Tag Archives: Poetry

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.

Change of scene

Land of Lorca: Andalucia, Spain. I haven’t traveled out of the USA in 7 years, and the travel-abroad process has changed a great deal in response to covid and the use of the ubiquitous cellphone and its hosts of apps, so this trip has already been quite the adventure. No problems, however–despite my primitive Spanish language skills, people have been kind and helpful. The cellphone plan we thought we had acquired did not turn out to work in Spain for reasons I can’t explain, so I have been traveling old-school using maps instead of Google and without access to handy translation software.

You know what? That is how it used to be, and we managed somehow. I am learning a lot and viewing everything as adventure. Even the occasional snafu.

But here I am. A couple of miles from this:

Almond trees and La Muela in Almería Province in southern Spain, at an artist residency hosted by Joya-AiR. They are also on Instagram, if you are interested.

~

I guess I’m the resident poet this go-round; among us there are a photographer, a graphic artist, and two multi-media artists and they hail from UK, Canada, Italy, and USA. I have been here half a day and am already full of ideas and have had interesting conversations and have enjoyed meeting a dog named after Frida Kahlo and a goat named Fou-Fou.

This post is just a say-hi and to share my enthusiasm for this beautiful rugged place and the people who want to get into their artist-zone here. More later.

The courtyard patio of Cortijada Los Gazques, Velez Blanco

Close of the cruelest month

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

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

~

On Having Lost the Confidence of Birds

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

Au revoir, institution

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

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

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

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

The iconic Goddard College Clocktower

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

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

~

Shreds
	 for Judith

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

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

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

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


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


~

Reading by day

https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/barefoot-girls-by-ann-e-michael-p-317.html

While I await the eventual drying-out of the garden soil so I can plant a few early veggies and herbs, it seems a good time to ready a few more poems. I’m revising, drafting, but not sending out work. That feels comfortable at the moment; anyway, I much prefer writing to submitting poems.

I’ve also reserved myself some quiet hours to read books of poetry and a novel or two. Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature just arrived in my mailbox, and I’m on an Isabel Allende kick at the moment, so I definitely need some time to devote to reading. My husband, who tends to do his reading in the evenings, recently forwarded a Washington Post column by Stephanie Shapiro about why so few people read for pleasure during the day. Its title is “Why Does Daylight Reading Feel So Wrong?” She writes, “Although I am retired, I find it hard to allow myself an afternoon with a book or a long magazine article. Just the thought of settling onto the sofa in daylight hours, especially on weekdays, smacks of laziness and stirs up guilt. If I must sit at all, it should be at a desk or a countertop to do something ‘useful’— answer an email, write a grocery list, look up a recipe, what have you.”

I’m sure this is a common feeling, but it isn’t one I acquired, probably because my dad was ALWAYS sitting around reading a book, newspaper, or magazine–day or night. Reading during the day seemed normal to me. It still does, I’m happy to say.

~ Here’s a poem from my chapbook Barefoot Girls.

Night Drawn

I drew the night
with a number 2 pencil
I'd sharpened with
a Girl Scout penknife.
It was 1969. Night
needed blurred edges
so I smudged at it
with two fingers of my
right hand. And then
night left its prints
on my thumbs and palms,
somehow, on the yellow
print blouse and blue
jeans I wore.

I sketched shadows
the way I saw them
under beds and outside
windows, how they
deepened the early hours
when Grandmother
wakened by gaslight
to start her chores--
in darkness
which I learned to draw
with a pencil and
which stayed on my skin
the whole day.

Legacy vs the present

For National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem here every few days…something from one of my books and chapbooks.

First, though, musings on why it matters to me that my poems get collected in book form. I’ve been asked about this by a few people recently, sparked by conversations about the changing technology of “print,” and also artistic purpose, and even the concept of legacy. If I were a visual artist–say, a painter–there would be objects my hands had produced. Even a mediocre painter creates something apparently lasting or worth something. You die, and your paintings go to family members or to flea markets where people can purchase them (for the frames if nothing else…). A ceramicist may make truly useful things such as bowls and mugs; those items can last and be used, even if they end up in thrift shops or post-apocalyptic archeological digs. Maybe the painter or potter isn’t remembered, but the product endures for awhile.

But poems? So many people leave behind sheaves of unread, unpublished, perhaps private writing, much of which won’t resonate with anyone. Even if it could, the chance that anyone would care enough to sort through before burning or recycling and uncover a heretofore unknown genius is vanishingly small. I, for one, am not writing for eternity or for the future. I write for the now. The main reason I want to get books in print is that the product (a book! I love books!) matters while I’m here. After I die, no one will want my pile of drafts, old journals, revisions, false starts–not even my children. And why should they? Will future society value archives of anyone, let alone very minor poets of the early 21st c? Maybe the demise of technologically-based societies is right around the corner. All the more reason to work in and for the present moment. If I garner a few readers today, I feel blessed.

