Sheila Packa Poetry Blog

In All, There Were Three Things by Fernando Pessoa

2012-01-28T12:42:00.005-06:00

de todo, quedaron tres cosas:

la certeza de que estaba siempre comenzando,
la certeza de que había que seguir
y la certeza de que sería interrumpido
antes de terminar.

Hacer de la interrupción un camino nuevo,
hacer de la caida, un paso de danza,
del miedo, una escalera,
del sueño, un puente, de la búsqueda,...un encuentro

by Fernando Pessoa

In all, there were three things:

the certainty one is always beginning

the certainty one must go further

and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.

From the interruptions, to make a new path,

from falling, a dance step,

from fear, a ladder

from dream, a bridge, from search...the encounter

By Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Cecilia Ramon and Sheila Packa

These words by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa express the frustrations of being a writer or artist. I post them here to remind myself of the fact that each new project has these three things. Art is capability, and maybe the best art flourishes in the tension between failure and success. The writer or artist learns how to use limitations productively in the service of creating the new work. In my mind, the best artists and writers are always exploring -- whether that is beings, objects or obstacles -- and learning new approaches, techniques, and methods. I remind myself -- so easy to forget -- that my muse has a name: Seek.

Quotes from the Masters

2012-01-23T10:48:00.001-06:00

"Poetry is made up of nothing except beautiful details." --Voltaire

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (July 12, 1827)

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
-- Walt Whitman, from Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way. --Emily Dickinson

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions. The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility. If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
--Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

Walking, like prose, has a definite aim....When the man who is walking has reached his goal...when he was reached the place, book, fruit, the object of his desire...this possession at once entirely annuls his whole act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the means; and whatever the act, only the result remains. It is the same with utilitarian language: the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard....The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.
-- Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The Art of Poetry

The difference between the action of a poem and and of an ordinary narrative is physiological.
--Paul Valery, "Remarks on Poetry," The Art of Poetry

Making Poems and Love

2012-01-21T11:54:00.007-06:00

If there is a connection between love and good writing, then it's the body. Many poets write the erotic. This poem by Donald Hall (see the New Yorker January 23, 2012 for his wonderful essay about aging) creates a couple making love, and his focus on the color gold fascinates me. It's as if he has set this moment in amber to keep for all eternity. The sense of enclosure is palpable, the walls of the room echoed by the sides of the clear bowl that holds the yellow roses. The other focus is centers of daisies, the couple centered in the room, and the light.

Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

The stanza break in this poem travels forward in time, beyond the deaths of these two lovers in a fascinating and satisfying figurative leap, the "tiny identical rooms inside our bodies"
where gold light will remain. The "o" sound resonates through this poem, solemn, orchestral, and extraordinary. It is as if the poet were spinning honey.

If there is one mantra spoken by writing teachers, it might be this: write with the five senses. If writers forget physicality, we forget the source of pleasure. This poem by "Little Lion Face" by May Swenson uses all the sensual and erotic possibilities of the body. Here is an excerpt:

Little lion face
I stopped to pick
among the mass of thick
succulent blooms, the twice

streaked flanges of your silk
sunwheel relaxed in wide
dilation, I brought inside,
placed in a vase.  Milk

of your shaggy stem
sticky on my fingers, and
your barbs hooked to my hand,
sudden stings from them 

were sweet.  Now I'm bold
to touch your swollen neck,
put careful lips to slick
petals, snuff up gold

pollen in your navel cup.

There are two bodies connecting, interacting, in this poem. The narrator feels "barbs hooked to my hand, sudden stings," and the dandelion she has described with "swollen neck" and a "navel cup." The entire poem delivers this level of intense connection. The sibilance, the s sounds, abound and the vowel sounds, or assonance, lends more richness. Later in the poem, echoing the succulent, the poet twice repeats the word, suck. And the erotic energy amazes, considering the topic is a dandelion. She makes love with her words. The reader is transported.

Transport is a very apt word. The use of figurative language, associational leaps of time and space, and ecstatic moments of being are the realm of poetry. In another poem by Mark Doty, "A Display of Mackerel," we find a juxtaposition of mackerel at a fish market with a Tiffany stained glass window and jewels displayed in a shop. The "iridescent, watery, prismatics" can transport us between the body of a fish, to a soap bubble, to gems in a glass case.

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

It's a meditation on love and death, this meditation on mackerel. Doty heightens the effect by
the use of high contrast. The fish are displayed on crushed ice, quickly followed by an image
of sun on gasoline. The particular is considered along with the multitude. He puts no boundary
between the natural and the created, fish scale and jeweler's enamels, dead and alive. All is
beauty. "They're all exact expressions/ of the one soul..." and

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer--would you want

to be yourself only
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They'd prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

With mackerel, no less, Doty strikes at the fundamental questions of the individual and
communal. What is it for, he seems to ask, except for what he calls in The Art of Description,
dazzle?

Love, love, love. That's what all these poems are about. They demonstrate how poets enter
writing through the body, explore with the senses, and leap into the figurative, reaching the
metaphysical, all the while remaining connected to the physical body.

___

Doty has a new book about writing, The Art of Description: World Into Word (Graywolf Press,
2010) that I recommend. From a poets perspective, he examines splendid descriptive work
by various poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swenson, and that of many
others beside an abecedarian guide.

____

"Gold" by Donald Hall
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16635

"Little Lion Face" by May Swenson
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15815

"A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty
"http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/176663

The Use of the Past: Reading Virginia Woolf

2012-01-02T13:09:00.006-06:00

Memory is a rich source of material for all poets and writers. It is the substance of memoir but also a major part of fiction and poetry. What we notice, what images resonate, what our mind fastens upon -- what fascinates -- changes over time. I've been reading a wonderful work about origins: Virginia Woolf, in "A Sketch of the Past," wrote:

"I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it -- the past -- as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There are the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start."

Each of us possesses those moments of great intensity that live in our mind, that actually illuminate and cast light on other events and become part of our perception. We listen to the past.

These moments make us who we are. Our listening to the past takes us back to events that are moments of intense sensation and awareness. Moments of being, Virginia Woolf calls them. And it isn't only events -- day dreams or night dreams like her own dream of the looking glass where she saw the frightening face of an animal in the background also create our consciousness. They are our dream of life.

Each writer has their own set of images, words, and sounds that are unique. These are repeated through one's body of work. Kate Green, a writing teacher, poet and novelist from Minneapolis, called these "totemic images" because they are very deep and they are in fact sources for the individual writer that yield again and again.

In writing, these are coordinates on the map that one might call the self. We see, hear, smell, taste and touch everything through these moments of being. It gives our work dimension and depth. Woolf said:

"I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand time deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason -- that it destroys the fullness of life -- any break -- like that of house moving -- causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L: "What's there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?" "At Monk's House," he says. So I write this, taking a morning off...I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream."

I write a lot, essay, poetry and fiction. It seems difficult now to distinguish kinds of writing -- memoir or nonfiction, fiction or poetry -- except by considering the external form, the writer's intent, and the purpose of the language. We want memoir and biography to be based on facts. of course. But it is a creation or a re-creation.

In fiction, the writer can create the facts to make a drama. Fiction captures the heightened moments of being and those other moments that mundane and the unremarkable in every life. "Non-being" according to Woolf -- "those moments lived not consciously." She said: "The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being."

Poetry (including prose poems) seems to have a shorter circuit, an immediate arrival at being, through its compression, physicality, language and music. Poetry has the capability of simultaneity. To me, it is the invention or device that Woolf wanted. Good writing does help us "plug in" and live our lives through from the start.
_______

Schulkind, Jeanne, Editor. Moments of Being: Virginia Woolf. Second Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, New York, London. c1985 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett.

Revision and The Body

2011-12-30T17:58:00.004-06:00

Good poems are written in the body. Some might say that poems are written with the body. The five senses are full engaged. The poem is connected to the body of the person and to the earth's body.

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry," says Emily Dickinson. She reminds me that part of the body is energy. The first half of this sentence, "if I feel physically..." is countered by the next part, "as if the top of my head were taken off." I think of this as energy. These days we are aware of an energy body in alternative healing, Hindu or yoga philosophy, people talk about the chakras and the concept of kundalini, the upward journey through the body toward union with the divine. This experience is a spiritual one. I define the word spirituality in this way--a mutuality of spirits, a feeling of congruence with another. Poetry is the union or communion of the spirit.

How does one create a poem that gives another person this experience? I do think there are ways to revise increase the poems physicality and spirituality. First question then is, is the poem written in the body? Does it employ all the senses? Is it fully physical?

The next question is about spirit or energy. This part of revision, in my experience is about taking out the extra junk: extra words, explanation, interpretation. It involves becoming more simple, more focused, more evocative. In my college writing class with teacher Wayne Moen, I learned that the more evocative a poem, the stronger it was. He insisted that we allow the reader to participate in making meaning. Lawrence Sterne also said this; he was the author of Tristam Shandy. Do not insult the reader, Sterne warned, by telling him what to think or feel. The revision technique needed is one of ellision. Take out clutter, words, lines, sections of the poem in a fearless surgery.

The next way to increase the energy of the poem is through the rhythm and sound of the words. One strives to create a certain music, even if it is not a formal poem, the poet pays attention to the vowels, consonants and where the stresses fall. Other things increase the energy as well -- resistances, frictions, contrasts, textures.

Muriel Rukeyser wrote about energy: "In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions."

"The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.

"If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death." --Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and social activist. The Life of Poetry was published in 1949. She was actively against the war and censorship (remember McCarthyism). The first chapters of her book examine the resistances that our culture has had to poetry. People say they "don't have time for it." I love the way she analyzes this as a fear. "A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response." Are we willing to open ourselves to an emotional experience? Are we willing to take a poem inside, to listen with our own senses to the world another has given us? Are we willing to have time for the spirit?

New Work & Poetry Hybrids

2011-12-12T16:01:00.004-06:00

Right now, I am at work on a new piece of writing. It is a hybrid between poetry and prose, and I search inside for its form. The goal is to find that interesting friction or energy that will engage me and the reader, and that will help the work go forward. Often, writer's block will occur when I've taken a wrong turn. I work in fits and starts, forward and back, revising and developing.

Anne Carson writes (from the section Short Talks in her book of essays and poems, Plainwater (Vintage Books, New York, 1995):

Anne Carson is a poet, translator, scholar of ancient Greek literature, and essayist, and she is a good example of a writer who is combining forms. She is entertaining and incisive. The Autobiography of Red carries the Greek myth of Herakles into contemporary culture. This story in poems details the Red Monster as a gay man who wears a heavy black coat to disguise his wings. We read about Herakles' mother and a lover in Argentina. The book also contains an interesting essay about the adjective and meat. The book Men in the Off Hours has poems that are essays. The Beauty of the Husband is billed as a fictional essay in 29 tangos. Decreation contains a set of poems, a play, and essays about ecstasy and eclipses. Nox is an art box of fragments and photographs, memories of a brother, and a translation of an ancient Greek elegy.

The boundaries are not fixed. Patterns shift. Formal poems give way to informal. Meaning gives way to language. Poetry gives way to prose. Sources vary. Discourses mix. There is a potluck of essay, fiction, autobiography, poetry. Conventions travel. Cultures blend. Translations err and err again. Words are the stock in trade. Poets conduct raids of other landscapes and lexicons. We make forays into art and science and metadata to yield the right friction or energy or fusion.

Recently, WW Norton came out with an anthology, American Hybrid. The editors have included many good poets who are experimenting with language, but I thought the collection falls a little short. The editors acknowledged how challenging it was to put the collection together. Their initial choices they decided against, in favor of collecting the work of the earlier generation, the precursors. The publishing world has turned upside down Cole Swenson writes, and academics are no longer on top. Changes are happening fast. Technology, the internet, and rapid changes in our culture make it difficult for an editor of such an anthology to keep pace. In order to learn the new works, it's best to scan the New York Times Book Review. Besides the interesting fusions in genre, other influences exist. Graphic novels, music videos, video games, and hypertext provide interesting story telling techniques.

I read Anne Carson because she opens doors. I also read Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian prose writer. This is an excerpt from the novel, The Hour of the Star (New Directions, 1992) that so clearly conveys that each book tells the writer how it must be written. It was written in Portuguese and is translated by Giovanni Pointiero. The narrator is a writer, Rodrigo S.M., who tells the story of a poor girl from Northeast Brazil who comes to the city and works as a typist. She is a very bad typist, and she lives a very sad existence. The drama of the novel is the struggle the writer Rodrigo has with his story. He says:

"I know perfectly well that every day is one more day stolen from death. In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze, the words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow. Allegro con brio. I shall attempt to extract gold from charcoal."

"I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day. Yet I am prepared to leave quietly by the back door. I have experienced almost everything, even passion and despair. Now I only wish to possess what might have been but never was."

Lispector is not a writer who is much concerned with plot. She has the concerns of a poet yet writes in prose. She is a wonderful and deep writer who is able to bring the reader with her into a threshold space of each moment, a threshold of becoming. This book is a very good book to read when one is struggling with a piece of writing, becoming. I return to her work again and again for her vision.

How Do You Know When You're Done?

2011-11-22T17:54:00.005-06:00

Endings are difficult -- think of love affairs, departures, and deaths. So where do you begin? I ask this question not only to open a line of thinking about the ways to conclude a poem, but as a reminder that, at least in a work of art, an end is likely intimate with its beginning. And this might be true of other things too.

A few years ago, yearning for a dog, my partner and I went to the animal shelter. There was a photograph on line. Some rescue websites post beautiful photographs of silky furred puppies playing on orange pumpkins, but the photograph we viewed was of a skinny, medium-sized black dog, smiling, behind a chain link fence. She had her head tilted just so, a certain wistfulness that caused us to get in the car and have a look. She was about a year old, and she'd been found on the Townline Road, starving. Her body revealed she had been recently lactating as well, but had no puppies. She did have a wonderful grin caused in part by a underbite, a permanent smile, a shining row of white teeth. We took her home despite the fact she could not for a minute focus on us, or be persuaded away from the rabbit cage, or coaxed into accompanying our lead on the leash. I thought of her a teen mother; bred too young, unable to be responsible. It's something we have made into a joke; we say we posted bail, got her out of jail, for turning tricks on the Townline Road. As soon as we got her home; she ran away. It's probably the Border Collie in her; she is a mix of many things. A special blend. We named her Sky.

Sky ran away several times, and in fact is incapable of staying home or in the yard. Yesterday, as I was going out of the house with an armful of old newspapers and the end of her leash, I dropped everything. There wasn't even a heartbeat of hesitation; she flung herself down the road with wild abandon. I've tried to change that behavior, carried treats in my pocket, conducted training exercises, been consistent. But running is her nature; I can't change it. Someday, I'm sure, that will be her end.

And think of all those other beginnings and ends. My last love began with a lavendar note; it ended also with writing. My job happened to me. I fell into it almost accidentally, on my way somewhere else. It was a case of being in the right time and right place, and I stayed for many years. The departure did not feature much deliberation; I was seized with a sudden urge to go, in order to pursue other opportunity. Endings can happen in so many ways. My mother died after a long illness. A cousin I had died suddenly, in a car accident.

I've been considering endings quite a lot lately, after leaving my job, and bringing another large writing project to a close. I've been doing a writing workshop every month for a year, and I wonder really, how do you know when you're done? Once one is in a flow, there is a certain force that carries you along. Endings should be considered. How do you find the right way, the right time and place?

Formal poetry have built-in conclusions. The sonnet has its question and response; the form itself lends the writer the place for a turn in the poem that becomes a conclusion. The conclusion might be an amplification or epiphany. The sestina form with its obsessive repeats of the end words, 6 line stanzas, 6 stanzas, ends in a 3 line final stanza that incorporates all the six end words used throughout the poem. The villanelle also leads the writer into the conclusion if one follows the form. Studying forms of poetry might help you understand how meter, rhyme, and line might come together. The formal poem is a like a ritual or ceremony. One follows it; the experience has a certain shape and form.

Rituals and ceremonies are wise practice; the funeral will help us accept a death. A divorce proceeding will undo a wedding. A break-up has its familiar characteristics. Good-byes entail certain rituals, even in poems. Change can happen suddenly; it can be too abrupt. A good ending is a good resolution; it satisfies.

Free verse or blank verse does not offer formulaic resolutions. I've been considering the conclusion of free verse poems and decided to review some ways they end. Some are actually good-bye poems, and some are not. This one for example is published at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19191

I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run
by Matthea Harvey

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign

for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.

When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.

The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.

Harvey's poem is very focused; she begins with rain falling, and the word "post-romantic" immediately indicates the situation is a break up; and it could be the final drink she describes in that restaurant/bar. There is a tearing sensation created by "heads in the carpets, toes tucked under carpets" and even more distance indicated by the detail about a translator and twenty horses backing away.

As the poem develops, the details exact to the room, very specific. "The drink we drank was cordial" has a very pleasing sound play. The alliteration of d sounds, hard consonants, echo a relationship that is done. The meter is very pronounced: two iambs, one anapest. It rings of ending. Image-wise, it is as if her consciousness was withdrawing from the expansive pre-romantic world and she was no longer having eye contact. "In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled."

