Category Archives: writing

Some awe

In 2015 (I think), I posted about the University of Berkeley’s professor Dacher Keltner‘s studies examining the experience and emotion of awe. Now he has a book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The subtitle’s unwieldy and promises a little much–I’m sensing a publisher’s or publicist’s input there. Keltner’s a psychologist, not a popular self-help author, but whatever…

The ways scientists attempt to study human emotions amaze me with their inventiveness. How does one conduct empirical experiments on anything so wildly subjective? (And honestly, I question whether empiricism is always as objective and reliable as scientists believe it is–though we haven’t developed a better method yet.) This book answers some of my questions about the “how” of studying emotion, which includes a good deal of physiology; after all, human emotions are based in human bodies. Qing Li’s book on forest bathing touches on some of these methods of study as well. Blood pressure, heart rate, breath rate: those can be measured, and there’s exhaustive research that shows how such aspects of our physiology connect with feelings of well-being, even before looking at the roles hormones and neurotransmitters play.

But what about awe? Isn’t that usually a feeling that takes your breath away? That might raise the pulse, that might be fear as easily as joy? Keltner writes about the line between fearful shivers of the Halloween-night kind and goosebumps that appear when humans feel awed. Also our tears–of joy, grief, physical pain, and those tears that we feel when we are “moved” by an act, a place, a work of art. He cites Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photos of tears, which I was happy to see mentioned because I love her work (a poem about those photos appears in my book The Red Queen Hypothesis). He cites Ross Gay’s poems and prose poems/essays of joy and gratitude, in books I happen to love. And Keltner offers an anecdote about poet laureate Robert Hass and the “whoa moment” that arises in “myriad cultural forms.”

Among those forms is poetry, and here’s where this text got me considering what I love in reading poetry and what I may be aiming for when writing it: the term he uses is everyday awe.

Deep awe–I’m not enough of a genius with words to create a sense of deep awe with a poem, though I admire the geniuses who have been capable of such art. But everyday awe? That’s a feeling with which I’ve been familiar since my childhood and which I have never lost sight of. For me, it arises from my favorite pastime: observation. The fog-mantled tent-spider web in tall grass, the sparrows sipping from city-street potholes, the toddler showering his baby sister with dandelion flowers, the smell of honeysuckle early in June, or campfires or cinnamon. Sea spray in my face. Sand in my shoes. The way my mother’s 90-year-old skin stretches and smooths when I stroke her arm. Skunk cabbage unfurling with the morning sun behind it. These things I can write about; the words are everyday words, and this is my everyday world. That, for me, is where the art of poetry and the experience of living intersect.

Once again, ambition

Dave Bonta, he of the Poetry Blog Digest, Moving Poems, via negativa, Dave Bonta blog, and more, recently posted a thoughtful essay about personal poetic ambitions vs. careers in the poetry field (see https://davebonta.com/2023/10/ambition-without-careerism/). The link’s here because I encourage you to read it! It is a topic many of us poets return to occasionally, especially when we find ourselves wondering things like why bother and who cares whether we write or not or whether we ever get any good at writing poetry…and whether poets should be paid better, or at all…and whether or not poets benefit by being attached to universities.

In fact, when I read Dave’s post I immediately recalled having written similar ideas, though from a different perspective, on this very blog some years back–and probably more than once. The concept of ambition in poetry, and how one defines that word in relation to poetry, is something I first encountered in Donald Hall’s 1988 book Poetry and Ambition–still in print from University of Michigan. I read this book of essays in 1991, in between changing diapers and coordinating naptimes for two children under the age of four. It was difficult to feel ambition about career at that time, and a career in poetry was ever a pipe dream; but the notion that a writer could feel ambitious about the work she might be doing in learning about and endeavoring to craft really good poems, even should she fail most of the time, felt encouraging to me. I recommend this book, as there’s also a good deal one can find to disagree with in it, and debate is useful for thinking.