~ Today’s poem is from my 2011 FootHills Publishing chapbook The Capable Heart.

No Long Farewells

The weedy field.
On the rise beyond,
armies of brown corn,
ready to fall.
Willow looses streamers,
yellow kites
floundering in
tall grass.
I look at my hands, 
fingers gold. We
walk past grapevines.

Later I think of this day
as a drafty barn,
sun on its walls,
clouds high beyond rafters:
roofless. 
Nothing blocks our vision
for once. No blinders.

There is little time
for long farewells.
A light goes on.
Your bus is leaving now.
Moon follows you home.

Gratitude

Fountains of gratitude are flowing in my heart today despite the gray, humid weather that seems to set off every imaginable ache my body could have. ❤

Wow, that was a sentence of hyperbole and cliché, for which I apologize; let me begin again. I’m grateful for a number of reasons that I want to mention so I can give appropriate and public thanks to the people who have added to today’s happiness. The list starts with Dave Fry of Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse & Listening Room in Bethlehem PA, who hosted an evening of poetry–with musical interludes and conversation–this past Wednesday evening. Two members of my long-time writers group and I read our poems and talked about a few poetic forms (haiku, waka/tanka, tanka prose, and short forms generally). Dave supplied some comments to encourage audience reflection and performed interludes on guitar. One observation he made is that the classic blues song follows a structure that has similarities to a short poem form: Line, Repeated line, Commentary line (often like a poem’s “turn”).

It was a lovely event and great to share the writerly camaraderie of a long & successful critique group onstage: Marilyn Hazelton and Susan Weaver are often the first readers of my own poems. I’m grateful for their support and for the way Dave gave us the opportunity showcase poems and maybe teach a few audience members new things about poetry. Another plus was that I sold a few books! Grateful to those folks, too. That’s one way to support the arts.

Thank you as well to my Best Beloved, who attended despite feeling a little lousy from allergies, and to those of my local friends who came out to hear us. The venue charges a cover, and not everyone’s willing to shell out for poetry. Therefore, I bow deeply to you all who do.

Today I also received a kind gesture from poet, scholar, educator, and blogger Lesley Wheeler. On her blog (which you really might want to follow), Lesley wrote a mini-review of my book The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems, last summer. I’m thrilled that this week she included a mini-review of my brand-new book, Abundance/Diminishment (“ectoplasmic micro poetry reviews“). My book was in such good company! See the link above, between parentheses, for her comments on books by Diane Suess, January Gill O’Neill, Elizabeth Savage, and Jen Karetnick.

For promotional reasons, (ha!), I’ll close with what Lesley says about the collection:

“I have a similarly eerie sense of connection with a sympathetic mind reading Ann E. Michael’s Abundance/ Diminishment. This book tallies losses and bounties: it’s full of mathematical and scientific language, but what it counts and categorizes is deeply emotionally freighted. In ‘Filling Out Forms at the Gynecologist’s Office,’ she subtracts the number of her children from the number of times she’s been pregnant. In ‘Tongues,’ a child of six, mocked by classmates for the tongue sandwich in her lunchbox, prices out peanut butter–even as she loses her immigrant mother’s language. Also like Seuss’s book, this is poetry of maturity, from a time of life when a person has to begin giving it all away. I’m especially grateful, these days, for books from midlife and beyond. I learn what I need to know by reading them.”

I’m grateful, too, Lesley!

Patterns

I recently finished reading Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison, a series of essays that considers the structure of written narratives in fiction, mostly in novels. Alison’s background context is the Western-developed Aristotelian dramatic arc, that “exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/denouement” plot that generally follows chronologically. She then examines several novels, modern and contemporary ones mostly, that don’t adhere to the classic structure.

I’ve read some of the books she looks at, and have decided to put others she mentions on my to-read list, but mostly what I took away from her text is my own recognition that poets have been varying structures for a very long time. I don’t mean just the patterning difference between, say, a sonnet and a pantoum or free verse but a poem’s narrative structure, its approach to chronology, imagery, argument, world-building, and more. When I was reading, I thought of examples of poems that spiral, meander, make wavelets, are fractal in nature, or explode (to use some of Alison’s terminology).

In particular, the cellular or networked ‘form’ of storytelling seems basic to poetry–each cell a room or stanza, interlocking or sitting nearby with space around each one. The space connects as well as makes gaps, leaves room for reflection and recombined connections and new patterns; sometimes the stanzas float like little blocks on the page (or screen)…interrupting the narrative and enhancing it as well. Poetry’s narrative is often collage-like, and I notice this aspect in some newer novels as well–but I read much more poetry than fiction these days. Maybe it’s time to plunge into more novels again? At any rate, Alison’s book has made me reflect on narratives, lyrical narratives, literary structure. Maybe even the structure of a new manuscript? (I ought to get to work on that.)

