Tag Archives: Books

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.

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.

Perfumes and tunes

This time of year, certain blooms and fragrances evoke my childhood memories. I spent most of my childhood and all of my adolescence in southern New Jersey, along the Delaware Bay; the swampy coastal plains have now largely burgeoned into suburban housing developments, but in the late 1960s there were actual townships with old-fashioned suburbs–the kind with sidewalks–and many a privet hedge that bloomed in early June with small, white spires that gave off a faint scent. In overgrown areas of meadow and scrub, the sweet smell of Japanese honeysuckle perfumed muggy evenings. And while I don’t recall much scent from the mimosa trees in bloom on Harvey Avenue, once those fallen pink blossoms began to rot on the sidewalk, they added a distinct punk that meant summertime. The honeysuckle is blooming here now, making me wonder about the neuroscience behind the sense of smell. Gotta check out these books, perhaps: Kiser reviews four recent books on olfaction.

On a side note, none of these evocative plants are native to the Americas: Ligustrum vulgare, Lonicera japonica, Albizia julibrissin–and yet I associate them with South Jersey. It is almost like a refrain in my memory-mind.

To speak of associations reminds me of Alexis de Tocqueville. I’ll post a quote of his below, one that makes me think of language and poetry and science. But back to refrains:

Musical refrains also run through my brain, evoking memories and nostalgia, or just being irritating “earworms.” At any given time such tunes may include Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, strains from a late Haydn quartet, one of many Springsteen songs, Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” or–most confounding of all–the Chock-full-o’Nuts jingle from the 1960s or some similar commercial sloganeering. Why such things wear a familiar groove in the gray matter I don’t know, though Oliver Sacks’ book on music (Musicophilia) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music offer some insights, and I’m thinking of reading this one by Samuel Markind when it comes out later this year.

Alas, I’m not gardening because once again the garden is awash in mud, so I entertain myself with endeavoring to discover how/why my brain works (and yours, and anyone else’s), since that’s one of my favorite lines of inquiry when I can’t work outside. I will take a sodden walk later and dwell on possibilities while enjoying the scent of the invasives; I’ll work on some poetry revisions; maybe I’ll listen to music…and freely associate with any and all possibilities. Here, as promised, Alexis de Tocqueville:

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it.

When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.”

Honeysuckle photo by Nadiye dabau015fu0131 on Pexels.com

Plan B (reading)

While I was traveling the high-altitude desert regions, my home valley got its much-needed rain. And the rain continues. And continues. My plan was to get to work on my gardens as soon as I came back, to weed and plant out seedlings. Well, it’s a bit too wet for that. Also chilly and humid and sea-level, and therefore my physical adjustment has been a bit …bumpy. So, Plan B.

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.

Reading my contemporaries

The poetry collections I’ve been reading during much of the past year have largely been works of contemporary writers–books that were published during the past two decades, some during the past two years. My focus on such current work was not intentional. After all, there is still so much poetry from the past three or four thousand years that I haven’t yet explored! Grad school, however, was decades ago; that’s when I last studied both contemporary and classic/canonical/influential poems with a specific eye to learning from them. I continue to learn from the poems I read, though. I just don’t take as many notes or write any papers about them these days.

Three collections I read recently have got me thinking about the grittier sonic elements in poetry; the use of scientific, foreign, antiquated, and invented words; wordplay in general as a poetry component; and how sound can push both experiment and meaning in a poem. I’ve been mulling about the task of writing anything that feels “new,” to me or to my readers, and about the challenges more sonic wordplay would mean for me as a writer. I’m saying here I think it would be difficult to do, because it differs from my long-accustomed voice and style. I’m also saying I like a challenge in creative work, and that my style(s) go though changes always, so why not? In creative art of any kind, the passing of years makes a difference in many things. Content (because: experience). Situation (because: life happens). Methods (because: technology and materials). And influence–what I was reading in high school vs. grad school vs. today–though some favorites will always hold a place in my creative mind.

My poems tend to be plain-spoken, although I’ve never been shy about going beyond the standard vernacular to employ a geological term, a botanical name, or a somewhat archaic noun or adjective when it suits the feel and sound of the poem. Most of my poems don’t fall under the description of experimental or edgy. I’m not making waves with language, but some poets are. And my recent reading has me wanting to experiment more. It will mean failing a lot, because I’m working against my habitual methods of composition. I won’t be as good at it as these poets (below) are. What I’m hoping, though, is that the practice of trying more sonic wordplay in my work implants a tracery of that practice onto my poetic voice.