Fast-forward to today (time does seem to move in fast-forward), and I find myself retired from a career on the fringes of academia, where I taught composition to students less-prepared for college and ran the writing center at a university. But I did not teach poetry or creative writing and was staff, not professorial/tenured; so the need to be career-ambitious through poetry was null. That suited my personality well. Maybe too well. Yet somehow I managed to get a reasonable amount of my work published (see the sidebar of this page) and to get several chapbooks and books into print (see the My Books tab here). I had my own form of ambition.

What now, I wonder? I have so much work to revise! Recently, I submitted an experimental, historically-based chapbook to a publisher, and I’m working on getting a new book of older work, though not as old as The Red Queen Hypothesis‘ poems, into print. Will I spend the next few years just catching up? Possibly. Is that “ambitious”? Nah, just means I wasn’t ambitious enough to get to it earlier!

Restorative

I often start a post with a mini-weather report; I guess that’s one way I prepare myself to write, centering myself in the environment I inhabit. Our region received much-needed rain this weekend, but I was out of town–and the weather in Chicago was glorious: cloudless, crisp, mild, a light breeze. Odd, though, how weather conditions can evoke strong memories for me. The amazing clarity of the sky and air reminded me vividly of September 11, 2001, and the two days following it when we had a run of glorious weather and a mood of intense disturbance all around us…and no plane traffic at all. It took a few moments for that recall to settle in, and a few minutes more to let the memory go so I could enjoy the present moment.

~

I was in the Chicago area–Highland Park– for the book launch of The Red Queen Hypothesis. Many thanks to my publisher, Julie Dotson, and the welcoming and supportive group of poets and audience; the reading went well, and we sold some books (always a satisfying thing). I met quite a few interesting people and learned a bit about the city of Highland Park, its relatively long history, its parks, architecture, the storied Ravinia Festival, and how the city’s been coping since the July 4 tragedy last year. Travel always offers perspective. In this case, travel offered community as well: a lively community of people who support the literary arts.

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I even got to be recorded, with Jennifer Dotson as the interviewer–a first for me. Here’s the link:

My generous poet-host, Julie Isaacson, knew from my writing and my biography that I would enjoy a walk around the Chicago Botanic Gardens–and she was so right! The gardens offered just the respite I needed after airplane travel. We hadn’t the time to stroll all 280+ acres, but the chance to walk amid trees and beside water in the middle of an urban expanse was genuinely restorative.

Now I am pulling weeds and pruning for the approaching autumn, activities that allow me to settle into myself internally and which sometimes result in poem drafts. Please wish me luck on both endeavors!

Language power

In advance of my reading this weekend, Jennifer Dotson of Highland Park Poetry asked a few questions and created the flyer below. I especially like the last question and have more to say about it below.

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The graffiti on the NJ and NY Palisades sent a thrill through my childish mind and body. I first recall seeing words spray-painted on the cliffs when I was under age five and barely cognizant of letter forms. The view puzzled and frightened me, partly because of the heights (I was acrophobic from a very early age) and partly because I had no idea what those huge, high-up letters signified. When I got to kindergarten and began deciphering letters, the graffiti confused me because it contained signs that weren’t in the alphabet I was learning at school: Ω, Φ, the scary-looking Ψ; θ, Δ, and Σ, which resembled a capital E but clearly wasn’t. Once I could read and still could not understand them, I asked my father what those letters were and why they were up there on the rocks. They reminded me of the ☧ embroidered on some of the altar cloths in church, but I didn’t know what that stood for, either.

Frat boys from the colleges painted their Greek symbols on the rocks long before spray paint was invented, my dad said, possibly as part of hazing rituals. By the time I was a child, the 50s-era “greasers” had begun announcing their love for Nancy or Tina through daring feats of rock and bridge painting; then the graffiti era came into full swing after the mid-sixties, and the process got colorful–the Greek symbols vanished, replaced by “tags.” All of which just reinforces the importance of words in the world.

I will never climb up high to write or declaim my own words, as heights continue to terrify me. But I continue to push ideas, words, arguments, pleas, elegies, and gratitude into the world. Writing is the only way I know how to do that. It’ll have to be enough.