Her last two lines are a great conclusion to the poem. The figurative image, "The Old World smoked in the fireplace," picks up a likely detail of the room she's in and uses it to mean the former world of the relationship has just turned to ashes and smoke. And "Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat" would suggest the old children's song, "Out went the doctor, out went the nurse, out went the lady in the alligator purse." But perhaps the detail might also reflect a painting found on the wall; the narrator now is no longer at the table, staring into the spoon, but even farther away. She has disappeared completely.

The conclusion is so completely congruent with the withdrawal of love; the narrator disappears before the end of the poem. It's a clear good-bye poem. The ending image is consistent with a conclusion that is a farewell. The image resonates like a bell that sounds after it's been struck.

Good poems begin in image and action, stay focused on that thing that came in when they begin, and find the sound to accompany you along the way. This is a superb poem.

Strong endings are very important to a good poem, in my opinion. There is another poem to consider. This one by Naomi Shihab Nye was published on Writer's Almanac at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/03/29

The Art of Disappearing
by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

This is a wonderful poem in a pattern of "When," "If/then," and imperatives. In the last stanza, a slight shift in sentence structure away from when and if to three commands creates a satisfying conclusion. However, there is a "then." This unifies it to the earlier stanzas. There is that resonant quality here too, in fact an actual bell resounds. The reader is left with a strong image of leaf and tumbling and the proviso to decide what to do with one's time.

The poem seems to result in a moment of silence, as if the reader must pause and take it in, as if one is filling in one's own details, weighing the desire to say no to all the expectations and demands. The sound of the language here also has a ring, the long i sound, as in chime. It resounds. The sound of the line is very important, and decisions about when one is finished with a poem can be made when one is satisfied with the sound when one reads it aloud.

There are many other ways to end poems, of course. In the poem by Allen Ginsberg, "The Lion for Real," the poem offers long ranging lines and a sequence of images in a story about a lion; the narrator of the poem explains his encounters, where and what it was like and what it did. In the end stanza, there is a shift. The narrator turns from explaining to the reader or others and addresses the lion directly. It is suddenly a prayer or entreaty to a god; and it's very powerful:
...
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the Universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy.

The entire poem can be read online at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179384

The story turns, like a sonnet might turn. It ends in a capitulation or adoration; he has offered his complete being to the fear. The last line has even a sexual inference, "I wait in my room" which acknowledges that fear is paradoxical, we are drawn to it; the power of the lion is seductive and potentially transformative. He surrenders completely.

Ginsberg's poems have an incantatory power. Howl ends with a last section of anaphoristic lines. "I am with you..." begins each line and the narrator focuses on the images of the psychiatric ward but also larger America. This poem is also at the Poetry Foundation website at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381This is the end:
...

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

The sequence of "O" phrases develop into an emotional crescendo. It moves beyond the ward, across America, in the Western night. It's no surprise that Ginsberg returns with another poem, "Footnote to Howl" that returns to Howl to add a final incantatory, celebratory footnote that is a blessing. He is grounded in the body, and singing it as holy. It's a stronger final conclusion. You can read the entire poem here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240700

The story I offered about our dog Sky is a story still unfolding. She came back today and was rewarded with treats. I'm not sure if she hasn't trained me more than I've trained her. We have -- each for the other-- expectations.

Free verse poems develop their own patterns. The pattern is an expectation, and it must be considered and lead into a satisfying ending. The structure of the poem will offer a clue to the appropriate choice. The epiphany is perhaps a classic ending to a poem; the concept of "turn," referring to a shift that's made inside a sonnet, offers a useful guide. The direction of the poem shifts; the language shifts, it is perhaps how best one can read a situation to know if it is the end.

The examples that I've offered here suggest that good endings have resonant images, pleasing sounds in the language, movement, crescendos or blessings. Finding the right ending will release the poem in the best way; it is perhaps a spiritual exchange, a transfer of image and sound that rises, travels, arrives from the writer's inhaled breath to the reader's last exhalation.

Submitting Your Work to Competitions

2011-11-03T10:57:00.001-05:00

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Whether fiction or poetry, it must be work that is original yet not merely sensational for the sake of sensation. It must contain clear, well-developed themes and be written in a style that exhibits love of language and mastery of craft.

If fiction, whether literary/mainstream or genre fiction, the characters must be fully drawn, not stereotypes, and must be engaged in conflicts (either internal or external) that are compelling and show forward momentum.

In both poetry and fiction, if it's a universal story (love, death, loss, coming of age, moral responsiveness or failure to respond), it must be told in a fresh way.

And poetry, whether formal or free-verse, must exhibit rhythm and "music" in its use of language, syntax, line breaks, and structure. A group of words carelessly slung lengthwise down a page is not a free-verse poem; it's a group of words that needs to be made into a poem.

Furthermore, a group of words that ‘plays’ with language without attempting meaning or message is not a poem, it’s an exercise.

This is an excerpt from www.danaawards.com and I've copied it here because I think it's the most succinct statement of what competitions and editors like to see. In addition, the work should be free of errors (spelling, commonly confused words, or the like) and the writer needs to read the directions carefully in order to follow the submission guidelines. In some, the author's name can not appear on the manuscript. Many of the competitions have reading fees around $25 or more; the writer should know that the prestigious awards have a lot of submissions, upward of a 1000 or more. The work needs to be a very high caliber. This is the caliber that a manuscript needs to be for publication.

I used to send a lot of manuscripts out and pay many fees--I didn't mind supporting the many small presses that used these funds to help maintain their operation. But it began to feel like a form of gambling; I realized I had better ways to use my funds. I've become more selective.

There are arts boards that take applications; these are very worthwhile and they do not ask for a reading fee. In Minnesota, the state arts board offers many opportunities. Visit their website at http://www.arts.state.mn.us/grants/artists.htm There are regional arts councils as well, and I recommend that you go to any workshops that are offered for assistance in the application process. In northeastern Minnesota, see www.aracouncil.org

Life and Work

2011-10-16T20:19:00.006-05:00

http://www.superiortelegram.com/event/article/id/59581/publisher_ID/37/
Phantom Gallery: "Migrations" a multi-media exhibit at 1215 Tower Avenue, Superior, WI: Poetry/video exhibit: On view from October 20, 2011 to November 30, 2011
www.wildwoodriver.com/rooms/migrations

Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work. Or maybe my creative work is an answer to my mother; often she told me as a child that life was hard. My grandparents were Finnish immigrants in far northern Minnesota with no grasp of the English language when they came. They lived in poverty. My grandfather's alcoholism and domestic violence only made things worse for my grandmother and their ten children. It was strength and resilience of the women that carried them through.

Migration from the old country was only the beginning, and it taught me things about moving from one culture to another. After that were other kinds of migrations: from a difficult marriage to coming out as a lesbian, from working in a taconite mine to a career in social work, from a love of hearing stories to establishing myself as a writer. One of the central obsessions in my life is the question why women (and men, for that matter) often deny their own needs, enter into or stay in dangerous situations, risk their children's safety, and deny or defy reality because of their dreams. From individual stories to myth to deep patterns in nature, I am engaged in the question about what propels us.

Echo and Lightning uses the metaphor of bird migration and myth to examine ways that women change and even relinquish the self. It is a spiritual exploration of fear, ecstasy and love through poems about Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot's Wife, Eurydyce, Leda and The Swan, and the Gnostic book Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Cloud Birds is about immigrants, bears, wilderness, bird migration, and the journey of women through hardship and violence, including the story of Persephone going back home to mother. This book explores a Minnesota family history and has a sequence of love poems to bears.

The third book, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions, traces movement and change in the community. This book is an anthology of writers from the Lake Superior and Northern Minnesota region that came out of an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning grant and my work as Duluth's Poet Laureate, teaching writing as a tool for life's transitions in the community and at Safe Haven Women's Shelter, the Family Justice Center and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project.

In addition to the books, this creative work has moved into collaborations with my partner, composer and cellist Kathy McTavish. As the name Wildwood River implies, our arts collaborative is a confluence of the arts. We live and work closely together in a wilderness area and in a creative process that draws from our own life histories and experience. The project continues in the form of musical compositions, abstract film, poetry videos, gallery installations, and live performances.

Catherine Holm (author of My Heart Is a Mountain, Holy Cow! Press, 2010) wrote: I read Echo and Lightning on my porch, after a night of queasiness, an upcoming demand later in the day, and the noise of traffic competing with the birds. I was instantly transported; material world forgotten. Packa's poems are passionate and they make me want to BE the narrator. Who hasn't "given themselves up" or left a part of life behind? What if we were the wind? What if we ARE the wind, in some or all aspects? These poems bring artistry, subtlety, and power to the world -- the world will benefit. I found myself want to, wishing to, write with this depth. This is the power of Sheila Packa's poetry. Read this and be transported. Namaste, Sheila."

The Midwest Book Review says: "The changing of seasons, the changing of life seems to move so much faster in the north. Cloud Birds is a collection of poetry from Sheila Packa, a Finnish American woman who calls Minnesota home, viewing the changing of nature and life as she sees it and always moving. Cloud Birds is an excellent compilation of poetry driven by both humanity and the beauty and uncertainty of nature. "Cloud Birds": 'we live on both sides of the border/ in two countries/ in and outside each other/ bone and blood/ in disguise without intention or force/ without blandishments/ blown by wind/ silent like shadow crossing and crossing/ over the boundaries without end/ borne by moon or sun/burnished by wing.' "

The books are available at your local bookstore or at http://amzn.to/oVJRAD

Starting to Write

2011-10-15T10:25:00.002-05:00

I begin with procrastination. Seriously, I think all writing begins this way. Instead of being discouraged, I consider this a useful tension, a gestation period. It's a time of silence and darkness, very fertile. On a subconscious level, what is going on is auditioning of images, sounds or phrases. The resistance of procrastination builds pressure, and pressure helps create the compression needed in a poem.

I walk. I avoid talking about what I'll be writing because it would dissipate the energy. I do laundry or yard work. The sound of running water is particularly conducive to writing. I shower, wash dishes, throw a load of clothes in the washing machine. Get my hands busy but keep my mind free. Writing is like becoming a river; I do things to start flowing. Read poetry. Do yoga.

I write in my journal everyday. At some point, I decide to give myself a half hour to do a rough draft of a poem. I try a writing exercise, finding one on-line or in a book.

Or, I invent ways to use the random. For example, yesterday I decided to make a word list. I chose four favorite authors and from pages of their books, using only page numbers divisible by 3, I count down 7 lines and choose a noun or verb from that line. I make a list of words. This looks like a word cloud in my journal. Then, I make a poem using most of those words. Next I make a second poem with the words used differently.

These exercises are all arbitrary, something for my conscious mind to become occupied with so my subconscious mind can emerge. I invent new rules all the time. When I find a poem of somebody else's that I love, I create a parallel poem with the same structure or with a something that is similar. I let my poem develop on its own so even I don't recognize the initial resemblance.

I give myself permission to be a beginner. Each new work will have its own set of rules that you learn as you go. Assume nothing. Listen intently. Be willing to take risks. No matter how many works you have completed, you will be surprised at what doesn't work and what does.

In my journal I write down images that resonate. It's a painterly thing to do. I focus on images and find them memorable. Sometimes I sketch. I write down stories that I tell more than once. I record my dreams. I describe places. I search my memories. I write about what I'm reading. I write listening to instrumental music, and give words to the experience.

I avoid expectations and work at being attentive, in the moment.

I create constellations of influences for each manuscript. I assemble certain books, quotes, photographs, paintings, visual images, phrases, music. These are the stars in that particular universe.

Once I have words on a page I begin playing making patterns. I add, delete, rearrange, juxtapose, use opposites. I look for contrast and tension. I listen to the sounds of vowels and consonants. I make sets and sequences. A few sequences become a manuscript. I begin looking at the larger shape of it, and it becomes part of my dream life and I dream solutions. I read sacred books. I read philosophy and study art and listen to music. These all inform my work in some way.

I have learned that letting go is necessary. I have left places and people when I could no longer feel comfortable, have given away many belongings, abandoned things, left my job. This has caused me grief. I escape gatherings, ceremonies, meetings, parties without notice. I flee. I avoid committees. It is necessary, solitude and loneliness and longing.

I believe in the hidden, emerging, invisible, and mystical. I believe in the musicality of language, believe that at some point a door will open and I will cross a threshold.

I believe in a muse and offer gratitude and praise for the poems I've received. I have an altar that is a small table that I keep empty, because the muse likes to have an emptiness to fill.

Migrations Events

2011-10-14T18:09:00.005-05:00

Performances and Readings:

Teatro Zuccone, Duluth, Sunday, Oct 2, at 3:00 pm (poetry, film, cello)
http://www.wdse.org/shows/playlist/watch/sheila-packa-migrations

Two Harbors Library, Thursday, Oct 20, 6:30 pm

Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College, Thursday, Nov 3, 7 pm
(poetry, film, cello) in Room 195, otherwise known as the little auditorium/theatre
Linda Johnson, Jan Chronister, Laura Krueger-Kochmann, Moriah Erickson, Rocky Kuikanpi, Liz Minette, Lynn Fena, Janet Riegle, Julie Gard, Michelle Matthees, Maggie Kazel, Bev Berntson, Ryan Keller, Felicia Schneiderhan, Gary Boelhower, Rocky Kuikanpi

Lyric Theater in Virginia, Minnesota, Monday, Nov 7, 6:30 pm
Margaret Veeder, Jeanne C. Maki, Kathleen McQuillan, Jane Barrick, Kat Mandeville, Lynn Fena, Leah Rogne, Liz Minette

Superior Phantom Gallery, 1112 Tower Avenue, Superior, Wisconsin on Saturday,
Nov 12, at 3 pm (poetry, film, cello).
Featured writers are Jan Chronister, Peggy Trojan, Jasmine Baumgarten, Jill Hinners, Kat Mandeville, Linda LeGarde Grover, Tina Higgins, Lisa Poje Angelos, Karen Keenan, Laura Kruegman-Kochman, Yvonne Rutford, Gary Boelhower, Michelle Matthees, Julie Gard, Maggie Kazel, and Sheila Packa.

Macrostie Art Center, Grand Rapids, Thursday, Nov 17 at 7 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Video Poems

2011-10-04T22:11:00.005-05:00

Video poems are a great way to present your work. For the "best of the web" and a wide range of the work that's being done today, see the website http://movingpoems.com/

spoken word:
"Was It I?" http://vimeo.com/30031642
(poem from Cloud Birds)

spoken word/ sequence of poems
"Immersion" http://vimeo.com/19985791
(excerpt from Echo and Lightning)

Written word:
"Black Iris" : http://vimeo.com/29698643

The abstract visual images and sound are by Kathy McTavish.

Video poems are similar to music videos -- they are very engaging. Some are animations, some are documentary, some are an intriguing amalgamation of visual images, photography, drawing, and what-have-you. Poetry is able to come off the page and into a visually interesting and musical environment that can enhance the work.

The ones that work the least well, it seems, are the ones whose images provide a literal illustration of the words of the poem. As a result, it causes the evocative quality of both the poem and the film to dissipate. The film should work as a narrative or imagistic flow on its own; the poem can be spoken, written on the film frames, or occur like text on a foreign film. I think the best video poems form interesting interstices and gaps between poem and film that allow the reader to enter into the making of meaning.

The Migrations Project

2011-10-01T04:47:00.003-05:00

About the Book: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/210797/

Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions just came out and I've been asked about where the project started and how it developed. Maybe it started with a recent trip to Finland to visit some relatives; my grandparents immigrated to the United States. They had to start from scratch and do so in a new language. They came out of hope for a better life and more possibility, and the change caused great hardship. Maybe the project started with my own changes in relationships and home. Or maybe it was a background in social work and writing; they were two separate careers, but I began to see that engaging in the arts was an effective way to deal with problems. And my own capacity to pay attention as a social worker was improved by my writing.

For me, writing is not about self expression. That is like saying gardening is a physical activity. It's true, but it leaves out the fact that it's an act of faith, an investment and act of stewardship -- the attention to soil, irrigation, and plants results in growth. It creates beauty and sustenance.

My mother's cousin in Finland, Mikko Himanko, was a war orphan. His father died before he was born, and he was raised by his mother and step-father. Now, a retired minister, Mikko spends his time interviewing and writing the stories of many war orphans. I think that's important work.

Writing is a quest to find an image, a metaphor, a pattern that is beyond the self. Like many arts, writing teaches us to pay attention. This is one of the great values of arts education, it increases skills of observation. It teaches us to listen. Writing gives one a greater capacity maybe not to solve the unanswerable questions but to hold them. It solves the question of where to put the hard stuff. To write about the obstacles or the barriers in life is to bring creative skills to the task at hand.

Migration, the annual cyclical pattern of birds in nature, happens to people. So does erosion, storm, and melting of glaciers We are not separate from the landscape; the natural patterns express themselves in human lives. Earthquake, wildfire, drenching rain. Lake turnover. These are very interesting patterns that offer metaphors.

Migrations is a theme of my work, certainly. And because of a Community Arts Learning grant I was teaching writing to people in transition. I'm enthusiastic. Because of being in the role of Duluth Poet Laureate, I developed a community writing project of placemats printed with area writers poetry and given to diners at the Empty Bowl fundraiser for the Northern Lake Food Bank. Because it is my job to promote poetry and increase the audience, the project fell into place.