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So which contemporaries do I mean? More than the three I’ll briefly mention here, for sure (and it is not as if the only poets playing with words and sound are my contemporaries–far from it). However, here’s a start with some examples that I particularly love.

I mentioned Silano’s poetry in a recent post when I appreciated her scientific ideas that meld with an “everyday” life. Reckless Lovely contains many long-lined couplet verses that name objects such as a 64-ounce Big Gulp, Wells-Fargo, Italian Renaissance paintings, or the red spot on Jupiter as the poet observes and speculates on the cosmos that surrounds her. And she invents or alters words that suit her for rhythm, alliteration, sound: “the sfumato is sfumato-ing, the lute-r is lute-ing;” “when most of all that creep-eth/breath-eth buzz-eth/galump-eth sex-eth spar-eth/went AWOL/paving the avenue of asp/the boulevard of bee…” or the totally wild mashup Silano composes in “Summons and Petition for Name Change”:

Dim sum-my dilberry. Down there Daquiri.
Ear of Eden. Eminently Earthy. Empress Gensho.
Fandango-ing funnel. Fox foot. Flamingo.
Geranium in the Gate of the Gourd. Gentian's grin.

~

I find much to admire in Martha Silano’s work even though I often have to look up words (physics and geology nomenclature, usually).

Lesley Wheeler’s most recent book demonstrates her ability with form and sound in a different way, though in “Gran Torino Gigan” the alliteration is as snazzy as Silano’s abecedarian poem above: “Buzzes fade up front,/where beltless adults murmur and smoke//after unfurling musty sleeping bags…in rhizomatic zigzags, with a sharp zipper.” Contemporary technology gets into the poems and, with it, the sounds of our infrastructure, as in “I believe in utility poles, transformers,/lightning arrestors. Subtransmission lines/and static lines. The dead southern yellow pine…” and the theme of fungal connectivity means that we learn some useful and often beautiful mycology terms. Yet Wheeler often relies on shorter words when they suit the tone of the narrative. In a poem dealing with the aftermath of her mother’s death, she writes “No one’s grimmer inside/than me. My bully of a heart wears cheap/scuffed pumps and cusses like a mobster.” The repetition of the word “snow” in “Minus Time” establishes the poem’s pace. So many poems in the collection offer experiments in form!

Percival Everett has gained an even stronger following thanks to his novel James, but he’s been writing poetry for years (Trout’s Lie is from 2015). This collection is deceptively simple in language and vernacular: there are surprises. Several poems make allusions to “great poetry of the past” by name or phrase; short lines build and build, twisting the lyric where we don’t think it would go. There are several examples I’d like to give, but this post is getting pretty long. I think I will close with an excerpt from Everett’s “Maybe Even Clouds,” the first section, which begins “Count the marines..”

They look like nice
Boys and bad boys,
From Vermont-and-Montana-
Following-orders-dumbshit-
Non-blinking-soon-
to-kill-soon-to-die boys,
Who might or might
Not, should or should
Not, but never would
Not and never can
                                not.
Not sure doesn't matter.
Doubt is a penniless
Customer, conscience
Waits for the weather
To change.


National Poetry Month may be almost over, but I’ll keep reading poems. And posting about them. And writing them. I encourage you to do the same, because there is no time in the history of the world when human beings haven’t benefited from poems.

Poetry month books & doings

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It is, once again, April: National Poetry Month. My recent trip to the AWP bookfair has given me many poetry books to peruse at whatever pace I please, and because the weather here has been far too wet to do much in the garden, I’m using the free time to read. The outpouring of millions of peaceful protesters who oppose the current administration’s policies and who rallied on April 5 was somewhat heartening to me, but I remain skeptical and am aware that real change takes a long time. For the present, I’m bolstering my spirit through poetry.

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I met Diane Thiel decades ago, briefly, at the West Chester Poetry Conference. She is incredibly talented, intelligent, frighteningly well-educated, and her work impressed me a lot; somehow, though, I did not get around to reading the many books she’s published since then, so her Questions from Outer Space (2022) is a delight and a revelation. Travel, literary and historical references, child-raising, teaching–the poems here cover a large range of topics. I bought her book at the Red Hen Press tables in LA. Red Hen is a terrific source for contemporary poetry books, if you’re looking…

At Saturnalia’s booth (another good small press with a large catalog), I found three of Martha Silano’s books and rejoiced. So far I have finished reading only The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, which I love, but I can hardly wait to read her more recent books. She has a wry sense of weird, nerdy humor that’s inflected with science facts and grocery-store labels, pop culture and life in the burbs, and a healthy questioning of, well, everything.