Script, postscript

The weather has been glorious lately, which has the downside of getting rather droughty. No rain in the forecast, either, so it is time for supplemental watering if I want to keep harvesting from the vegetable garden. There’s not much left there, though; I may just wait things out and save the water. Meanwhile, some of our days have recently been punctuated by the sound of green ash limbs crashing in the nearby woods. When I investigate the trees, there are the telltale scribbles of ash borer on the trunks. The marks look like script.

I learned, while teaching college freshmen the past few years, that many younger adults do not know how to write or even to read script. Many children never get the lessons in handwriting in the second through fourth grades the way I did. Instead, they learn keyboarding–a skill I got to in my junior year of high school but never really have mastered (yes, even now I use a self-developed version that’s sort of an advanced hunt-and-peck method). It’s hard to believe that reading script is a task that will be relegated to specialists in years to come, but I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happens. To many of my college age students, handwritten script in English is almost indistinguishable from the marks of ash borers. They don’t see the need for that particular skill. Handwriting is going the way of letter-writing.

Perhaps we live in a post-script world?

I have been thinking about the handwritten word recently because of a recent incident while visiting my mother. She received a small refund check from an insurer, and though she understood what it was and that she no longer uses her checking account–we siblings take care of that through power of attorney–she was confused about what to do with it. “Sign it, Mom,” I told her, offering her a pen. “We’ll deposit it for you.” I turned the check over and pointed to the line for signature on the back.

She wavered, pen in the air. “I don’t…I don’t,” she said (her aphasia has advanced past the point of expressing full sentences). It took me a moment to realize that she could not recall how to sign her name. I placed my hand around hers and helped her start with the capital B.

I didn’t cry, but the experience hasn’t left me alone. I suppose there may be a poem in this incident, but if so, it’s a sorrowful one.

Book launch, travel, PR

Highland Park Poetry press has set up a book launch/poetry reading for The Red Queen Hypothesis (and me) with poet Rene Parks and an open mic to follow. This event takes place Saturday, September 9th at 5 pm, at Madame ZuZu’s, 1876 First Street, Highland Park IL. Here’s a link, and here’s another link. It’s a ways to travel from eastern Pennsylvania but a good reason for yours truly to visit a new place, meet new people–including the book’s publisher–and listen to other poets.

Too often, perhaps, I stay around the home front, indulge in my introversion by gardening and reading, and shy away from promoting my work. Lately, it’s been months since I did any submitting. There was my participation in the annual Goschenhoppen Festival, then a short but lovely week in North Carolina, camping and seeing friends. Now, the veggie season is starting to wind down–tomato sauce simmers on the burner–and I will have fewer excuses for why I am not sending out poems.

But my travel for the year is not quite done. In September there’s one more trip away from PA, and after that we can settle into autumn. I have writing plans, so once we return, I need to create a schedule that is flexible enough I can stick to it but framed clearly enough that it feels necessary and not difficult to integrate into my days and weeks. Every one of my writer friends knows how challenging that can be. Wish me luck. There’s a chapbook that’s been languishing in my desk area for quite a long time, but to which I’ve recently returned; there’s a ream of poems under 21 lines that might make up a collection, too. Then there’s the next manuscript, rather grief-heavy at present, that I need to re-think and revise.

Oh, and all those poem drafts I have not looked at in awhile…

Then there will be the next round of promotion, not just for RQH but for a collection for which I just signed a publishing contract! That book may be released as soon as April or May of 2024. We shall see. After the drawn-out publication wait for this last book, I will not be holding my breath. Still–it’s heartening news on the poetry front.

Above, Blue Ridge Mountains in August.

Classification

An admission: I’m barely competent at the promotional aspect of The Writing Life and would prefer to hole up in my house and garden and just… write. But writers need readers, and writers benefit by meeting other writers (and readers); and I’ve always been interested in learning new things, even things that are not particularly fun or that I am not naturally adept at. Such as educational learning management systems (ie, “portals”). Such as recording audiofiles of my poems. Such as contacting potential poetry-reading venues or reviewers. Or coming up with clever ways to let people know about my book.