My project started small and got bigger as I read the beautiful work that people sent to me. Others refer to this as "scope creep." It has certainly expanded my own skills at editing and helped me examine my theme through the words of many contributors. I've learned more project management skills.

I couldn't have done it without help from my partner Kathy McTavish and Wildwood River, our creative collaborative. Art making is at the center of our life, it's our business. She is a composer, cellist and media artist. I am a writer. We inspire and support each other.

It's satisfying to bring the work of a community of writers together into a book. It's like introducing your friends to each other. It shows the community the depth and breadth of the writing here. It offered the opportunity for me to bring together my two careers at the point where I leave social work to write full time. The book creates an opportunity for readers to reflect and to pay attention to the changes going on in their own life.

Making a Book of Poems

2011-09-20T01:34:00.004-05:00

Sequences & Consequences

Since January, I've been at work on new poems. Writing is a daily practice; I keep a journal of images, dreams, encounters, and lists. I write about books, movies, and things that strike me. The journal is a tool I use to pay attention, and it is the source book of my poems. In January, I started a twitter account and began posting writing prompts. It was the writing teacher in me that came up with the idea. Privately, I wanted to write a poem in response to my own prompt...but not tweet it.

I'm fascinated by stories about books and how they come together. I wanted to share my own experience; maybe it might help other writers articulate their own process.

My main goal at the beginning of a new book is to not be controlling, but to let individual poems emerge and then stack them for later review. I share them with a few friends to get feedback, revise, and return them to the stack.

Nine months into this process, I took out my notebook and looked for poems that were related by image or theme and arranged them into a sequence or set as if I were going to present them at a reading or performance. This chapbook size (chapbooks are about 20-30 pages) sequence is the building block of a full size manuscript (a poetry manuscript is about 60-100 pages in length).

There are some guides available about assembling a poetry manuscript. Ordering the Storm by Susan Grimm offers several essays from various writers about their methods. Of course, what works for one writer will not work for another. The best guide for the form of your book is careful examination of the poems inside -- you must listen to the work.

After developing a sequence of poems, I notice repeated words and images. Revising begins. I consider poems' relation to each other. I find a good opening poem. Like the first sentence or paragraph of any book, the opening should be interesting and have a hook. It introduces the reader to your themes or preoccupations. The last poem should be satisfying. In between, if it's a narrative, a rising and falling arc. The work needs an overall title.

While in this stage of the process, I maintain the daily writing practice. In addition to the journal, I start writing about the process of assembling the new manuscript. Writing is not merely a process of recording thoughts; it is a path of discovery. New things will occur to you while writing that would not occur otherwise.

In addition, I collect my current favorite poems and poets, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, music, and objects. If I find a book I love, I keep it. I read and reread it, examining how it is assembled: as if it were a garment, I consider the fabric, the cut, the seams, the finishing. I will do this with individual poems. I will read the poems aloud often and hand copy them in order to run them through my hand, in order to personally experience the words, the line breaks, the stanzas, everything.

These collected works form a constellation of influences over my own new work. I look for patterns and stories in the constellation. This is the time when I write ekphrastic poems (poems in response to visual art). My book Echo & Lightning was somewhat influenced by a painting by Emily Carr that hung in my studio. I work on poems that respond to the other works, that create a dialogue, pay homage or explore a form or an image. This might be called research and development.

One of the ways I further develop a manuscript is to explore memory, myth, and music. Memory both personal and communal, historical. This is a consideration of roots. By writing in this direction, I deepen the work and find ways to connect it to family and historical events. Next, I consider cultural or mythic stories to find resonating patterns. This is the opposite of roots. It's a reaching outward. Religious stories and archetypal patterns are powerful forms; if you connect to them, your work will extend farther. Christianity, Greek myth, Nordic myth, the Kalevala (epic poem of Finland), and archetypes explored by Carl Jung and others might be part of your consciousness. I consider runes, the I-Ching, and Tarot cards for their archetypal images. Often times I write poems that connect with these larger patterns.

The work I do in this process might end up in the manuscript or it might not. There can never be any expectations of new work; it must find its own direction and form. My job is keep experimenting, playing, feeding the work, enriching the ground and the environment.

Preoccupations arrive. For instance, during the making of the last book, Cloud Birds, bears began to visit. In one summer, I encountered no less than seven bears. Because of a childhood terror of bears, I was faced with managing my anxiety. In order to overcome my fear, I decided to write twenty one love poems to bears (I was inspired by Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and One Poem of Despair). As it turned out, the bears helped me identify that one of the themes of Cloud Birds was fear. It's important to pay attention to your life and what is going on; it feeds the creative work. Be receptive.

"Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work," said Carolyn Forche to me years ago at a poetry workshop. This meant that things you might think of as distractions, interferences, or obstacles might very well be the heart of your book. Write about it. Pay attention!

Music is a very important element of poetry and revision. The sound and rhythm of the sequence is a point of consideration. Are these breathless or fast-paced? Are these contemplative? What are the textures? How do the individual lines and stanzas best convey the rhythm and sound?

Other considerations in revision: point and counterpoint. Good art has interesting contrast. This is true of a book of poetry. Design principles used in visual art or architecture are useful. Consider your unique mark, perspective, composition, imagery. Is it collage or painterly? If it were a physical space, what would be its entrances, exits, transitional spaces?

I am interested in creating a world. Some writers might focus primarily on the story. But there are story telling techniques or narrative strategies that can enhance or emphasize certain aspects. For example, the rule of 3 occurs in fairy tales, the character gets 3 wishes. There is the "onion," or "once in a blue moon," or "journey" template. Consider the techniques used by the earliest narratives: Chaucer's Tales, Beowulf, stories of Camelot. It's wise to trust your instinct, and then in revision understand how the choice works for the manuscript.

A book takes a lot of writing and a lot of time. After I have sixty or so poems, I began to consider the overall shape of the manuscript. Everything needs to be deliberate, even if serendipity and accident put it together initially.

I make decisions about sections, as in, how many sections (if there are sections)? what is each section about? what order do I put the sections in? The first sequence I have in Echo & LIghtning is about migration and ascension; the middle section is about descent. It seemed logical, and it was the shape of a wave, which made sense for the overall form, a collection of poems strongly connected to water and sky.

Also very valuable: good readers. If you have good readers to give you feedback, you will be a better writer. If you hear the same suggestion from two or more friends, pay attention. These are my thoughts about my process; your process might be different. I suggest you write about it.

Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life's Transitions

2011-09-11T16:23:00.003-05:00

Performances and Readings:

Teatro Zuccone, Duluth, Sunday, Oct 2, at 3:00 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Two Harbors Library, Thursday, Oct 20, 6:30 pm

Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College, Thursday, Nov 3, 7 pm
(poetry, film, cello)

Lyric Theater in Virginia, Minnesota, Monday, Nov 7, 6:30 pm

Superior Phantom Gallery, Saturday, Nov 12, 3 pm (poetry, film, cello)

Macrostie Art Center, Grand Rapids, Thursday, Nov 17 at 7 pm (poetry, film, cello)

The Community Arts Learning Project has developed into this anthology about changes. You will want to read it! Here are some reviews:

"The Lake Superior area has either bred or attracted an amazing community of poets, and the best are featured in this diverse collection edited by Sheila Packa. While the title Migrations implied any number of processes to me, I was struck by how many delightfully (or darkly) unexpected topics Ms. Packa had included. Love, childbearing, opening, the creative process, Christmas, aging, divorce, the seasons, Paul Wellstone’s death, all and many more are examined in these luminous poems. Open to any page for the gift of a glimpse into the poet’s mind and heart!
Carol Orban, retired teacher, Ely, Minnesota

Sheila Packa's Migrations is the product of a born writer’s craft nourished and shaped by immigrant work ethic and iron will, Finnish music, burning taconite pellets, long northern Minnesota winters, seeing deep patterns in nature and community and literature. With this potent collection of poems and prose she helps us connect with ourselves and one another as a community in the midst of change, movement and radical growth.
Ann Wallin Harrington
Family Justice Center Facilitator

Migrations is a marvelous collection of wide-ranging, in-depth reflections in poetry and prose on major existential transitions and reinventions. It conjures up colorful images of weather, flight, birds, water, air, associated with transformations triggered by experiences such as being trapped, going away, bewilderment, violence, aging, loss, death, trauma, emigration, and departures.
Tineke Ritmeester, PhD, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She is a Dutch immigrant in transition.

In your hands, you hold a unique collection of high quality poetry and prose by favorite & by newer Lake Superior area writers. Don't set it down! Turn the book over to examine the cover and lift it to smell this ink-and-paper presentation of singular ideas. And know that Migrations follows the primary rule of poetry, reframing details of your world in ways that jolt your consciousness.
Cal Benson, author of Dakota Boy

From the Introduction:
Each fall, along the western shore of Lake Superior, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds ride the thermal currents above the dark conifers and bright reds and golds of autumn leaves. They follow the shoreline. Under their outstretched wings, I reach for the language of flight as I gather and arrange this collection of poems and prose.
This book is about migrations in life that all of us make: the embarking, the long journey, the returning — beginnings and endings, irrevocable. We are like birds in migration, traveling between memory and new beginnings. The stories and poems capture the voices of many writers and the landscape of the North and of Lake Superior.
...
In every workshop, I hear new and arresting voices. I've included poems of blessing and transition, polished and unpolished, that capture an image, a turning point, and a unique voice. Each was like a bird inside a larger flock and as such, wide-ranging.
...
Years ago, in the Split Rock Arts Program, I talked with poet Carolyn Forché about the difficulty of finding time to write. It seemed I was always in transition, juggling many responsibilities, and found it challenging to set aside enough time to write.
"Whatever keeps you from your work becomes your work," she said, meaning that I should write about what I was currently grappling with. Along with her husband, freelance photographer, Harry Mattison, she had facilitated the Iron Range Documentation Project. As a social activist and witness to atrocity, Carolyn Forché's own voice became the vehicle of many, and she wrote to reveal the pain and suffering in Nicaragua and other places. Later, she edited an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (WW Norton, 1993).
Poetry can be many things: song, story, memoir, philosophy, image. Poetry can use many narrative strategies: journey, list, prayer, blessing, letter, or quest. Poetry can witness; it can be an agent of change. It can preserve a moment with vivid immediacy. It can awaken. Its purpose is diverse, but it always illuminates.
I followed Forché's advice, and now give that same advice to a lot of writers. If something is an obstacle, write about it. If something is getting in the way of your writing, then you should be writing about that. If you are preoccupied, let your thoughts go into ink on a page.
It is important to create a time and place for writing. There is evidence that keeping a journal improves one's health and immunity, and that it speeds recovery from illness. Writing is a tool of the mind, but I also think it is a tool of the soul. The poet Linda Hogan once said, "Whatever you write will make it stronger." Writing helps one find and use a voice. Writing strengthens identity and allows it to develop and change. Writing about place helps us understand our roots and name our desires, not just for ourselves but for the larger world.
A community that honors and celebrates the arts becomes a community of openness and exchange. Unique voices rise that bring images and stories that stir us. The arts foster diversity not uniformity. The community that invests in the activity of art making is preserving its culture and promoting creativity. We are all strengthened.
These poems, stories and essays form a conversation; I invite the reader to participate. At this moment, something is changing in your life. Find an image or a metaphor to enter the complexity. For me, writing is a type of way-finding, a lamp in darkness.

Poet's Work: Condensery

2011-09-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

My grandmother worked with wool. She raised sheep, and spun their fleece into yarn. She knitted the yarn, and then boiled the knit to shrink and thicken the wool into felt. Felted wool slippers and hats are phenomenally warm, protecting the wearer from piercing northern winters. As a writer, I am more of a wool gatherer, but my process with language is similar to her process with wool.

There is a difference in the language of poetry and prose that can be described by using the word compression. Paul Valery said the language of prose is meant to fall away once meaning is delivered, but this is not so with poetry whose language is meant to recreate the breath, and make the poem new each reading. Reading poetry gives the reader an ear for this, and I recommend reading poetry extensively. There are techniques that poets use to compress the language.

Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker

Grandfather
   advised me:
          Learn a trade

I learned
   to sit at desk
          and condense

No layoff
   from this
condensery

Condensery is an apt term. The poet must condense the language; in the condensing, the language begins to have more substance. My grandmother had her copper laundry boiler, a wood stove, and wooden paddles as tools to condense her knitted garments into felt. The poets' tools also allow one to put the language through a process. Figurative language allows a writer to compress language. Metaphor is effective; the writer talks about two things at the same time. Consider this line from the poem, "Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"And have we room/ for more folded sunsets, still quite warm?"

One word will makes the difference. If the poet had used the word 'blankets' instead of 'sunsets,' then the effect would have been prosaic. Bishop's decision to use sunsets makes the sentence take on more wonder. One can imagine the sunset's colors folded and put away like blankets. Can one take a sunset along, in a suitcase? The sunset suddenly becomes intimate as the blanket on a bed, it has a tactile sense. She did not say blanket, but she has created a physical sense of touch by suggestion. A single word choice made the meaning both intimate and expansive. The compression the poet achieves here suddenly vaults the reader into another space.

Poetry often evokes more than one meaning; Mary Oliver says poetry is language that casts more than one shadow. If it casts a shadow, then it must have solidity and heft. This solidity and heft comes from the five senses, the perceptions of the body. If it casts a shadow, it could be a thing or a being, like cart or a horse. Interesting possibilities, this intensity of poetry. Each word has a history and a host of associations; the poet considers this. Sometimes words come out on paper perfectly, but many times revisions help the poet find just the right language.

Here is another example:

Question
by May Swenson:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

This poem is physically palpable. The form is created by a parallel questioning. The words lend their history and associations to the task; the words are tightly bound together like wool beat into felt. My house, my horse, my hound. The series of words illuminate the body as place first followed by images of horse and hound. Speed, beauty, animality. Hound also invites associations with hunting and baying. Metaphor again. In this spare poem, Swenson also uses sound elements and patterns to compress the poem. The rhymes are tight: ride and hide, I and sky and lie. Almost rhymes: quick and thicket. hound and mount and cloud. Alliteration (same consonant sounds) and assonance (same vowel sounds) occur; everything intense.

The form of a poem lends the poet a tool for condensery. Repetition and variation are built in to some forms like the villanelle, pantoum, or sestina. Other forms have strict limits like the haiku, seventeen syllables, or the sonnet, fourteen lines in a certain rhyme scheme. One must compress and cut the language to fit. In addition, poets add tension. Suspense or the use of opposites add tension. Twists. Line breaks and choices about form can also increase the compression.

Robert Lowell, in interviews, said poems must be high tensile objects. He talked about setting up tension in or between the poem's metrics and in the form or content of the poem. For example, a sonnet form sets up an expectation of rhyme. The poem might use blank verse (iambic meter) and instead of rhyme on the end lines place it elsewhere, internally.

Condensing is perhaps also a process of reduction. One takes away words and phrases, a process Virginia Woolf referred to as ellision. In the taking away, the poet can heighten the effect and create an ambiguity that evokes more meaning. Spareness is often powerful.The stronger the focus, the stronger the poem. Using precise and concrete images adds weight. Staying in metaphor adds focus.

Sometimes I think the form of the poem is a dialectic between language and white space, silence. Dialectics, or the use of opposites, compress. Allusion to other literary work adds weight and meaning.

Add heat. Keep refining. Words are like wool; they have fibers that pull on other fibers. About wool, my grandmother knew about boiling, then ice. She knew how to take fiber into strand into knit into felt.

Poetry is distilled. From language, the poet makes a tincture or an essence. A poet learns to create a distillery to turn grain into whiskey or potatoes into vodka.

Perhaps condensery is akin to the ancient science of alchemy and its quest of turning metal into gold.

Of course, some writers do this is in fiction and essays as well. The writer, Clarice Lispector, created visceral, existential consciousness for the reader via the use of character and setting. Her language is compressed like poetry, compressed to a point of great intensity as if she were at a work bench, cranking the words with a vise. I read her work for its lessons in compressed language as well as for her vision.

This sentence in her book Stream of Life conveys in just nine words her unique voice.

"I am before, I am almost, I am never."

This poetic language uses parallel structure, repetition, variation, and sound in a tight form that conveys psychological truth. It embraces opposites. None of the phrases are subordinated; all are equal. It is tensile and brilliantly evocative.

Niedecker's poem "Poet's Work" expresses the poet's endless search, the quest for the right words and the right arrangement. It is work that is never done.

Sources:
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. c1984.
Lispector, Clarice. The Stream of Life. University of Minnesota Press. c1989.
Alexrod, Steven and Helen Deese, editors. Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. Cambridge University Press, c1989.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Mariner Books. c1994.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. University of California Press. c2002.
Swenson, May   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177225
Valery, Paul. Selected Writings of Paul Valery. New Directions Press. c1964.

The Architecture of Poetry

2011-08-12T15:39:00.000-05:00

The Architecture of Poetry

The Gallery by Tomas Tranströmer
Miniature by Yannis Ritsos

I'm fascinated by architecture and its link with poetry. Architecture offers to poetry the principles of design. One of my favorite poems is "The Gallery" by Tomas Tranströmer. He was a Norwegian poet of great skill. This poem combines a deep interior world with a wide exterior. It is one of the best examples of poetry and architecture that I have seen. The poem is not about architecture; rather the design of the poem uses the architecture of its location as a foundation. Also the poem "Miniature" by Yannis Ritsos is framed by a room where two people are having tea.   Likewise, this poem uses the pattern language of a tea room, the ritual of making tea, to express an inexpressible good-bye.