If you want a taste of this book, you can read part of her opening chapter, which appeared as an essay in The Paris Review, here. I don’t teach in a classroom anymore, but if I were instructing a creative writing class I might put this book on the reading list.

Cover reveal

Earlier this week, I went to a neighboring city–Reading–to record a TV segment for the local station, BCTV, that hosts a program about poetry! The host and interviewer is poet Marilyn Klimcho of Berks Bards (a non-profit poetry group in Berks Co, PA). It was truly pleasant to read a few of my poems in a professional setting (studio), but the best part of the day was just chatting with Marilyn about poems, poets, and poetry. We began our conversation half an hour before the cameras rolled and continued it afterward, so the 25 minutes that were recorded seemed just to be part of a longer, casual discussion.

I appreciated that. I’m part of a long-running critique group, but it’s seldom that I get the opportunity to pick someone’s brain and share ideas, influences, and general enthusiasm about the art of poetry the way I did in grad school. Probably could work on getting more such discussion into my life.

The “Poets Pause” segment will air in March and then reside on YouTube, so I will post that link at some point. It was kind of Marilyn to highlight The Red Queen Hypothesis and to give me a chance to mention my next collection, forthcoming from Kelsay Books later this year. Speaking of which, I do now have a photograph of its cover:

The photo is by Don Schroder, a friend who’s got a website full of lovely images from his numerous travels to the African continent as well as good shots of festivals of many kinds and floral beauties from arboretums and gardens. Go check it out!

The cernuous tulip seems appropriate to several themes I evoke in these poems–elegies and the sense of impending losses but also appreciation of beauty and brevity and life’s many colorations. Initially, I thought that I was using fewer of the animals, plants, weather and the “nature stuff” I tend to populate my poems with, because so many of the poems in Abundance/Diminishment are for or about humans. But…nope, just took another look through the manuscript in the final approval/editing process and realized that I cannot seem to leave the planet’s environment out of my work. I probably should have been a biologist, ecologist, or a science teacher instead of an instructor of English, but oh well.

Frankly, I love the simplicity of this cover, and I’m excited to have the book in print later this year…especially since it took me a decade to get The Red Queen Hypothesis into the world.

Hominid animals

Reading Frans de Waal’s books always gets me thinking about the use of anthropomorphism/personification in poems. When I was studying and first learning about poems, the general thinking from critics seemed to be to treat anthropomorphism, and even personification, as a “no-no” in contemporary poetry. We were not to make trees or grasses or wolves “humanized”–which does make a kind of sense; instead, we were told to observe and describe what we saw with less of a reflection on whether the non-human thing bore resemblance to human things.

For example, the bee was not to love the flower or the hive, nor the ostrich to love a fellow ostrich. A willow shouldn’t sway like a dancer. It should sway like a willow in the wind. There was science behind all this, maybe Skinner’s science but still; and there is Nagel’s bat: how can a person imagine being a bat the way a bat experiences being a bat? I’m not going into reductive materialism here, don’t worry. Just trying to provide some context outside of poetry to suggest there may be forces behind the trend away from anthropomorphism, some of which are valid.

I have always been tempted to title a book The Personification of Everything.

Now science is fairly certain that emotions preceded “rational intelligence” as life evolved and that animals possess traits and behaviors that aren’t so fundamentally different from ours; we are hominid animals. I would add that, as reflective hominids who employ language for reasons beyond basic information, human beings make connections (metaphor, simile, parallelism…) and can observe the “others” in our environs as not always so unlike ourselves. Or dream of inhabiting the lives of those others, or imagine telling stories from those vastly strange (to us) points of view.

So I’m coming around to appreciating anthropomorphism and personification as dwelling in the realm of the imagination that is not the domain of philosopher or scientist. After all, writers have been taking other perspectives on stories for quite some time, especially during the past century. Ophelia’s perspective (Hamlet), Persephone’s (The Odyssey)…Kazim Ali re-writing Icarus’ story (Sky Ward, 2013). Why not, then, write poems using the perspective of the spotted lanternfly, as Robin Gow has done?

One of my favorite short stories by Ursula Le Guin, “Direction of the Road,” takes the perspective of an oak tree. It is about the relativity of time and motion, but one thing the piece brings home–without any preaching–is that human lives are comparatively brief and, dare I add, not as important in the scheme of things as we may believe. Once we can accept that possibility, maybe we can more gently embrace the world and the things of the world.