My fellow Goddard alum and friend Lou Faber has a new book here, and it’s so wonderful to read the work of a long-time poetry colleague whom I haven’t seen in years but whose voice comes recognizably through this collection. The second half of the collection, in particular, deals with the emotionally-complex aspects of being an adoptee and this person’s efforts to untangle where (and who) he’s “from.” Contradictions abound over the years; then, DNA testing sort of, but not quite, sorts out some of the mysteries. But life–well, much of life contains mysteries and always will.

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Meanwhile, this April I will be busy giving and attending in-person and online poetry events–even a radio spot! I’ll be reading mid-day at a local community college, participating in a No River Twice poetry event; and at some point this month, an interview about The Poetry Press Project (and my latest book) will air on WDIY 88.9FM. And a few of my poems will be appearing in print this month, the first of which is here: “Luna, Paloma.” I’ve also signed up for virtual attendance at a couple of poetry reading; and on May 4, I will be among the features for a virtual reading sponsored by One Art journal. My physical stamina isn’t what I wish it were, but thanks to technology that enables me to participate from home, I can manage to do a bit of yard work and STILL get to a poetry event.

Just reading

Sunday evening, my weeding stirred up so much dust and chaff that I needed to wear a bandanna around my nose and mouth. A continuous late-summer drought. There are still tomatoes and basil, sunflowers and zinnias, but the avian migration has been going on for some weeks and the days are getting shorter. Just after equinox, three weeks without rain; at last the sky clouds over and drops a little moisture on the parched soil. Yellow leaves sift onto the lawn. Small flocks of robins rejoice in the softer top layer of dirt, pull at grubs and worms, then fly off.

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The rain’s necessary, and I’m grateful. Rainy days, however, take issue with my body–or, probably, the other way around. The need to take NSAIDs and rest offers the opportunity for just reading. This isn’t a bad thing, especially as I had Richard Powers’ novel The Gold Bug Variations to hand. It’s a tour de force of pattern, structure, code-breaking, DNA-building, relationships, love, chemistry, music, art, literature, and much more. I love the references (the narrator is a reference librarian), the minutia, history, alliteration, lists, compilations*, the whole thread of the novel’s dramatic arc, its relationship (mathematically, metaphorically, structurally) to music and the work of the gene-sequencing science. The book tells the parallel stories of couples who fall in love 25 years apart, the coincidences and randomness, the patterns that may not be patterns. I’m thoroughly wowed by an author who puts so much research into his writing and makes everything fit somehow.

Powers must have been about 33 when he completed this novel. I can’t imagine being so wise about human behavior and so informed about the sciences and music theory at that young age. Well, for one, I’m not as brilliant as he is; and two, I was raising toddlers when I was 33, which is a science unto itself and as revelatory as any book I could have been reading or writing in early mid-life.

But I digress. This book interests me on so many levels that I’ll be thinking about it for weeks. I may have to re-read it, take notes next time. I kept wanting to underline passages–it’s a library book, and marginalia is a no-no. I can imagine reading it again to the strains of the Goldberg Variations–indeed, I read a few chapters to said accompaniment this time. This is not a swift and easy read: it took me awhile to feel warmed up about the narrator, though she’s funny and smart. By the end, I loved her like a friend.

Honestly, novels seldom get me this excited or inspired. I’m glad I had a crappy day so I could justify lying around and “just reading.” As if “just reading” is not a worthwhile endeavor. The weeds can wait.

~

* re compilations: a word Powers employs often in this novel is the neologism/computer programming term “kludge.” I wasn’t familiar with it. But it’s a terrific word! https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=kludge

August

August is the month of the Sealey Challenge, which basically urges those who like/love poetry to read a book of poetry each day of the month. I haven’t given myself the challenge this year, but I am posting individual poetry books on my Instagram account daily–books from my personal library, mostly–and that means that I read a few of the poems, too. Sometimes I get carried away and re-read the entire book. [@aemichaelpoet]

This is not a bad thing.

Meanwhile, August this year behaves as it usually does, weather-wise: blisteringly hot and wiltingly humid. That would be okay except that June was so hot and dry and now an early hurricane has begun its climb up the coast; for now, we are stalled in a heat dome, and by Friday we may be inundated with rain. All of this means that my tomatoes are likely to split just as they all get plump and ripe. It also means that our annual folk life festival (Goschenhoppen) is likely to be a muddy, damp affair with fewer attendees than usual. These things happen, and they happen more frequently when the planet undergoes climate change.