I've found wonderful books about architecture that I believe have deep links to poetry: Christopher Alexander, Vol I: The Timeless Way and Volume II: A Pattern Language. Alexander focuses on living patterns as a way to think about design; he names these patterns with basic, almost archetypal, images: 'the gate', 'the way,' 'entrances & exits,' and 'spirit places.' He examines the features of various buildings: the honeymoon cottage, teenager's cottage, and the like. Recognizing the human needs of various phases of life, he identifies ways that buildings can help people. Therefore, a teenager's cottage needs to be close by, but have more privacy. A bench near the front entrance of a building will provide the elderly a place to rest and watch others in the community. It's architecture that evolves from the consideration of human needs. These words, which he uses as a language, encourages one to think of a larger patterns. Basically, he urges builders to consider making buildings that are organic, that reflect the life inside, and contain living patterns.

I like to adapt his ideas to poetry. Writers would also benefit from the consideration of a pattern language. Entrances and exits, for instance, can help us think about how a poem begins or ends. There are many ways to create an entrance; considering the larger scheme helps us to make the choice. Not only that, contemplating the rituals or patterns of life is useful. The patterns of life, reflected in a poem, will enhance the structure of the poem and the life of both reader and writer.

Alexander writes in The Timeless Way: "It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it can not be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it." This process is not one of forcing a pattern, but of watching the unfolding of a natural one. It is not about control, but it is about attentiveness.

Tomas Tranströmer's poem "The Gallery" is an example of a poem with beautiful architecture. The title The Gallery is figurative. The narrator in the poem describes a sleepless night in a motel, but each of the images that emerge from the wall are like portraits in a gallery; the long poem is both surreal and deeply moving. Translated by Robert Bly, this is the ending of the poem:

I stayed overnight at the sleepwalker's motel.
Many faces here are desperate
others smoothed out
after the pilgrim's walk through oblivion.

They breathe vanish struggle back again,
They look past me.
They all want to reach the icon of justice.

It happens rarely
that one of us really sees the other:

a person shows himself for an instant
as in a photograph but clearer
and in the background
something that is bigger than this shadow.

He's standing full-length before a mountain.
It's more a snail's shell than a mountain.
It's more a house than a snail's shell.
It's not a house but has many rooms.
It's indistinct but overwhelming.
He grows out of it, it out of him.
It's his life, it's his labyrinth."

The gallery is a word that reflects a pattern language. This word choice gives us an immediate understanding of a night that is spent viewing portrait after portrait of haunting images. Tranströmer uses the architecture of the motel and gallery to keep the poem structured and focused. And like the shifting portraits that emerge from the motel wall, the image of the narrator shifts with each line in the last stanza.

Another book that provides an interesting insights is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. A sampling from the Table of Contents reveals these phrases: House and Universe, Nests, Shells, Intimate Immensity, Miniatures. The phrase 'intimate immensity' perfectly describes a good poem like the one by Tranströmer. It is specific and detailed, and yet it offers an immensity.

Reading this list in the table of contents brings to mind another beautiful poem, "Miniature" by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos.

Miniature

The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child's fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

(trans. Edmund Keeley)

This poem is contained by the tableau in this room, yet it contains an intimate immensity.
Poetry is a practice of architecture. A poet might consider what type of dwelling a particular poem provides: a kitchen/dining space, a gallery, a spirit house, a honeymoon place, or a tomb, for instance. Each has different characteristics and expresses a deep human need. The best form or design for the poem is the one that best facilitates the living pattern. In the revision, a poet might discover ways to enhance the living patterns inherent to the work. Repetition, variation, and music offer patterns to the poet. The goal is not to create complexity; the best work creates simplicity.

Alexander says, "The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one pattern to life; and the intensity of the results depends on the intensity of each individual step."

The poems by Tranströmer and Ritsos have the intensity of which Alexander speaks and the intimate immensity articulated by Bachelard. They both are very intimate revealed experiences that are specific to time and place. They are small scale, and the architecture that informs this essay is also small scale. The following link features photographs and a story of a couple who live in a 12x12 cabin, off the grid. It is an example of the poetics of space and attentiveness. And, on the shelves of their tiny home is a lot of poetry.

http://www.innermosthouse.com/#/innermost-house

To Punctuate or Not

2011-08-09T20:58:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, a poet uses punctuation in a poem and sometimes he or she does not. To examine the possibilities, I've brought together four poems without punctuation written by respected poets. In this first vividly realized poem by Lucille Clifton, the line seems to follow the philosophy of "the line is a breath." The line break can be used in a way that gives the reader a chance to breathe between phrases.

miss rosie
by Lucille Clifton

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

She has used two commas inside two lines, each occurs after the same word, "sitting." It seems to help Clifton create a parallel structure, although what follows after the word is not exactly parallel. Another poet might be tempted to use commas after the phrases. However, a comma at the end of a line seems to make a harder "end stop." Some poets who do use punctuation avoid a comma at line end because there is already an inherent pause. A line break without a comma adds a level of ambiguity, a slight pause between words that can add extra meanings.

Other things besides a lack of punctuation are noticeable. Clifton does not capitalize any words except Georgia Rose. She does not capitalize the subject, miss rosie. Neither does she follow the convention of capitalizing the personal pronoun I. One might speculate that she wanted to minimize the "I," downplay the personal narrator in order to indicate that "I" is no more important than "you." The "i" occurs five times however. In such a short poem, five is a lot. One line is just one short syllable: "or" makes an interesting hinge or pivot point in the poem.

The repeated phrases serve to provide a structure for the narrative: "...when i watch you..." "i stand up" clearly communicates respect and honor for the subject of the poem, miss rosie.

So, why then is Georgia Rose capitalized? Is a flower, a state flower, more important than the individuals? The phrase does provide a geographic location for the narrative; the phrase also highlights that the subject's name is rose, miss rosie. It provides an enduring image of beauty, the ultimate ideal, contrasting with subject's apparent destruction. Clifton makes very good use of the senses. The smell of too old potato peelings is such a deft use of detail. The line, "...in old man's shoes with the little toe cut out" is another good detail. She grounds the poem firmly in the body.

The lack of punctuation seems to present a fragment, or a breathless utterance. It might indicate the narrator is placing herself equal to miss rosie; perhaps both the narrator and the subject exist outside convention. Perhaps they don't follow the rules, or live beyond them.   Punctuation or the lack of it can provide meaning in this way.

In the following poem by Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, the poet also avoids punctuation. She does however use capitalization as if beginning a new sentence. Perhaps she meant to signal a new breath or new idea, but not a hard end stop. Not all the lines start with a capitalized word. Niedecker generally used a short line with a tight sound play in the stanzas.   It's a shorter rhythm, almost syncopated. She was born in 1903 and died in 1970; she was known as an avant garde poet. She was connected to a group of poets called 'objectivists' (the word was first used by Louis Zukovsky). William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth are both considered to be part of this group.

Paean to Place
Lorine Niedecker

...
I grew in green
slide and slant
     of shore and shade
           Child-time--wade
through weeds

Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando
    sublime
         slime-
song

Grew riding the river
Books
    at home-pier
         Shelley could steer
as he read

I was the solitary plover
a pencil
     for a wing-gone
From the secret notes
I must tilt

upon the pressure
execute and adjust
      In us sea-air rhythm
"We live by the urgent wave
of the verse"
...
Her poems have beauty and strength in the choice of word and sound. Alliteration and assonance cause a pleasurable sound play along with rhyme and near rhyme. The rhymes are in words close to each other and not at the ends of phrases. With her short lines and tight turns, punctuation may have caused the reader to stop in ways she preferred not to have happen. Her stanzas that are similar in size and line breaks. The use of a capitalized letter is an interesting detail, perhaps a technique that helps the reader find the beginning of a new thought.

In the following poem by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, the reader encounters a capitalized beginning of each line with no punctuation. Without punctuation, all line breaks have roughly the same weight or pause. One continues reading at the same pace throughout the poem.   Without punctuation, the line seems to end in space, without landing. It is as if broken off in mid-breath.

For the Anniversary of My Death
W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

This poem also has the development of consonant vowel sounds that make for a pleasing experience. The poem arrests the reader with its speculation; one always marks the anniversary of one's birth, but the opposite of that, the anniversary of one's death, exists unbeknownst to us. It is a bare shadow that Merwin finds and names.

In the following poem by e.e. cummings, there is no punctuation except for the apostrophe mark and a hyphen. The hyphen is not used in a standard way. Here, he hyphenates words not usually hyphenated.

Buffalo Bill's
e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                        Jesus

he was a handsome man
                                    and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

He does use conventional capitalization for names but not for the personal pronoun I.    e.e. cummings is known for his creative arrangements of the words, spacing or not spacing, stringing together or breaking words apart on a line or across lines. Many poets use the lines and spaces as a form of musical score; the reader can run the words together, read words fast, and then have a long pause for the next line, "Jesus' is far indented, as if hung on the end of the line before it. cummings also avoids using the question mark at the end. I think this adds an ambiguity. It begins as a question, but perhaps offers an acerbic comment instead.   By avoiding the punctuation mark, the poet is able to create more ambiguity and therefore more possible meanings.

Each of these poems would be much different with conventional punctuation. Each poet had internal consistency with his or her approach. Each used other unusual methods with capitalization or no capitalization; they used spacing in a way that also would affect the breath.

When writing or reading poems, consider the uses that punctuation has. Many poets use punctuation just as it is used in conventional sentences. Done this way, the writer can guide the reader toward meaning and rhythm. If the writer chooses not to punctuate, then I think it's important to have or to develop an internal consistency. Without punctuation, one must consider line breaks and other use of white space in the development of structure and rhythm.

It does seem that an unpunctuated poem is closer to a fragment. In my own poems, a series of unpunctuated poems serve as a fragments of a longer arc that usually is marked off in sections. Initially I used it because some poems arrived in dreams, as a stanza. I wrote them down just 'as is.' Later, I began other series that seemed to work better without the conventional stops of punctuation. This added a breathlessness or a speed to the poem that would not exist otherwise. I would never swear off punctuation; like other elements in poetry, it's best to use or not use this element deliberately.

How to Be Creative

2011-07-24T12:44:00.000-05:00

I took Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write from my bookshelf the other day. I don't think I can ever become an e-book reader with my penchant for paper. My paperback copy, from Graywolf Press, 1987, is a worn blue reminiscent of tile borders, framing the yellow ivory front cover. The glue of the binding is getting brittle with age, someday I might open this book and it will snap into sections, and pages that I have lined with a yellow marker will fall out.

There are two photographs of the author just inside the cover, one in 1938 as a young woman and the other in 1983 as a old woman. In the second photograph, Ueland's decorous image has changed to one much more flamboyant. Instead of a solid color blazer, hers has wide vertical stripes. Her hair is no longer neat and carefully combed. Her gaze no longer pensive but direct. I like to think aging is a process of throwing off convention and others expectations to become more oneself.

Today, I notice Chapter IV: The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly. She explains what creative power is and how to use it. Be idle, she says.

Of imagination, she writes, "...memory and erudition can smother it very easily," and "...smart, energetic, do-it-now, pushing people so often say: 'I am not creative.' They are, but they should be idle, limp, and alone for much of the time, as lazy as men fishing on a levee, and quietly looking and thinking, not willing all the time. This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas."

Moodling, she calls it. It is the idle time similar to the play of children, without anxiety or pressure to make something meaningful. It is not using the leisure time to smoke or drink or find endless distractions, but to simply dream. Leave off "measuring, comparing, cautioning, advising prudence, warning against mistakes...anxious doubts" in favor of wandering and searching. Take long walks. Don't be too busy. It's slow work, as Ueland says.

My mother, who spoke English as a second language, used to call social events "doings." This too can become consuming. I used to be so busy with doings. I used to have not one but two jobs.

The photographic images of young writer and old writer remind me of the final destination of each of us: mortality. Life is so brief. We have limited time to do creative work. Why put off a poem or a story until you're done with work, mown the lawn, cleaned the house? Why wait until you've saved more money, retired? Where is the end point of all that busy-ness?

It's a paradox. In order to be productive creatively, you need to give yourself time off. In order to do that, you have to get off the treadmill, avoid debt, re-examine your ambition. Do you really need a larger house or more things? Do you really want to take on more responsibility, work so many hours, if it takes you away from your creative work?

Throughout my life, because I was not wealthy, I thought that one could either have time or money, but not both. I took some leaves of absence, for time, but went back to work. Right now, I've elected time. Before I am like the photograph of an old woman, I've chosen to step away from all "the getting and doing" in order to be in my studio, where like the men fishing on the levee, I will be moodling.

The Umbrella and the Piano

2011-07-03T16:52:00.000-05:00

Story telling is critical for every culture. It links person to person, group to group, culture to culture. It links seemingly disparate things. Stories can heal us. According to Judith Herrmann in her book Trauma and Recovery, telling the story to the community and having the community hear the story helps people cope.

Poetry not only tells a story, but also wields image, metaphor and pattern in the telling. This creates a very powerful tool of transformation. D.H. Lawrence, in an introduction to Harry Crosby's Chariot of the Sun, writes:

"The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers' a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth."

He goes on to say, "Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos."

Lawrence gives the reader an image: an umbrella, our vision. A version of reality. So flimsy, a hard wind will turn it inside out and break its spines. We can turn it into shelter, plaster its ceiling, paint it, use it as architecture, a space to live in. So circumscribed, we eventually mistake it for the universe, until somebody damages the fragile thing.

"Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun."

Even a little research does indicate that many poets are the enemy of convention. Convention can be positive; but it is artificial and eventually oppressive. It's a made thing that is imposed on life. As a genre, poetry embraces both chaos and order. Loss and love. Maybe poets remind us there is not one thing without the other.

Perhaps the sun, a swirling orb of burning gases destructive and essential, is an apt image of chaos. It blinds us with its harsh brilliance and makes things grow. An umbrella offers protection, some shade, a story we tell ourselves. The umbrella reminded me of this poem he wrote:

THE PIANO

by D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;   
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see   
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings   
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.   
   
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong   
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside   
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.   
   
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour   
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour 
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast   
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Lawrence sat beneath the piano as his mother played, and later as an older man yearns for that beautiful ceiling of sound, the splendor and thunder. It is a magnificent umbrella.

One moment suddenly cracks open flood of loss. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "There is a crack in everything God has made." A crack in everything, Leonard Cohen said, is how the light gets in. Lawrence refers to poets themselves as people who will break convention, make a slit in the umbrella, break illusions. Of course, not just poets do this. Damage is done in many ways, by many people. Poets recreate another vision, offer a new umbrella.

Story-telling is one of the best responses we have to the chaos of the universe. One story won't explain it; I believe it is a joint and communal task to tell stories. It makes sense that one story can not carry us, that the story needs to change each time we catch a glimpse of what's out there, in that moment between when our ceiling cracks and falls and we rebuild it, when the chaos inside us sees the one outside.

Between those two things, maybe it is wise to focus attention on the beautiful fresco. Build a fine instrument, have a beautiful song, make a new world. Let's make a lot of umbrellas, even though they won't last. Nothing does.

Read Lawrence's Introduction here
http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/lawrence1.htm

Federico Garcia Lorca & The Duende

2011-06-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

What is the source of power in poetry? What leads one to write it, or causes one to seek it? Some writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin report that the writing was given to her by God; she merely wrote it down. Is there a divine source?

Federico Garcia Lorca has found it in the duende, a dark spirit that is neither angel or muse. Who has duende in American culture? Billie Holiday. Edward Hirsch, poet and essayist, writes of several poets and artists who have a dark and arresting intensity, whose work breathes life and death, and by whom we are transfixed.

Lorca said, "Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard."

This is not a spirit who brings gifts; Lorca puts it in the terms of a battle:

" With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work." To read his entire text, please click here:

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

A wound that never heals appears in many mythic stories. Arthurian legend, Greek myth, Russian myth, Christian stories of stigmata, and many others seem to point to a universal story of suffering.   Perhaps suffering and the writing that springs out of the attempt to heal it will evoke the duende.   The duende, says Federico Garcia Lorca, is the battle pitched between you and death. It is a wound that won’t heal, a wind that blows over the dead, “a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.” From pain, violence or carnage, birth.

Lorca evoked the Duende whenever he did a reading; he called to the spirit for both him and the audience; often it held them with its terrible beauty.

The Task of the Poet

2011-06-16T11:47:00.000-05:00

In an interview in the Paris Review, Adrienne Rich said,
     "I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference."

The task of the poet is to remain true to one's own experience. The poem comes from the body; the body should be reflected in the poem. The poem comes out of a particular place in the world. The poet needs to be cognizant of the landscape and also her own position and perspective within it.
A good poet is aware of the underground of the subject and form of her work. This could be the history, context, connections, and language.
A good poet is open to surprise. Is intuitive. Sometimes in the writing of the poem, an accident of language, a juxtaposition of image, an error brings a startling insight.   In the practice of poetry, one strives for a deliberating openness.
A collection of a poet's work reveals vision: a perspective, motivation, goal. A poet's work provides a landscape and a story, different for each poet, and a language that reaches beyond the individual toward the community or the divine or the one lone reader somewhere in the future, paging through a book, wanting the heart, or a piercing light into the center of life.