I got a couple of responses from my initial forays, which is lucky. One of these sent me a sort of writer’s questionnaire about my book, and one of the responses I’m supposed to give is to say how I would classify my latest poetry collection. That got me mulling over the whole idea of categorization, classifying, and stereotypes. Genre–that’s easy. It’s poetry. But the sub-category of this book? uh…

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At the beach earlier this week, we found a much-broken up rock jetty that teemed with creatures. As I sat back on my heels and peered into the mixture of sand-water-rock-mullosk-kelp, I found myself thinking about Aristotle’s immanent realism (epistemology/natural philosophy), ideas he likely nurtured while examining the tide pools of Lesbos. Or I imagine that he may have done so. We humans observe, and then classify or categorize based upon these observations: similarities, differences, various adaptations–in environment, habit, behavior, construction of the being or entity itself.

I think if I had known as a child and young woman that there was a career path called “a naturalist,” I would have pursued it.

~

Unclassifiable doesn’t strike me as much of a selling point. However, there are always art forms that are, to use a current term, intersectional or interdisciplinary, and creations that repurpose, alter, or reimagine the known or customary into something new and intriguing. Fellow blogger and talented poet and novelist Lesley Wheeler‘s books come to mind, as do works by Anne Carson and books from Coffeehouse Press and Tarpaulin Sky (among others).

My poetry is not experimental nor groundbreaking, though it is a little quirky; so here is my recent attempt to classify The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems:

Touching on a range of topics and employing variety in poetic craft—free verse, metrical verse, rhyme, and classic forms—the poems in The Red Queen Hypothesis play with invention, science, and the environment of the everyday.  One example of these juxtapositions is the title poem: a villanelle, based on an evolutionary theory named for an episode in Alice through the Looking Glass, that sums up the corporate rat race. Sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes disturbing, the poems urge readers to observe and to reconsider what is beautiful.

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I dunno. Does that seem like a remotely interesting description?

(Really not adept at the promotional biz.)

Aristotle, supposedly.
from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/world/europe/greece-aristotle-tomb.html

Mindlessly

There are some necessary but mindless tasks that I’m good at and don’t mind doing. Weeding, for example (unless it’s raining, or disgustingly hot), or cleaning a bathroom. My morning chore today entailed removing staples that fastened carpet underlayment to the floor. There are dozens of these staples stuck in the subfloor, and most of them have bits of foam-like fabric wedged in them. The edges of the room are studded with tacking strips–annoying to remove when one is not a professional. Best Beloved and I did consider hiring someone to replace the floor, but since it is a job we can do ourselves…well, we have the time and are doing it.

There’s a difference between the mindless and the tedious. I don’t care for tedium; but a task I can mindlessly manage–something physical, but not too demanding, without a lot of surprises I need to problem-solve–those projects can be almost relaxing. When weeding, my thoughts can wander. The job is so familiar and repetitive that there is no need to devote much brainpower to it. Ideas, reflections, observations, images can float aimlessly in my mind. I can think about poems while weeding. Taking a walk in a woods or quiet countryside offers me the same sort of internal/external environment.

Proofreading was like that for me, back when I was a proofreader (when there were such things as proofreaders in every newspaper, type or print shop, publishing house, ad agency, and legal department). Editing takes some thought; but the less engaged a proofreader is with the text, the better. I was employed as a proofreader when I first recognized that I was truly serious about writing poetry, and I found value in the ’empty mind’ that my workaday job fostered. There was a bonus in that sometimes I did glean new information from the materials I read.

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Composing this post, it strikes me that “mindless” is the wrong word, or not an accurate word to convey what it’s like to feel internally occupied while the physical body’s doing something else. “Reflection” implies more stillness. Something more akin to walking meditation?