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August, as most of us learned back in grade school, is named after the emperor Augustus, whose name means “venerable, noble, majestic.” [Source: my favorite, Etymology Online]. The online source notes that “In England, the name replaced native Weodmonað ‘weed month’.” Weed month is a perfect name for August, and I think I will adopt it from now on. It certainly fits the current state of my vegetable patch as the dog days keep the outdoors too miserable for heavy labor in the dirt.

At least for me, however, the laboring can be optional as long as I don’t object too strenuously to a haggard-looking garden. The people who are truly hard workers this time of year are construction and road crews, landscaping crews, farm workers, roofers, line workers, and others who have to brave the heat and humidity to make a living. Also the janitorial staff crews at schools and dorms and other older buildings that don’t have reliable–or any–air conditioning. When we are outdoors working at the festival in August, we get a taste of how challenging it is to do physical work in the heat. This is actually an educational aspect of the festival for those who participate, especially for younger people who are new to the festival. We remind them that people worked like this all the time, in summer and during snowy winters and in the rain and without electricity…with no escaping it, since they needed to work hard just to stay alive.

Perhaps unfortunately, our forebears’ grinding efforts may have led to the idea that only hard work will save us and make us morally upright human beings. Few of the early Germanic settlers here had much time to read or compose poetry, to savor novels, to learn to play an instrument. Art was acceptable to a degree, so long as it decorated otherwise-useful objects. The poetry of the Bible was acceptable, but it wasn’t studied for its beauty. A person with my sensibilities and temperament would probably have been an outlier in Goschenhoppen’s historic community. If I’d lived to be 66 in the early 1800s, I’d be considered “an old cripple,” mostly blind and bent over with arthritis and stenosis. But maybe I’d be the kind of old woman who tells stories.

On the other hand, maybe I’d be considered a witch! I guess it depends on what sort of stories one decides to tell.

At a previous year’s festival, with my daughter. Bewitching the local kids with potato candy!

Useful avoidance

Trapped inside with the air conditioner on for over a week, I sat by my bookshelves going through the poetry books in my library. I’m re-reading, assessing which books I truly want to keep because I turn to them often or learn something each time I read them, which books I keep for sentimental reasons (maybe I know the author personally), which ones to keep because they are signed copies, which ones are long out of print and I would never be able to replace them. Some of them remind me strongly of places or eras in my life: I bought this one in a small bookshop in Grand Rapids MI, or this one at Barnes & Noble when it was just one store on a NYC street corner, or these at the storied and much-mourned Gotham Book Mart or St. Mark’s Bookshop. What are good reasons to keep books when I really have to downsize? It’s not an easy task, and the first of many in the process of getting rid of stuff so my kids won’t be stuck doing it. Besides, I enjoy re-reading these books. My children are not as enthusiastic about poetry as I am, so it makes sense that someone who loves the works on the shelves be the one who makes such decisions. It feels good to be surrounded by the words of wonderful writers when the outdoors is brutally hot and humid, and every joint in my body aches.

Surrounding myself with other people’s books also acted as one more way of avoiding my own creative work. Sometimes, though, waiting around and doing nothing on a project ends up bringing clarification or new ideas. It can prove useful. I have been stalled on my in-progress manuscript, so a month or so back I asked someone to take a look at it–and then I got caught up in doing other things. Like getting cataract surgery and having covid, and then it was gardening in full swing under sweltering weather, and then the bookshelves… I wasn’t exactly procrastinating, but neither was I actively working on, or even thinking about, the collection.

Acquired when I was much younger, and cool bookshops abounded.

And one night recently–during a much-needed rainstorm–I got a brainstorm! I realized I was trying to pack too many topics into what really should be a manuscript more closely focused on how people who love one another vary in their relationships to old age and death, and on how the contemporary social and medical aspects of the aging process pull us in uncomfortable directions, often distancing us from those relationships. So yes, there should be family poems, hospice poems, biblically-influenced poems, and dealing-with-everyday observation poems. Also some poems of hope and love, poems reminding me (and readers) of the need for compassion in all dealings. But the draft had 92 poems in it, far too many; and some were there just because I like them or they’d been published in a good journal. Which are actually not good enough reasons to include a poem in a collection, according to most of the editors I know.

I am back to thinking about the manuscript and digging up potatoes–a nice crop this year–instead of culling the poetry books because, thank goodness, the heat wave’s subsided a bit. But in the process of this non-routine summer I have allowed numerous weeds to flourish and set seed; all the more work for NEXT year’s gardening, but it’s been too hot to deal with said interlopers. I like to believe the weeds and I are reaching a sort of understanding, but it is not really a compromise. All the concessions have been on my part. [Note: weeding a personal library is less physically taxing but not really any easier.]

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.

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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.