Why Poetry?

2011-06-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

More than self-expression, poetry is a way of seeing. Robert Henri, in The Art Spirit, wrote:

"The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture--however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by-product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has past. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with a brush, pen, chisel or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trance, the footprint of the state.
These results, however crude, become dear to the artist who made them because they are records of states of being which he has enjoyed and which he would regain. They are likewise interesting to others because they are to some extent readable and reveal the possibilities of greater existence."

Doreen Gildroy presented this quote in an interesting essay ("Poetry and Mysticism," American Poetry Review, May/ June 2011). A "greater existence" is an experience of dissolving boundaries, meaningfulness, or a sudden perception of connectedness; a mystical experience with poetry often comes unbidden, by accident or by grace. One can invite it, certainly. The state of flow that happens during creative work may be the state of being that Robert Henri describes. Writing is one way to enter a state of flow; in the state of flow, perceptions shift. Time goes by without notice. Focus is enhanced. The ability to see is increased.

The poem becomes a record of an experience; it is a dual experience. The first experience is the subject of the poem, and the second experience is the making of that particular poem. Each poem offers a new possibility, a new way of seeing, and it engages one in "a making." In the making of a poem, one finds images, sounds, and patterns that develop and come to fruition. The plying of the language leads one forward into new insight or image or story. I like this way of seeing; this is why I write.

Community Arts Learning

2011-05-30T18:27:00.000-05:00

Writing captures the voices, the history, the landscape into a piece of art; it serves to build and strengthen community. It is not true that only a select few are capable of making great artistic work. Great writing happens everywhere. In every class I teach, I hear new and arresting voices. Not all of the writers want to hone their skill or pursue publication, but if they did, they in all likelihood would achieve success.

Reading a good poem, story or essay enhances our life. Besides offering beauty, it fosters empathy and understanding. Writing a good poem, story or essay gives us the opportunity to use an image or a metaphor to enter complexity. For me, writing is a type of way-finding, a lamp in darkness. This is the experience with writing that I want to share with others.

With an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning grant through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the willingness of some nonprofit organizations (The Women's Shelter, Family Justice Center and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, MN) I began to teach writing for people in transition. Since I began the project in October 2010, I've logged 40 classroom hours of teaching “Writing for Transition.” I have worked with diverse levels of experience with writing. Many were moving through violence; many were moving through ordinary life changes.

The Depot - Community Arts Learning Group: monthly group Dec 2010-ongoing
Womenʼs Shelter: January 8-February 12, 2011 (weekly workshop for 6 weeks)
Family Justice Center: monthly group, January 31 - ongoing
Domestic Abuse Intervention Project: June 20

And the culmination of this effort will be a publication, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions, pub date October 1, 2011 (Wildwood River Press).

In my role as Duluth Poet Laureate, 2010-2012, I've also focused on the same themes. I've taught a workshop "Change, Change, Rearrange: Writing for Transitions" on November 15, 2010. Also, in an attempt to reach out to an audience that is not necessarily an arts audience, I made a call for submissions of poems on the topic of transitions or that were blessings, and created four placemats that present the work of 35 area writers; these were given away at the Empty Bowl, a fundraiser for the Northern Lakes Food Bank. The Empty Bowl provides a hand-made bowl made by an area potter; the event sells about a thousand tickets and serves a thousand bowls of soup donated by local restaurants. The placemats fit into this setting very well; when diners sat down with the bowl of soup, they also had the opportunity to read the work of regional writers. These placemat poems also will be published in the forthcoming book.

Besides the Empty Bowl project, I've had the opportunity to present workshops to students and community people in the following settings:

Unity School (the alternative high school in Duluth, 10th grade) workshop: March 21, 2011

UWS Young Authorʼs Conference (7th and 8th grade): April 5, 2011. Two breakout sessions.

Fondulac Community College, Cloquet, MN: April 6, 2011 workshop and reading

Grand Rapids Library: April 12, 2011 a childrenʼs and an adult workshop about writer's voice.

It is my goal to share the experience of writing I've had with others, to help others create poems, stories or essays using the material that their own life provides. I'd like help others access their own way-finding, in order to be able to listen to the inner voice. It's the best guide through life. In my opinion, personal expression is therapeutic but there is another, more important goal: to access a larger vision that connects the self to the community, and then brings the community to other communities. This exchange happens in the social space, between reader and writer, between one person and another. What I want is not just one insisting voice, but a dialogue, a circle of conversation that invites other voices.

Creative work is essential. It doesn't matter where one begins; it does matter that one begins.

Poetry & Landscape

2011-04-30T16:23:00.000-05:00

I write in the context of many good writers. I'm referring to friends of mine and those who I only know through reading, writers of the past whose work seems as current as ever, writers whose work has shaped my own. Writing never occurs in a vacuum. Those writers form a constellation of stars. They are the points that I reach toward and sometimes, navigate away from. As writers, we are informed, influenced, inspired, and intrigued by the images and language of other writers, singers, storytellers, sacred texts. Besides the work of others, we are influenced by our place in the world.

Poetry rises out of landscape. Of course. Landscape is inescapable; it is the ground beneath our feet, the air that we breathe, and it shapes us in profound ways. It is the enduring thing and yet it also changes.

     The birds have vanished in the sky,
     and now the last cloud drains away.
     We sit together, the mountain and I
     until only the mountain remains.        --Li Po

This beautiful poem by Li Po resonates. It speaks of the timelessness and constancy of the mountain, but also says so much more. Poetry can not and should not be reduced to a single meaning. We need its ambiguity and multiple meanings. We can come back to the poem again and again. Poetry has the capacity to renew, to make new meanings, to resonate in deeper ways than we initially know.

In his book Crossing Open Ground (First Vintage Books, 1978), Barry Lopez has a wonderful essay "Landscape and Narrative."   He traces the stories we tell, saying we learn about the external landscape by understanding the connections within it.
Landscape, wilderness, the outdoors always calls us out of ourselves. Sometimes talking about the weather is a way of keeping a superficial level of communication, but I'm not referring to that. I'm talking about recognizing the connection to a specific landscape, finding context physically as well as in other ways (culturally, for example).

Lopez describes the internal landscape as the one that we grow up in or live in that becomes part of our psyche. Here, "...the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as 'mind' are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person's thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature--the intricate history of one's life in the land...."    Our personal landscape is integral to our writing.

As a writer living in the cold north, on the coast of Lake Superior, near or in the wilderness, witness to wildlife, I have a story that is different than the writer living on the prairie, in the desert, or on the east or west coast. The hawk migration along the edge of the Great Lake and the increase of the bear and wolf populations mark my consciousness. To take my road home, I cross over several rivers and pass by the sheer drops of granite outcroppings. The blue rim of Lake Superior forms a crescent to the east and north, the forest dark with shadow, fallen limbs, broken trees, and spruce and the lake light is always changing.

The animals that we encounter, the experiences that we have in the wilderness or in a city park, the life that we live within landscape contains a poetic element that renews, reanimates, recreates meaning in our lives. Landscape contains the things we don't know we know. The patterns of nature, for example, tell us about our human experience. The confluence of two rivers, for example, is turbulent. So is the joining of any two people or cultures. Change can happen gradually, as in erosion, or it can happen precipitously, as in earthquake or storm. Mary Oliver is a poet known for her attention to the landscape, sea coast, marsh, dune, and woods.

I search for the geologic. A good poem isn't about lessons or wisdom. A good poem has at least a few layers of meaning. It's about depth.

Writing is intuitive. It's wise to cultivate skills. As a writer, I know that I can get in the way of good writing by trying to insert ideas or explain or control the writing too much. Concepts usually get in the way and ruin a good poem. Poems that are ideas often don't work out as well as poems that are images and metaphors. "No ideas except in things," advised William Carlos Williams. This is the way forward. The best writing is a process of discovery. We might think of revision as form of orienteering, navigation using both compass and landmark.

In the poem by Li Po, the mountain's image is the most compelling. A poetry grounded in the landscape will take on the spirit of its beings and the shapes and structures where we live. The poet and writer Linda Hogan once told me that whatever we write about will make it stronger. If you write about a bear, it will make the bear stronger. I believe it's true. Writing about animals expresses how we value them. Animals and landscape are not mere figures of speech; they are beings and aspects of life that exist around and beyond human experience. I can speak of the bear, and the bear will speak of more things.

Good writing is in the body. The visceral body. The five senses. The physical body. The changing body. Increasingly, I'm aware of how much we are like that cloud or bird that so soon disappears.

The compass marks true north, magnetic north. For direction, there are maps. Markings. Natural boundaries. Landmarks. Stars. How does one travel as a poet?

Poetry, as Mary Oliver says, casts more than one shadow. In poetry, the landscape is internal. In it, we can trace a history. In it, the universe with its simultaneous creation and destruction. In it, pleasure and pain, awareness and blindness, hunger and sustenance. It offers maps. Erosions, eruptions, echos.

In its tensions, poetry has physics. Opposing forces, weights and counterweights, rising and falling. It contains the rhythm and breath of being. Language with its mellifluous, elastic, and startling juxtapositions of sound and image, with its literal and figurative capacities, delivers us from one to another, from root to seed, from wing to mouth, moment to moment.
When we develop relationships with the landscape and the other beings in it, or when we recognize those relationships and understand our context, we are stronger.

Cloud Birds

2011-04-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Cloud Birds

For me, this book of poems grapples with fear. I've arranged the poems into three sections: 'bear,' 'wing,' and 'cloud.' The poems in the first section are about encounters: fear of the wilderness, especially bears, fear of women, and fear of relationships. The pomegranate, the myth of Persephone, and the migration of Persephone between her husband in Hades and her mother enter into the book. Some of the poems in Cloud Birds are about women moving through violence; all of the poems are about moving through fear.

This is not about victimization, but about learning how to walk through violence and fear and get beyond it. My grandmother on my mother's side survived spousal abuse. I had a brief marriage, at age 20, to a man who, on our honeymoon, kicked me because the suitcase was not packed correctly. I have known so many who have suffered and even lost their lives to this violence.

The painting on the cover of the book by visual artist Cecilia Ramon is called "Refuge I/ Refugio I (in homage to Ana Mendieta). Cecilia Ramon, the visual artist, migrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina. When she was young, she witnessed violence on the streets. During that era, many people 'were disappeared.' The concept of refuge is apt. Ana Mendieta was an important visual artist. She was born in Havana, Cuba, and she came to the United States at the age of 12 without her parents. She became an environmental artist with striking work. Click for info about Ana Mendieta, visual artist. Her death was mysterious. She died from a fall from her apartment window in NYC. Her husband was charged with murder, but acquitted. Perhaps she did commit suicide. But that too is the extreme act of violence toward the self. I wrote the poem "Spilled" for her, for many others, who don't survive.

The section, Wing, is a migration through the Iron Range and the places in northern Minnesota where I grew up and lived. The Iron Range is a place of iron and taconite mines. It was a working class culture--sexist, racist, and homophobic. Drinking was a major preoccupation. But it is also a beautiful landscape with people, native and immigrant, of great resilience and strength. This section has stories about love and about my parents and immigrant grandparents. They never achieved English literacy; my grandmother and I weren't able to converse across the language divide. Some poems pay homage to my father; the first protector in my life and the first to threaten violence. He loved me fiercely. When one steps back from the family and looks into the landscape, one sees violence in nature, predators and prey in a relationship phrased as "the way life is." I mull over these things. In the section are poems about factory work and an underground mine, dangerous work with horrible health consequences. Recently, studying cosmology, I read that the creation of the universe was a simultaneous creation and destruction. It's everywhere. There is every reason to have fear and every reason to live one's life fully.

The last section, Cloud, is a sequence of poems about dissolved boundaries: between lovers, between walls that one puts up, between the immigrant past and the present, between the self and the landscape. In this section, the poem Persephone speaks of returning. When my mother was alive, I went home to her a few times. When relationships were difficult. Now that she is gone, I continue to revisit her origins.

In order to overcome my own fear of bears (because I had moved into the woods and shared the landscape with several), I decided to write twenty one love poems to bears. This is the origin of the manuscript--and its end--the decision to love what I had feared.

Cloud Birds is published by Wildwood River Press and is available at your local bookstore, or at Amazon.com

Poetry & Change: Journaling, Pablo Neruda, and the Past

2011-03-20T15:07:00.000-05:00

Journal writing and memoir provide a starting point for poems. Journals especially are excellent places to generate poems and to grapple with changes that life brings. Poems are especially built for grappling, and the poem by Neruda, "Past," shows us how well it can be done.

Ira Progoff, author of At a Journal Workshop and founder of the Intensive Journal® process offers an in-depth and interesting method to explore life experience. His technique of a multi-sectioned journal that records steppingstones, intersections, dreams, daily writing, and dialogues (with body, self, others and even society concepts or norms) offers a helpful tool to navigate life. Not only does it increase awareness, it aids in decision-making. I like what he says about phases in life:

"...many people are able to live through two or three distinct cycles of life. In each of these, there are a different person with different values and lifestyles. To be able to look forward to such successive developments opens a large potential not only for the later years of one's life but for the fullness of meaning in a human existence as a whole. The main difficulty lies in the period of transition between two major units in a person's life. When the old period has ended and a new period has not yet been substantially established, the emotional burdens of anxiety and self-doubt may be heavy to bear. That is the time when it is especially important to have a progressive and organic method for enabling the perspectives of one's life to reshape themselves." (p 115)

Progoff also refers to the writer and public statesman, Dag Hammarskjold. He kept a journal that was eventually published, titled Markings.   The term 'marking' he borrowed from his habit of walking mountain trails. Marks upon the trail help us find our way and avoid difficult spots. The term is evocative; I like to use it when I teach writing. We are marked by different things, good and bad; those things shape us. These are places that we should go to when we sit down to write.

I would add that writing is an excellent way of coping. It is quiet and similar to meditation; it relaxes the body at the same time that it gives the mind a place for preoccupations and concerns. Not only that, it costs next to nothing. All that is needed is a notebook and pen. For people who don't have a safe place to keep a journal, the internet offers a password protected online storage of files (see http://www.google/docs and http://www.zoho.com). To anybody who wants to begin journaling, I suggest short writing exercises that focus on particular details: a pair of shoes, a hand tool, or a particular person.   When journal exercises delve into such exact details of one's own particular life, over-generalization and sentimentality is nicely sidestepped.

Another way to approach journaling or writing exercises is to focus on images. An image, often the foundation of a poem, is vivid and powerful. It transcends languages and offers immediacy.

However, writing is more than a repository of memory or experience; it is also a tool of the mind and gives us a method to get past both memory and experience. It is not about "dumping." Even among friends, dumping all the negative experience can burden others. A journal offers the ability to contain difficult experience. Once written, we can stand back and observe our own experience. Writing allows writers to discover insights and shape the story, a profound and necessary step in taking control of one's life.

This brings me to consider the poem by Pablo Neruda, "Past."   The poem begins:
"We have to discard the past" and this is followed by image after image of demolition and construction. It ends in this way:

"Now the heavy eyelid
covers the light of the eye
and what was once living
now no longer lives;
what we were, we are not.
And with words, although the letters
still have transparency and sound,
they change, and in the mouth changes;
the same mouth is now another mouth;
they change, lips, skin, circulation;
another being has occupied our skeleton;
what once was in us now is not.
It has gone, but if the call, we reply;
'I am here,' knowing that we are not,
that what once was, was and is lost,
is lost in the past, and now will not return."

(click here to read the entire text: http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/N/NerudaPablo/Past.htm)
This poem captures the anguish and loss; it holds the contradiction of saying we must 'discard the past' and the impossibility of doing so.   It is an example of the way that a poem, in very few words, goes right to the crux. It may have begun in a journal, I don't know. But out of the images he draws from, he pushes out into the deep heart of experience: it is always and forever changing.

Poetry is particularly an effective way to express this truth--any moment that we write about is a moment we can not hold. It slips away, becomes something else and so do we. By writing, we can bring it close, see it and feel it, even though it has changed and perhaps changed us. Poetry offers an intimacy that is hard to describe or experience anywhere else, it is a body experience but it happens in language.

What is it about the language of poetry that makes it so powerful?

More than any other type of writing, poetry is shaped. Memoir also is a shaped form. A memoir might capture a segment of someone's life, and it might select certain experiences. An artist's memoir, for example, might contain only the experiences that were formative to that person and his or her art.

Poetry focuses on image and provides patterns of sound and form that make it memorable. Neruda's poem relies on the construction and demolition. "We go on throwing down/ first, broken tiles,/then pompous doors."   The word doors becomes not just wooden panels that allow entrance and exit in a building, but entrance and exit to other states of mind by use of the word "pompous."   It conveys memory, image, story, but also casts many shadows, as Mary Oliver says. It offers multiple meanings and it does this with the choice of words and their placement. A line break is a way to nuance a sentence or phrase, to pause in a certain place and thereby add more meaning. Neruda repeats words within the poem: "There is nothing, there is always nothing" and "It was all alive,/ alive, alive, alive/ like a scarlet fish..." Repetition and variation within a poem also create meaning in a way similar to waves on a lake, a score of music, a cloud of birds.