At any rate, I can hope that the weeding and staple-removing might eventually get my poetry mojo re-booted. I have to work on my next manuscript and continue to promote my latest book, too. In the meantime at least I’m accomplishing something.

~

Aloft at last

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Hypothesis-other-poems/dp/B0C9SNKGJZ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VSSIOETPZQDW&keywords=ann+e.+michael&qid=1689466800&s=books&sprefix=ann+e.+michael%2Cstripbooks%2C104&sr=1-1

My second full-length poetry collection is finally available. Whew! It took a good bit of patience, some frustration, and considerable persistence to get here, but I believed that this was a manuscript worth plugging away on. And thank you to Highland Park Poetry and to judge Cynthia Gallaher for choosing RQH as a prizewinner.

Persistence doesn’t always pay off, but when it does, we tend to focus on how important it is to keep on keeping on. However, I’m not sure I wholly believe in the process of sticking-to-it no matter what; there are times when you do need to let go of an unattainable goal or the pursuit of a not-terrific idea, and just–well, fail. I have let go of quite a few goals, plans, and previous manuscripts when I honestly evaluated my feelings about them and their possibilities for becoming realized. It’s okay to fail. You learn more from failure than from success. I have gained quite an education that way myself.

But I wanted this book to get into print. I like the poems in it. I like the things I learned as I played with meter and form and (mostly slant) rhyme. It was fun to find a range of topics that managed, one way or another, to work together. Mostly, I wanted an audience, to find out whether readers find it thought-provoking or entertaining or interesting. Also, I was starting to sense that it was getting in the way of my next manuscript. Yes, of course I have the next manuscript…

Do I wish the book had come out four or five years ago? Yes. My first collection, Water-Rites, came out way back in 2012; RQH was supposed to have followed more rapidly on that book’s appearance. Am I glad it has appeared at last? Also yes, very glad!

I am grateful to so many people for this book. And I will be grateful to anyone who buys it, reads it, and doesn’t find it a complete waste of time. Meanwhile, I’m working on getting some readings lined up. I know I will appear at the book launch September 9, 2023 in Highland Park, IL! I’d love to read at other venues, so if you know of one let me know.

And if you have a manuscript you really believe in–keep trying.

Transitions of one kind or another

Transitions require reflection and, quite often, reorganizing–and certainly that seems the case at present. I decided back in April to take a hiatus on submitting while I wound down at my college job, also recognizing that I need to put in some work on promoting my book (the cover should appear on my next post!). Besides, before I can send out poetry again, I need to assess what I have that might actually be worth sending out. It’s possible that much of the pile of not-yet self-evaluated poetry exists in unfinished form. That means further revision. While revising is an enjoyable task for me, at this point I confess to feeling overwhelmed. The first task, then, is one of organizing…which I admit I like a lot less than revision.

It was therefore with considerable resignation I faced the drawers, folders, computer files, and index cards that more or less make up my, uh, creative output. The project is nowhere near complete, but I got some cheer by realizing that I have been writing and revising more than I thought, a little at a time. The pile of papers on the chair pictured to the right is 16 months of revisions.

I would pat myself on the back more heartily if that stack had resulted in several damned fine pieces of poetry, but at least it means I’m doing the work that writers do and that I was doing it even when feeling taxed by situations not entirely within my control. Which is also what writers do. Sometimes you need to give yourself a little boost of validation.

A bigger boost of validation for writers is the publication of a book, and that ought to keep me buoyant for awhile even if I do dislike the promotional aspect of book publication (which falls more and more on the writer these days as the book industry contracts). My publisher says the book should be available in August– “Watch this space” –as advertisers used to urge.

Meanwhile, the anthology of contemporary Ukrainian literature published by Vogue Ukraine is now in print and available; it’s full of passionate creative work and includes some internationally notable writers, the best-known of whom is Oksana Zabuzhko, who wrote a reflection about the appearance of her debut novel 25 years ago; one of the most shattering pieces is an extremely current non-fiction text by Olia Rusina written, diary-form, as the assault began on Kyiv. Info here.