t avoid topics like families and day jobs; but such getting-to-know-you chats are secondary to conversations about art, artists, reading, technical methods, responses to environment, discussions about intent and audience, aesthetic and artistic philosophy.

A residency also offers that key component of creativity: unstructured time (or, time one gets to structure to one’s own liking). I cannot stress enough the value of reflection, contemplation, and woolgathering; the residency I attended in Spain offered this to a degree I haven’t had in quite some time, and I relished it. I took along Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights, perfect reading for a plane-bus-train trip, and Mark Doty’s Deep Lane, contemplative and fearless poems that urged me to spend the necessary time with my thoughts and my environment.

~

It was interesting to hear about the methods and processes of other participants who were there the week I was. While all of them write in some form, their creative work is visual: Photography, film, digital art (animation, 3D, comics), performance/performative art, painting, multimedia. At first, I felt a bit out of step since what I “produce” is…well, abstract, I guess? And the means a person uses to create poems is mostly invisible; it’s not as though you can see us at work. A person at a desk, sitting on a rock, or lying under a tree doesn’t appear to be in the process of making anything and, except when the written work appears in print/online, the “artwork” isn’t something one can show to others. As I began to converse more with the visual artists, however, once again I experienced the joy of discourse with fellow creatives, no matter their discipline. I certainly have friends who are sculptors, painters, photographers, ceramicists, dancers, musicians, actors, & craftspeople of all stripes–and I don’t feel out of step when talking with them. I suppose it is my initial hesitation around “strangers” that kicks in. Shortly into the residency, we were no longer strangers.

The word la joya is Spanish for “jewel,” and it can also refer to a geographic hollow–a bowl-like area, which is fitting since the cortijo is situated in a sort of high valley surrounded by the mountains of the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada. On my last day at Joya-AiR, we held an artist talk to inform one another of our creative work and processes, influences, and possible future directions we imagine our work going in. Some of the other participants will be working there for another week or two! Which would be lovely, but I could not extend my stay at this time. Nonetheless, the residency has been very useful and productive for me. I feel so grateful to the people at Joya and to my Best Beloved for encouraging me to attend.

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.

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.