Does poetry change the writer or reader? The reader most certainly can be changed by reading, the reader takes the poem inside of his or her breath, and can be in-spired, a profound exercise in empathy. I think it does change the writer; as the writer becomes more and more adept at craft and learns how to ply the language more skillfully, he or she is changed. As one writes, one begins to observe more, listen more, and consider more.
Success as a writer might or might not bring positive changes; but I do think writing itself brings the ability to find context and to connect to others.

Revision is a necessary part of writing. In revision, we develop an initial image or pattern to its fullest and strengthen the context and connections. Revision is also necessary in life; we may not be able to change the events or incidents that mark us, but we can change what they mean for ourselves and others.

Perhaps like Neruda, we would be able to hold the contradictions.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his great essay, "The Crack Up," wrote, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." This is what writing and especially poetry offers.

Progoff, Ira. At a Journal Workshop. c1975. Dialogue House Library, New York, NY.

The Practice of Poetry: Emptiness

2011-02-20T22:35:00.000-06:00

What does it take to write? I believe it takes emptiness. In 1928, Virginia Woolf said it took a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year, the space and time to write. Helene Cixous, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, says loss often triggers a writer to write. First loss, then emptiness occurs that only writing can ameliorate.

Writing is perhaps a compulsion, a solution to an ache. I’m not sure what brings it on. The cure is writing, but soon after having written, the ache or urge returns. Instead of a vicious, I’d call it a spacious cycle.

One makes time for writing by clearing a schedule and rearranging obligations to allow oneself a block of time. It doesn’t have to be a lot, even just an hour or two daily. One does the same to create space. A room of one’s own is wonderful, but for many years, I have worked in a quiet corner of shared bedroom or living room. Time and space are the prerequisites for a fruitful emptiness.

One becomes a good writer by being a good reader. They are two sides of the same coin of quietness. In order to write poetry, I read poetry. I believe that poetry is a language within a language, and that reading poetry opens a door for me to enter in.

More importantly, the emptiness or clearing must be interior. Empty the self by pouring regularly onto the page, and then share what you write with supportive others. Lewis Hyde talks about the concept of pot latch in his book, The Gift. This is a spiritual wisdom: by giving the gift away, one will keep receiving. Emptying helps clear space inside the mind that can then be filled with what the muse brings.

A writing teacher, Kate Green, recommended visualizing the muse. In a writing exercise, writing students were asked to give a persona to the muse, to describe physical characteristics and then to identify their muse’s wants and needs. Let yourself by guided by this useful exercise. If your muse wants an empty chair, give her an empty chair. If she wants an orange wall, then by all means, paint the wall orange. Find ways to please the source.

The material--what the writing is about--is given. One writes from the imagination. Writers write what we write, we write from our observations, obsessions, experiences, longings. Finding ways to tap the subconscious is useful: write from dreams or associations or intuition. Try aleotropic techniques. Chance. Play.

When I say that writing comes from emptiness, I don’t necessarily mean loneliness, a feeling of being left or abandoned. These can certainly be important sources of writing, but the emptiness can also be peaceful, an emptiness that is pure potential. One cultivates a receptivity. Without anxiety. One can learn to be present with peaceful non-expectation and gratefulness, aware of being. It is a state of listening.

Writing practice helps with this type of listening. It is not so different from Buddhist meditation practice that helps train the mind. The mind is fretful, afraid, preoccupied, distracted. Many internal obstacles must be overcome with patience and compassion toward self. In time, with intention and steady practice, this gives way to peaceful emptiness.

All of writing is process. First comes receptivity, openness, willingness. Next, vision and re-vision. One must be able to recognize potential in the material and develop and hone it. One must be able to write with an eye for image and an ear for sound. Revision is a form of letting go.

Poetry and process are actually the same. The practice is the discipline of regular writing. It doesn’t make sense to wait to be inspired, because it is usually in the process of writing that one receives the gift. One listens to the work and let’s oneself be guided by it in the process. For me, poetry springs from and feeds the spirit. (The Latin word spiritus means breath.) The breath of the poem is distilled, intense. For me, it is a beautiful sound meditation that achieves both emptiness and the presence of Being.

The Body of the Poem

2011-02-17T13:33:00.000-06:00

It is productive to consider the form, or body, of individual poems. The body perceives with the senses, as does the poem. I consider the “eyes” of the poem--who is gazing and at what.    I consider the breath. The poet has created a sound and rhythm that will recreate in the breath of the reader. In addition, the poem listens to something. As a reader, I listen to the world the poet has given me. Next, the poem employs touch in the textures of the poem. There may be a scent or a taste. The five senses are common elements to each poem. The form or pattern that manifests visually and aurally might be lyrical, narrative or dramatic. The form may call up ritual, or it may create its own pleasing combination of forces and frictions and conjure many associations. The variations are fascinating.

Consider this:

I Am the Great Sun
   (from a Norman Crucifix of 1632)
by Charles Causley (from Union Street, 1957)

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
     I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
     I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
     I am the city where you will not stay,
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
     I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
     I am the lover who you will betray,
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
     I am the holy dove who you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

This poem has a deep and clear pattern. It is a sonnet and also a form called an anaphora (the lines begin with the same phrase). Each line has ten or eleven syllables. The words are short and plain. The rhyme is not just end words but in the second to last end words: see/free, believe/leave, hear/cheer, name/blame. The sonnet form has 14 lines, roughly iambic pentameter (the iamb is the basic unit of breath in English, an unaccented syllable, followed by an accented syllable) (pentameter is 10 syllables). The stanzas are quatrains, four lines in each with alternate lines that rhyme. They are consistent in size except for the last couplet. The anaphora form is used a lot in the Bible and in other poetic works (see Walt Whitman). It is an arresting and beautiful form.

One notices the sound: long vowel sounds (a, e) and short o sounds, and the v consonants in captive, leave, believe, lover, victor, dove, never.

This poem is also a persona poem. It seems to take the persona--it speaks from the Norman crucifix. Sometimes this method is called “a mask.” The poet puts on the mask and speaks as if from that object, person, or place. The body of this poem is very striking and powerful.

Consider this:

Why I Need the Birds
by Lisel Mueller

When I hear them call
in the morning, before
I am quite awake,
my bed is already traveling
the daily rainbow,
the arc toward evening;
and the birds, leading
their own discreet lives
of hunger and watchfulness,
are with me all the way,
always a little ahead of me
in the long-practiced manner
of unobtrusive guides.

By the time I arrive at evening,
they have just settled down to rest;
already invisible, they are turning
into the dreamwork of trees;
and all of us together —
myself and the purple finches,
the rusty blackbirds,
the ruby cardinals,
and the white-throated sparrows
with their liquid voices —
ride the dark curve of the earth
toward daylight, which they announce
from their high lookouts
before dawn has quite broken for me.

“Why I Need the Birds” by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press.

This poem, in contrast to the “I Am the Great Sun,” is free verse. However, it still has form. It still has its own pattern. The lines are about 5 or 6 syllables each with a longer line coming at regular intervals. The sound element is well crafted, the ‘a’ vowel resounds with a long ‘i’ sound. There is a narrative arc to the poem that is circular. it begins in the morning, goes through the night and ends right before dawn. There are two stanzas, roughly the same length, one has 13 lines, the next 14. The design is pleasing.   The figurative language, the bed traveling, and the precise details swiftly take our imagination.    When we enter the body of this poem and perceive with its eyes and ears, we experience a breath-taking circuit around the earth.

Real bodies have a skeletal and muscular structure. They have hearts and minds. They have nervous systems and circulatory systems. In the same way, good poems have these. In fact, the shape of the poem has both external and internal dimensions. The form of “I Am The Great Sun” borrows from the crucifix opposing directions. In the poem, the poet has worked out sentences that include assertion and negation. The opposing forces or tensions around or within the work create a powerful dynamic.   The circular form of “Why I Need the Birds” also pleases with its circle of day and night, circle around the earth, and circle of bird’s flight. The “eye” of the poem that sleeps appreciates the birds that serve as sentinels and guides.

When you write a poem, you also create a body for the poem. In revision, pay close attention to the five senses. Give precise details. Find your pattern and let the pattern connect to the larger pattern of which we are all a part.   Let the body of the poem reinforce and even expand the meaning.

Writing is My Shelter

2011-01-09T18:50:00.000-06:00

Writing has a way of transforming experience. There is evidence that keeping a journal improves one's health and immunity, and that it speeds recovery from illness. Writing is a tool of the mind, but I also think it is a tool of the soul. Through writing, we can explore life's events and changes. The page offers a place to put the things that are difficult to bear; once it's has been placed there, one can shift roles from victim or witness to one that is more active. Instead of being done onto, one is a doer. Psychologically, the change is profound.

The New Yorker magazine featured an article written by Joan Acocella about the Swedish mystery writer, Stieg Larsson.   It's a peek behind the scenes, a look at the writer who seemed to have started writing recently, in his mid-forties.   The article examines some questions around authorship and editorial changes of the three manuscripts, but I was also interested in the connection between his fiction and his real life.   He founded a magazine, Expo, that is similar to the one, the Millenium, in his trilogy. The Expo office, like Millenium, was threatened and vandalized. As a young man, Larsson witnessed a gang rape of a young girl. He never forgot it. He insisted the first book of the trilogy be titled, Men Who Hate Women (as it was, in Sweden). Larsson was able to transform the act of violence that he witnessed into a story about a strong, female character who survives, even wins.   Read the article.

This week, I facilitated a writing group at the women's shelter for women who have survived domestic abuse. I'm very glad to have the opportunity to create a time and place for writing for them; in my twenties, I experienced violence in my first marriage. Writing helped me. Not only did I have the opportunity to find and develop my voice, but my writing connected me with people who gave me strength and support. It changed my life for the better. I know it will do the same for these women.

We sat down and did three timed writing exercises in session. First I read a brief example, and then we begin the exercise. The first assignment, after Sandra Cisneros chapter called "Names" in her novel, The House on Mango Street, I asked the women to write about their name. I never demand that participants read their work aloud, but they all volunteered. Each one wrote a moving piece. The next assignment was to write an anaphora (a poem whose lines begin with the same word or phrase) based on the poem, "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon. The last exercise was after Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, "I Am Waiting." I was interested in exercises that could be either poem or memoir. Writing about identity helps to strengthen one's identity. Writing about place helps us to understood our roots.   The last allows us to name our desires, not just for ourselves, but for the larger world. We spent about an hour and a half in session, and I left there feeling grateful to the women for sharing their stories, and to the art of writing for the gifts it brings.

I've asked my friends to donate extra journals and notebooks that I can offer women at the shelter and at the Family Justice Center. Many writers teach writing classes at homeless shelters, jails, women's shelters, and other places. To allow a place and time for writing is to honor the experiences and lives of others. I found a blog entry on Mira's List about her project, "My Words Are My Shelter." Read the article here

I've also made a call for submissions for writers in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota to send me poems or short pieces about transitions.* I want to publish the work on placemats that can be used at the Empty Bowl community dinner (a fundraiser for the local food bank) and at the Thanksgiving Dinner at the DECC (both events are in Duluth, MN). I will help the women at the shelter share their experiences in a small publication (published in October 2011) with other poems of transition. Changes in life are often difficult; it's heartening to hear about others who have gone through similar changes, or even more difficult ones. Writing is my shelter, and with others, we can make the world a better place.

*Blessings & Transitions
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:   Invitation to writers in the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota to send poems, prose poems, flash fiction, or brief essays (500 words max) that illuminate life transitions and/or that are blessings.   This is a project of the 2010-2012 Duluth Poet Laureate, Sheila Packa. These will be considered for a poster & placemats (to be created for April poetry month and for an anthology of work to be published by Wildwood River Press in the fall of 2011.   Email submissions are okay. 5 page limit.   Deadline March 31, 2011. Paste into an email to sheila@sheilapacka.com or mail up to 5 pages to Wildwood River, 1748 Wildwood Road, Duluth, MN 55804.

Ecstatic Poetry

2010-12-30T22:31:00.000-06:00

What is ecstatic poetry? For examples of ecstatic poetry, I can name names: Rumi, Kabir, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud, Ginsberg. It is poetry that is visionary, reveals spiritual wisdom, crosses beyond ordinary boundaries. The self dissolves. The poem is a ladder that the reader climbs. The poem is a lightning bolt.

Rilke's poem, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15814) is an ekphrastic poem, a response to visual art. The poem grasps not just the art but the god in a sudden flash of beauty.   I consider it an ecstatic poem; at the end, Rilke writes in the final line: "You must change your life."

In a brilliant flash of light, ecstatic experience changes you. This is often described as an awakening, like in this Rumi poem (translated by Coleman Barks)

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

An ecstatic poem, in my opinion, is an intersection with the divine. Falling in love is ecstatic; one's vision expands. The poet Anne Carson has an interesting essay about women and ecstatic experience in her book, Decreation. The essay can be found online at this web address: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.1carson.html

This essay was pivotal for me while I was revising the ecstatic poems in Echo & Lightning. In the poems of Sappho, and in the writings of a 13th century female mystic, and in the writing of Simone Weil, Carson examines the 'dissolving of the self.'    I believe it is the point of profound change for an individual, to leave oneself is to let go of the past, to let go of an investment in one's identity, to let go of attempts at control and enter the present moment.

The ecstatic is best expressed in poetry. Poetry has its roots in religious ritual; poetry has the immediacy, metaphoric capacity, and compression that best creates the divine flash.

The poet Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture about the Duende, a dark spirit that he called before each poetry reading. It was a spirit close to death and sexuality, he explained, that infused his work with power and beauty. Poetry that can evoke the power of the gods is ecstatic poetry. To read his lecture, click on this link or paste it in your browser:
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

Other resources:

Women In Praise of the Sacred, edited by Jane Hirschfield (Harper Perennial)
Holy Fire - Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment, edited by Daniel Halpern (Harper Perennial)
News of the Universe Poems of Twofold Consciousness, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly (Sierra Books)
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, by Edward Hirsch, Harcourt Press

New Work

2010-12-29T02:30:00.000-06:00

It's a double-edged sword, seeing one's work into print. Simultaneously, the writer must embrace the text with clarity and purpose to achieve the best re-vision (after all, once published, the work enters a fixed state) and also, at the point of the greatest obsession with detail, let go of it.

Putting a manuscript of poems together is a process unique to each writer. It begins for me in disorganization. Because I reside in individual poems that I write, in order to see the poems as a group, I must pull myself up to achieve and see them in a larger perspective. Not easy. I start by sorting the poems into sets and build sequences. This takes time. It does help that I do regular performance, and each time, must create a set list with a beginning, middle and end. The practice of creating a larger story begins in performance, definitely. The poems are like pieces of a mosaic that I've found will create different stories depending on how they are arranged.

I should add a lot of work happened on a subconscious level. I'm often working with dream images, and follow an image in and through collaborative projects, visual art, other poets' work. I write a lot. I write to process my life experience and to develop my imagination.   In a relationship break-up, I was thinking about "don't look back" and I wrote the poem, "Salt," about me and Lot's Wife. It is only later that I connect my own poems of experience and imagination with mythic stories.

The new book, Echo & Lightning, came together out of three well developed sequences. The first was a set of love poems I had called "Fearful Journey." The title is from a poem, "Blindfold." It was an erotic poem exploring Hildegard Bingen's concept of erotic justice, published in The Mother Tongue. This poem was triggered by an invitation to participate in an art exhibit at Northern Prints Gallery. The gallery owner and printmaker Cecelia Lieder, who later published my collection of poems The Mother Tongue, invited me to write poems for this theme. After some contemplation, I realized that the image of blindfold was appropriate for both justice and erotic. While writing, I begin in image and follow it.    This sequence of poems became the last section of the book.

The first section of the book is concerned with ecstatic experience, intersection with the divine, cleaving. Cataclysmic grief and joy. The set begins in migration and follows the image of flight into the story of Zeus (in the form of the swan) and Leda. These poems were written over a period of a few years. I was curious about mystical stories. I'd found the Gnostic text, Thunder, Perfect Mind. As a piece of writing, it was electric: a female God, the intense combination of opposites. I began contemplating the stories of myth and the Bible: Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot's Wife. Each story involved a woman's intersection with the divine. What happened to her, what did she give up? Because I'd been reading the cosmic story for a solstice celebration, the story of the universe, I was thinking about the origin of the universe, simultaneous creation and destruction.   Finally, the poems followed a sequence of ascension.

The poems in the mid-section of the book I'd recorded on an audio cd with Kathy McTavish.   I called the set "Undertow" because the poems were underwater, submerged. It was all subconscious. Curious to me, at first, but then they made sense. I realized these underwater images fit well after the sequence of ascension. It was the form of a wave, climbing and falling. That overall image was important to the book. One doesn't have ascension without descent.

It was a stroke of luck to find the book's cover image, a painting called "Dawn" by my friend from Argentina, Cecilia Ramon.   The image perfectly expresses the themes of migration, love, ecstasy, and undertow.

Now, that book is out. I'm working on a new one, Cloud Birds, that will be out in 2011. This one is now under intense scrutiny as I proofread, re-vision, and develop its final form. Once new work is at this stage, it's time to look ahead to the next project.

I'm generating new poems, playing really. I am focused, but one must also take writing lightly as new work starts to percolate. I'm curious and not too attached. I started a twitter account, and have been using it to assign writing prompts. It's a personal challenge to make an assignment for others and then follow the assignment myself.   All teachers should take up this practice in order to stay humble. I like to be entering unknown territory, to be exploring images from experience and dream and artistic works I encounter, to discover ways to tap the subconscious mind.   Writing isn't just what I do, it's how I live.

The Dragon

2010-12-09T19:53:00.000-06:00

Creative work can be satisfying, but most often it puts you in touch with the feeling of inadequacy. In fact, most writers will tell you that they love "having written."   Afterward. Writing usually presents the challenges of what some people have termed "monkey mind."   The mind offers up all sorts of anxieties, fears, distractions, and difficulty. The self is one of the great obstacles in writing.

The visual artist Agnes Martin addressed the feeling of failure in her book Writings (c2005 Hatje Cantz). The following is from a lecture, "On the Perfection Underlying Life," delivered to art students:

"Why do we go everywhere searching out works of art and why do we make works of art. The answer is that we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it. The difficulty lies in the fact that it may turn out well or it may not turn out well. If it turns out well, we have a tendency to think that we have successfully followed our inspiration and if it does not turn out well, we have a tendency to think that we have lost our inspiration. But that is not true. There is successful work and work that fails but all of it is inspired. I will speak later about successful works of art, but here I want to speak of failures. Failures that should be discarded and completely cut off.
"I have come especially to talk to those among you who recognize these failures. I want particularly to talk to those who recognize all of their failures and feel inadequate and defeated, to those who feel insufficient--short of what is expected or needed. I would like to explain that these feelings are the natural state of mind of the artist, that a sense of disappointment and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work."

In other words, embrace the feeling of inadequacy, defeat and failure and do your work anyway.

The discipline of work allows one to continue despite the feeling of failure. She recommends the Chinese sage Chuang Tau's concept of "free and easy wandering."   No attachment. Let yourself wander.

Along with this, she recommends solitude and acknowledges that in solitude one encounters both fear and a self-destructiveness she refers to as "the Dragon."   As an artist, one must strive to become independent of judgment and familiar with the "ways of the Dragon."

Self knowledge is valuable. If you know how you subvert your own process or create obstacles for success, you will more likely be able to overcome the destructiveness. Agnes Martin didn't think it was possible to actually slay the Dragon. For her, it was more a matter of working while it slept.

Talking to other artists and writers will provide encouragement and support. Also, I learned a good maxim from a writing teacher, Carolyn Forche. She said, "Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work." In other words, if you find something interfering, then write about that. It is perhaps one of your important subjects.

Practice open-mindedness. Maybe you want to write about x, y or z but whenever you sit down, you start writing something else. My advice: go with it! Learn to honor the resistance and accept what comes. Artists and writers often believe that we have very little choice when it comes to our material. It is given. Craft and skill come in during the development and final draft.

Samuel Beckett said: "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail... failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.... "    Like Agnes Martin, Beckett urges the writer to continue on despite failure. "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

Artistic work is difficult. One needs to suspend judgment of the early stages of a project and manage the interruptions and distractions that arrive. One needs to accept what is given. One needs to develop writing into a discipline. The practice of meditation may help one develop skills to let go of the mind's chatter and be still. Walking usually helps. After reading Agnes Martin, I'm wondering if it might work to create a nice comfortable place for the dragon to sleep. Sometimes it does work to write or draw the image, to make the intangible manifest.
Another teacher, Kate Green, suggested that we write about the Muse. This was a writing assignment: What does the Muse look like? what does the Muse want?   Where does the Muse want you to write, what sorts of things should there be around you? In the spirit of "free and easy wandering," you might extend this exploration and find out from the Muse what to do about your personal Dragon.

How to Teach a Poetry Workshop

2010-11-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

Recently, grants have been available for Community Arts Learning. This is a wonderful opportunity for artists/writers and members of the community to develop their skills. The key to successful arts workshops is a lesson plan.    Lesson plans are simple, but they will help the artist stay focused and organize the time so that the experience is productive. The younger and larger the group, the more essential is structured time.

Here is a sample lesson plan for poetry workshops for children. This can be adapted for adult learners as well.    Children who are 4th grade and younger developmentally may not grasp the metaphor but they can learn to use sound patterns and the five senses.

The Lesson Plan for a Children's Poetry Workshop

Age:   grade 4-6 (often it's been about 20+ students)
Time: 1 hour (and it could be 1:15 min)
Goal:   Students will practice poetry and learn to use the 5 senses in description and use figurative language.

Materials:   the workshop leader should bring good example poems. The writing prompts that you plan should relate to these examples.
It's helpful (preferred but not absolutely necessary) to have another adult in the classroom if you have a large group. This person can assist with some students' needs (esp if there are special needs kids)--a little one to one coaching.
Students should have paper and pencils

Introduction to Poetry:

I begin by asking students to tell me what poetry is.    They have interesting answers. Praise any interesting observations.   I will talk about 5 minutes about what poems are: they create a picture and sound for the reader. They can be a story, a list, a letter, a blessing, or a memory.

I'll read an example poem and ask the students to tell me what they noticed about it...to reinforce the definition of a poem.   We will also notice sound elements: rhyme, alliteration, rhythm, etc. I point out figurative language and define the word metaphor.

Practice Poetry:

The goal is to teach students to use the five senses when they write description and to use figurative language.    I approach the project lightly to make it fun. I give them rules: 1. write fast, 2. don't worry about spelling or punctuation 3. write about what is important to you and 4. be specific.   Students are writing first drafts. I tell them not to expect it to be perfect. We are just going to play with words. (These rules of flow writing are adapted from Natalie Goldberg's book about generating new material, Writing Down the Bones)

Writing Prompts are then used in the classroom. Each writing exercise is given about 5 minutes for students to write.

Prompt 1. Metaphor: Students will hear an example of a persona poem.  (I'll read them a poem I have by John Haines).   They will then be asked to choose an animal and write at least 3 descriptive phrases related using as many of the 5 senses as possible.    Next step: write the poem.  Begins with "I am....."    The students will be asked to pretend that they are the animal.   They will use the phrases to help them build the poem. We are looking for a poem of at least 8-10 lines.

Prompt 2.   Learning how to use specific details.    Students will be asked to write a list of short phrases, specific details, about the area around where they live.    In can be a backyard or a place that they frequently go to play.    Next, students will hear an example of an autobiographical poem called "I Am From" by George Ella Lyon. This poem is a list poem.   It begins, "I am from clothespins/ from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride./ I am from the dirt under the back porch./ I am from the forsythia bush/ the Dutch elm/ whol long gone limbs I remember/ as if they were my own."      Students will then use their own details to write an autobiographical list poem of their own.

Prompt 3.   Students will use their imagination to write a poem that begins with one of these prompts: (often I decide the prompt during class when I learn about their interests or other classroom projects). I ask them to use a sound element--either rhyme or alliteration.
a journey poem that starts with "If my arms had wings..."
OR a list poem of excuses or reasons that starts "Because"   (they are asked to use the word because at least 3 times)
OR   a letter poem that is written from a pet or from a favorite object.

Reading Out Loud:

After students do 3 writing exercises. I like to offer them an opportunity to read the new poem to the class. These are all rough drafts, so nobody should expect polished work. It's "work in progress." I give some short instructions about posture and breath for the best projection. Students enjoy sharing their work. I don't force anybody to read. It should always be volunteered.

Whenever a student reads, observe the strengths that they have.   "That poem has wonderful vowel sounds," for example.   "That poem uses alliteration. That poem is a vivid picture. That poem has a strong beginning or a strong metaphor."    This is essential. Avoid negative feedback in a short workshop, it will dampen enthusiasm and cause self consciousness. Avoid laughing at the efforts. If participants feed judged or self-conscious, they will withdraw their willingness to read rough drafts.

Reading the work is a fun closure for the poetry workshop. I help the students read if they need that, and I remind them how to be good listeners.   I often get amazing and great poems from the kids.

Feel free to use or adapt my lesson plan to your own needs. Each writer/artist should teach from their own strengths.

Poetry & Change

2010-11-21T20:53:00.000-06:00

Poetry comes of direction and indirection.   In order to write, I need to do a fair amount of staring out the window. It's helpful to do some mindless tasks like cleaning and laundry. Somehow the sound of water running into the washing machine helps me find my way to the page.   Dreams help; this morning I climbed out of bed with a phrase delivered to me in my sleep. Some poems I've written began in just such a way. Daydreams, reverie, and music help.   Good conversations, reading, and especially walking or yoga help me make the transition from conscious mind to subconscious. Spending time by the lakeshore or near the river, journaling, writing letters. In my studio, I find the process of making a fire in the woodstove very conducive. It is a journey that leads inward.

The process of artistic submersion is similar to the process of planned change. As a writer, I've learned to invite the meditative state that leads into artistic work. In the field of social work, research about the process of change reveals a parallel: a premeditative state, followed by contemplation, preparation, and action. Now, an evidence based practice (one that has been proven to be effective) called motivational interviewing is used to support and encourage the process of change; the social worker affirms the point in the process, no matter what it is, and discusses the process of change and possible scenarios of changing, or not changing. Amplifying ambivalence often leads to taking action. In creative immersion and change, talking about process is so important to help you find your way, your own unique way.

Consider what you do to help you enter into contemplation and preparation. An artist friend of mine has a strong Buddhist practice. Meditation, silence and contemplation of the words and writing of teachers has been very helpful to her. Another friend works in more than one medium; besides writing, she also does visual art and music.

Writer's blocks are perhaps an earlier stage of the process and can be investigated. Perhaps more contemplation or more preparation is needed. A block may represent fear or a resistance to change. The social work response to these two obstacles is acknowledgment and affirmation and then a consideration of how staying stuck affects you in the short and long term. Practicing respect of the internal and external obstacles is a skillful tactic. The use of force doesn't work. Controlling responses don't work. In artistic counseling, Anne Paris, PhD, suggests three solutions; mirroring (finding somebody to reflect on your work with you), eliciting creative work in relation to a hero that you have (another writer or artist), and working with peers. These relationships with others help us stay connected to the source of our own inspiration.

In the action of creating something new, we must stretch and rise in ways not otherwise called for. Consider the language we use for such experiences; we say a person is consumed by their work.   At times, I've been consumed by writing and afterwards, I was not the same.   Artists are perhaps marked by their changefulness, like Merce Cunningham.   We are willing to enter in again and again, to create something new.   And of this new beginning, the artist or writer creates an experience with a beginning, middle and end.

Each new work has a different constellation or different set of principles, in order to engage with it, an artist or writer has to let go of the past. What has worked before might not be what works in the new project.   Adjustments are needed.   Perhaps this is also what Rilke meant in his poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo: "...you must change your life." (To read this poem and poet Mark Doty's critical analysis of it, click on this link http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19707.

Besides writing, I work with people who are affected by mental illness and I help facilitate recovery. Once I had the opportunity to attend the Creativity and Madness Conference in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It is a conference that examines the psychology of art and artists. Many artists have transformed very difficult life experience and mental illness into astonishing artistic achievement.   (http://www.creativityandmadness.com/)

The artistic process engages us with the process of change in a very intimate and personal way.    Not only does creative work relax and help us feel centered, it is a profound act of change in the world. We all know you can't change anybody else; it is possible to change oneself (and that is difficult enough). Creative work allows us to make small alterations in the patterns of the self, allows us to follow an image through to a completed work, and sets in motion a beginning that reaches farther than we realize.

Arts learning is so important. The wisdom we gain from working artistically is valuable. Artists can help others learn how to overcome obstacles, especially the difficult obstacles that one's own self can erect during the process of change. Music programs, theater departments, art departments, and creative writing classes not only help students improve their math scores; they give an individual an important tool that might save him or her, and maybe the world.

Notes:
If you are interested in artistic process, check out this book by Anne Paris, PhD: Standing at Water's Edge: Moving Past Fear, Blocks, and Pitfalls to Discover the Power of Creative Immersion (New World Library, c2008) If you want to know about the change process and motivational interviewing, read Miller, William R. & Rollnick, Stephen. (2 edition) Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People For Change . New York: Guildford Press (2002).

How to Revise Poems

2010-11-09T22:30:00.000-06:00

Re-vision is an opportunity to come to the emerging work with attention and deliberation. The rough draft will reveal things to the attentive writer about how to best develop and hone the poem. No rules are hard and fast; these are simply guidelines.   The goal at the end of revision is to have every element of the poem (the voice, the images, the metaphor, the word choice, the punctuation, the line and stanza breaks) all choices that have been made for the best possible effect.

Paul Valery wrote that the language of prose is meant to fall away once the meaning is delivered. In a poem, the language is a physiological device that recreates the breath of the writer in the reader.   Each time the poem is read, the experience is created anew and can reveal new meanings.

1. Begin with a strong line.   A sense detail or an action is best.   It must be arresting in some way: either make it musical or sensual or surprising or make it an action.

2. Poems are a pattern language. Sound patterns or visual patterns are pleasing. Look for ways to enhance the emerging patterns of a first draft. Pay attention to vowel sounds, consonant sounds, almost rhyme, rhyme and rhythm and repetition. The best way to hear this is to read it aloud. Consider the overall shape of the poem.   Repeating words greatly emphasizes those words.   (So make sure you aren't overusing the pronoun "I" or the word "the.")

3. Focus. If you begin with a metaphor, continue to stay in the metaphor throughout the poem.    Avoid simile. It just isn’t as effective.   Writing persona poems is good practice for staying inside a metaphor.

4. Make sure that you have employed the five senses. Good poems are rooted in the body.   Write from your heart, and write about what is really important to you.   You are creating an emotional experience.   Longing belongs in a poem, but not preaching.

5.   Consider context, juxtapositions, simultaneous occurrences, the landscape. Consider some storytelling conventions, like journey or the rule of 3 or circular forms.   Consider mythology and Biblical story. Is your poem somehow similar to a wider cultural story?

6.   Use active verbs and SPECIFIC, concrete detail.   Vivid description. Avoid the use of the words "is, are, was, were, has, had, have, been, seem, being." In words, create a vivid picture in active voice. Like Mary Oliver says, nouns and verbs are worth 50 cents, adjectives and adverbs are worth far less.   They can clutter up the poem, deaden it.   Try to build tension into the lines (maybe by the use of opposites or juxtapositions or by the use of an antagonist; consider what the poem is up against or irresistibly drawn to). Evoke a feeling, but don’t tell the reader how to feel.

7.    Stanzas are like paragraphs.   Stanza breaks offer an opportunity to cross time and space, to free-associate or free-fall, surprise the reader.

8.   Line breaks offer an opportunity to make the poem more evocative.   See if you can increase the meanings. Sometimes ambiguities enhance the poem.   The end word of a line, a stanza, and the entire poem is important.

9.   Value the resonating image.   Sometimes an image lingers or resonates for a writer.   Use
this and keep it central to the poem. Let the poem lead you. Listen to the work.   Allow yourself to work intuitively.

10. Often beginning poets can be heavy-handed with the conclusion. Do not summarize what you just said in the poem. Don't tell the reader what to feel. End strong. Think of your last line as a phrase of music. 

A Poet's Voice

2010-10-31T12:57:00.000-05:00

Curtains by Ruth Stone

Putting up new curtains, other
windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams NO PETS! NO PETS!
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

from Second-Hand Coat (Boston: Godine, c1987)

The voice is so singular, so strong. In the space of just a few lines, we are completely connected. It is intimate, immediate, and sweeps us into her world. A memoir in a few associations. In two lines, we have a history of a marriage and a widowhood. "Now cold borsht alone in a bare kitchen." Stone has nailed the reader with an inescapably vivid detail. The taste is something the reader knows. A stanza break and a question, "What does it mean if I say this years later?" The stanza break here allows the writer and reader to make a transition. What does it mean? I like that the question is not answered in the poem, but the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. The next stanza presents a dramatic scene and a memory of another scene. The final question nearly stabs the heart with its poignancy. The title is so well chosen. It begins by putting up curtains, but the shadow meaning of curtains, meaning the end in a drama, also comes in.

Each writer's voice is singular and unique. It's important to preserve it through the drafts of the poem. One's voice is made of the way that you talk, your word choice, the things you notice, the place you live, the intimacies you have.

The Poet's Power

2010-10-17T19:40:00.000-05:00

Greeter of Souls
by Deborah Digges

Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off rivers.
Here souls pass, not one deified,
and sometimes this is terrible to know
three floors below the street, where light drinks the world,
siphoned like music through portals.
How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless.
A memory of water.
The trees more beautiful not themselves.
Souls who have passed here, tired brightening.
Dumpsters of linen, empty
gurneys along corridors to parking garages.
Who wonders, is it morning?
Who washes these blankets?
Can I not be the greeter of souls?
What’s to be done with the envelopes of hair?
If the inlets are frozen, can I walk across?
When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,
do I put on the new garments?
On which side of the river should I wait?

from Trapeze (Knopf, 2004)

Lately, I've been thinking that poems are made of desire. This one, for instance. yearns with a dark intensity.

It begins in the natural world. After the first line, it falls into another world, the one you might enter after death. She uses the images of a hospital parking garage, a dark recess below healing, or past it. Delightful is her fusion of sense details: "...where light drinks the world,/ siphoned like music through portals./ How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless." The alliteration of f sounds, "framed faceless" seem to reinforce the earlier f sound, in "siphoned." There are many f sounds: deified, fed, frozen. The word siphoned is an interesting choice. One thinks of muzak played in elevators, drawn off, stolen from its rightful source. The word means taken away from, and 'taken away from' is the topic at hand. Is it the narrator that is taken away from, or is it the others? The language shifts from literal to figurative and back as she wanders across the line between this world and the next.

She writes from the body: "What's to be done with the envelopes of hair?" Vivid detail. It haunts us. "When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,/ do I put on the new garments?" Perhaps the narrator is speaking of her own death. It seems so. She is on a brink, desiring still. "Can I not be the greeter of souls?" This sentence with the word 'not' seems to cast two shadows. "Can I not be....." is a heartbreaking choice of words for this poem. It speaks to the mystery we face, after being, can I not be? "Can't I be" would have more correct grammatically but would not lend the additional meaning. The 'not' reinforces the angst. She is witness to death--others and her own, and she expresses the poignancy and confusion.

Poems like these reach into the subconscious, use both memoir, myth, and music, and release both deep wonder and awareness.

For more information about this poet, click on this link: Deborah Digges

The Muse

2010-10-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

I like to have two chairs at my desk, one for me and the other for the spirit that joins me at my work.   That is how it feels--the work is not just mine, it comes through me; so I must acknowledge this unnamed spiritual help.

When one person, by herself, even in self doubt and confusion, sits down to write, something happens. She listens to herself and this other. A world can rise up out of nothing at all, out of piece of blank paper and a pen, and it can hold such vivid life that it can change everything.   Writing can change the writer and it can change the reader.

A writing teacher once suggested a creative visualization in order to create a guide for yourself in your work.    I recommend this. Consider who your literary influences are and choose a persona for your own muse. Let your muse help you create the work and present it.

As a child, my life was changed when I read Louisa May Alcott. She gave me Jo March, and ever after, Jo March lives inside. Since then, many other texts have amazed me, shaken me, awakened me, and gotten me through changes. I think of recent ones I've read: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Gnostic Book, Thunder, Perfect MInd and many, many poets, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Yannis Ritsos, Cesar Vallejo, Rilke, Anne Carson. Generally, it is never all the work of one person, just certain work by certain writers at a certain time in my life, as if a light falls just right sometimes and the illumination is unforgettable.   Two very powerful influences on my own work are the poets & activists, Meridel LeSeuer and Audre Lorde.   I like to recall and call upon their powerful presence.

Lorde said: "... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

Poetry illuminates experience. It's particularly effective at getting me through changes. It is about changes.   Poetry gets past the conscious mind (we like the conscious mind but its anxiety and self absorption does not always help) and goes into the subconscious.   This is the place of intuition and image and pattern, the place where art finds deep knowing. I aim for it and let it guide me through my writing and my life.

Synergy: Poems & Music & Film

2010-09-25T18:48:00.000-05:00

"(immersion)

water resists
breaks without breaking
flows along invisible scores
courses between continuous
ends, begins

doesn't resist
touches, touches, turns
over the same skin...."

Click on the link to view a sample of collaborative work. In this piece, I have written and read the poems and Kathy McTavish has composed and performed the music on cello. The video images are selected collaboratively; Kathy has made the film.

Immersion: poetry on video

In performance or in video, my poems are often joined to music and image. Poems are often created in silence and solitude, and sometimes they are created while listening to music. My poems have strong images, and they are a painting with words. The poems reflect my landscape of northern Minnesota and the body. I use memoir, myth, and the patterns in nature to tell a story of change. Yet it is not 'nature poetry.' I tend not to write wisdom poems. Not that those are bad, but they aren't what I'm after artistically. I seek to evoke multiple meaning and in the interest of that, pare down the language and have rapid "turns." In the patterns of nature, migration, erosion, flood, storm, I find meaning that lends itself well to human experience.    A good poem is vivid and immediate. I like the poem to be an investigation that breaks open emotion. I have no ready answers nor do I trust that there are any.

When Kathy McTavish and I perform together, we do not seek to illustrate the other's work. Poems are made of figurative language; we love the imagination. We strive to 'push off from each other' and present a sound that has a creative tension and dialectical meaning. We begin, but the sounds are like two people in conversation who are not necessarily talking about the same thing. This technique makes a much more interesting dialogue and story. It is improvisational.

In hand, I have more poems than I will read that I've arranged into an arc. The individual poems are pieces of mosaic that create a larger story. My choices in performance are spontaneous and in relation to the sound of the cello.   The cello sound that Kathy has developed is done by a technique that we call "deep listening."   Deep listening demands a concentration and being in the moment.    In the moment, the changes of intonation and color are responded to immediately. We do not erect rigid barriers but are open to the subtle and sometimes not so subtle changes in the environment, the instrument, the voice, and the setting. We have learned that relying on intuition is best.

The voice of the cello and my own voice are similar. We are doing a duet. It means that we can flex and alter and shift and build on each other.   The video work that we create also seeks an independent flow. We have learned that interpreting the words of the poem literally in video image also does not work well for our purposes.   It must evoke meaning, and continue to be able to provide new meaning. Therefore the still motion images create an abstract expressionist painting in motion. The film has gestures and movement and color, and by itself is a shifting and beautiful story that invites the viewer to participate. There are glimpses of character in shadow or mirror or other oblique means. The viewer interprets the meaning. This is the same for the poems and music.

The still motion images are created by the use of DSLR camera, a Canon EO5.   Kathy has been exploring Bokeh effects. It is an artistic technique initially used by some Japanese photographers who enjoyed the aesthetics of blur.    She comes to this work by way of music; in fact the images are created in the same way that she creates music in her studio. Her echo pedal and harmonics perhaps are a musical expression of blur. She likes the 'infinite between.'   She began using images in her search for techniques of writing scores. The images evoke meaning; to her, they create a synesthesia and seem to have their own sounds.

The creative work that occurs simultaneously in performance will draw more shades of meaning and energy in proximity. We seek to share this synergy with the audience and are pleased to talk with people about their own 'invisible procession' of images that arise in their imagination while they listen to our performance.

Poetry works well with other media. See this website for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany.
http://www.zebra-award.org/index.php?id=779&L=1

From Duluth's Poet Laureate: A Community Wide Poetry Assignment

2010-09-13T21:20:00.000-05:00

Since becoming poet laureate of Duluth, I've been considering ways to invite the community to write poems.   Poems are marvelous little machines.   They are made of sound and image and if poems are good, they will touch you. This kind of touch is especially important during times of transition: a loss or a death, a departure, a journey, a union like a marriage, a new job, new home, an illness, a recovery, a birth, a new beginning.   Poetry has so much to offer everybody.

So on this blog, I've decided to offer some writing prompts. I've gathered three examples and invite you to write a poem that is structured like the example.    "Copying from the masters" is a good way to learn the craft of poetry.   But instead of recreating the master's work, make a parallel poem. Try adapting one of the master's features to your own. Make a poem with the same number of lines or stanzas.   Make a poem on a related topic.   Use language in a similar way.   Play with it 'fast and loose.' In this way, you can use the master's poem as a scaffold of sorts to build your own poem.

The following suggestions are drawn from the following poem examples. When you begin writing, detach from the internal critic. Avoid perfectionism. Focus on details and the five senses. Experiment, play, follow your instinct.   Make a first draft without much thought. Save that for later.

Writing prompt: Write a poem about a piece of clothing
Writing prompt: Write a list poem about something you've lost or found
Writing prompt: Write about a first lesson

In this poem by Connie Wanek (from her book of poems, On Speaking Terms, Copper Canyon Press, c2010), Connie focuses on a rag, a sleeve of an old shirt, to express changes:

Rags

I dust with a sleeve I loved
to look at on my arm.
Blue is gray now, like a patch
of sky filthy with clouds.
Why is piano dust always so gray?
Something about sound waves
and day
that science could explain.

I didn't need scissors
the cotton was so rotted
by sun and sweat, the salt I made,
the sticky seawater. I was glad
to actually wear something out,
to have seen one thing
completely through,
even though I'd miss
being the person who wore it.

Poetry has such an economy of words and yet conveys volumes.   This poem focuses on just one object, a dust rag that she'd made from a worn shirt.   The last line is so striking; one understands suddenly getting older.

In this poem, Elizabeth Bishop talks about loss. It is from her book The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, LLC).

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next to last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This poem is a form called villanelle that features 3 line stanzas and repeated lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza. It uses figurative language like many poems.    It starts out with simple losses but with each stanza, the loss becomes greater and deeper.   Bishop's tone is light and ironic, but she conveys the devastation.   Poems like these bring the reader gifts of solace and beauty.

Poems are gifts. To receive a poem is an honor.   Consider writing a poem about a person, a place, or a thing in your life. In the example by Connie Wanek, she shows us how writing about the sleeve of a shirt can reveal a life. Wanek's poem is tightly focused.    In the example by Elizabeth Bishop, she creates a list. Lists are very good ways to build a poem. Bishop's losses were very important ones to her. It is essential to write about what is important.

This poem by Philip Booth (you can find it at www.poemhunter.com) is a memory that also becomes a blessing:

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

This poem concentrates on the details of learning to swim. Booth does allow the poem to open up, past the particular day of the swimming lesson, but he remains in the metaphor of swimming. Metaphors allow the writer/poet a longer reach. Booth is talking about swimming, but we all know he is talking about life as well.

I invite you to try these exercises and share your work with others.

Information for Writers

2010-08-03T21:09:00.000-05:00

Check out the National Writers Union website for information about copyright, negotiating contracts, publishing, and many other important topics.

https://nwu.org/node

How to Facilitate a Writers' Group

2010-07-25T20:53:00.000-05:00

A writers group provides support, encouragement and critique.   It is a great way to give structure to your writing project and to get good feedback. The group does not have to be large; 3 people is great.   Over 6 people will require more time for the meeting and to read manuscripts.   I've used the following guidelines to facilitate groups.

Guidelines for Writing Groups
for a critique group: 3-6 people

Plan your group process with the members of the group.

Are you a closed group or an open group? Multi-genre or single genre? How will you take in new members? When and where will you meet?   I've found that it works well to meet at a coffeehouse or restaurant, especially if you can reserve a quiet corner.   It's a neutral territory and eliminates worry about housekeeping or managing pets or displacing family members at home.   Decide the length of time that you will meet. One hour is good for a small group. Over two hours is too long. What is the primary goal of each person in the group? (This is important. Some people find having a deadline is what they need. Some just want to get started and don’t want a lot of critique that might be discouraging. Some have a large manuscript or past published work and want “deep critical examination.”

This is a good time to decide if you want to designate one person as a facilitator or time keeper.    This person can help manage the group process.

Prepare for your writing group session.

Make a clean, readable copy of your writing.   Format it in the same way that you would if you were sending it to an editor or publisher. Bring enough Xerox copies of the work you want comments on—hand these out.

Be courteous. If you will be late or must miss the group, notify the facilitator or other members. Don't bring uninvited guests. Writers are often reading works in progress and might prefer to have more private sharing.    Also, writing tends to be personal. A new person might cause others to feel uncomfortable.

Learn to detach from your writing.

Read the work aloud (or an excerpt of the work aloud) while members read along with you. Don’t apologize or dismiss your work. Reading out loud in itself will reveal some flaws or things that need to be added or omitted. If you have specific questions about the work, you can ask your reviewers to consider those.   It's a good practice for the writer to remain silent when members are giving feedback.   Resist explaining your decisions.   The readers must rely on what is written on the page and should respond only to that.

Let your work stand on its own. Members of a group should practice ‘detachment’ from their own work when it is reviewed. Remember it is the work that is being scrutinized, not you the writer. Don’t take things personally. The feedback is an opinion and you don’t necessarily need to follow any advice or suggestions. Simply hear the feedback and then deliberate on your own.

Don't monopolize the time.   Each member should have roughly equal time for reviews.

Give good feedback.

Reviewers should make observations about the work. Notice what works well. Identify the strengths. In poetry, you should be attending to the sound, rhythm, pattern, imagery, metaphor, word choice. Be specific. Avoid general or vague comments like “this is good” or “I don’t like it.” Explain what exactly works for you and why. Note the shifts or confusing things. Reflect about what doesn’t seem to work. In prose, give feedback about dialogue, setting, action, point of view, and other aspects.    Note discrepancies or things that don't make sense.   Sometimes reviewers will disagree—all the better! The writer should sit back and listen to the feedback.

It is not necessary to tell the writer how to “fix” the work. This might feel supportive, but it also might feel overbearing. Recommended solutions may not reflect the writer’s own style.   Ultimately, the writer will need to make the decisions to bring the work into line with his or her vision.

Check in with each other regularly.

Take time to review group process. Your group will want to discuss how much time to spend on each work, and you will also benefit from talking about the individual writers process as well. Try to avoid distracting yourselves with personal information or experience. It’s easy to get sidetracked. Perhaps assign somebody to be a time keeper or to remind people to stay focused on the written work.

Set up an email list. Notify each other if you can’t attend. Respect each other’s time.

Getting Inside Poetry

2010-07-25T13:27:00.000-05:00

Poetry may seem difficult at first. Some readers feel frustrated or shut out by poems that seem obscure. It takes awhile to learn its dimensions.    I think of poetry as a language within our language.   It is figurative instead of literal.   It uses metaphor and some devices in order to gain access to things that cannot be said.

I find it useful to describe poetry as "pattern language." This phrase from architecture describes common forms: entrances, transitional spaces, roofs, particular uses for rooms, etc.    In fact, the word 'stanza' comes from the Italian and means 'room.'   Poetry is built; it does have structure. This structure contains images, sounds, and creates meaning.    When you start to understand these elements, a gate opens and poetry becomes essential.   For me, poetry houses the spirit.

Poetry's history is in the oral tradition. It has been used in spiritual or religious ritual. Prayers are memorized and spoken.   Blessings are given.   Spells are cast. Traveling minstrels or storytellers instructed and entertained people. Poetry's patterns allowed for easier memorization.

"Voice" is key to understanding the poem. Who is speaking and to whom? Some poems are public and some very intimate. Three basic types of poems are 1) narrative, 2) dramatic, and 3) lyric. I consider the intention of the poet to determine the type of a poem.    The narrative is essentially a story. A dramatic poem tends to sound like a speech delivered to many. It often engages with important figures and historical events; it might be epic. The lyric type is similar to song.

Some poems are 'formal,' meaning that they use a form with prescribed meter, syllables in a line, stanzas, and rhyme. Sonnets are forms, some are Shakespearean and some Petrarchan. Other forms are the sestina, villanelle, and pantoum.   Individual poets adapt forms to suit their work. Then there are 'free verse' poems that do not follow a formula. These might have 'blank verse,' meaning iambic rhythm. The author of a free verse poem usually establishes his or her own pattern.

The purpose of the poem is also an interesting consideration. The poet Paul Valery said that prose language is meant to disappear once the meaning is conveyed, but poetry is different. The particular arrangement of words and rhythm physically affects the reader.   It resists disappearing. The form itself is compelling and acts as a device that continues to create meaning each time we read it.

Helen Vendler, an astute literary critic, writes: "Both John Stuart Mill and T.S. Eliot...thought that the reader 'overhears' the speaker of the lyric, as the audience overhears the soliloquies of Hamlet. Others...have preferred, as I do myself, to see the reader as the true speaker of the lyric. In this view, the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader--who, as soon as he enters the lyric, is no longer a reader but rather an utterer, saying the words of the poem in propria persona, internally and with proprietary feeling. For poems that are overheard, I prefer to keep the name 'dramatic monologue'; in such a poem the reader is genuinely placed in the position of overhearing someone else, clearly not himself, speak aloud to yet another person. I reserve the name 'lyric' for poems that make their reader their solitary speaker." (from the Introduction of her book, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition)

Poetry does have a strong connection to the body, and the breath of the writer affects that of the reader.    In this way, we breath in and out the images and language, the vision of the poets.

Remnants

2010-07-08T06:50:00.000-05:00

Going through a difficult time? Keep a journal. A journal will help you in many ways. It can contain everything that you bring to it, grief, fear, anger, joy. It will provide an opportunity to slow down and meditate. Writing is a tool of the mind; you can sort out your thoughts on paper. It will be a source book, a place to collect images, sounds, thoughts.

There is no correct or incorrect way to journal.   Write a lot.   Use the five senses when you write.   Julia Cameron of the The Writer's Way had good advice: 3 pages a day.   If you don't know where to begin, then start with an image or a description. A person, a place, an object.    The best thing is to is not to think too much about what to write, but just to begin.

Allow yourself to be a beginner; use beginner's mind.   Once you are writing, your subject will come to you. When it comes, accept it. If you are one that works best with deadlines, a 10 minute timed writing is a good idea; but if you are still writing when the bell rings, then keep going. It may become a poem or a story.

I found these quotes (unknown author) on the website Creativity in Motion. https://cim.ou.edu/quotes.html (If you are interested, check out the Creativity in Motion grant application and information about previously funded projects.)

“You cannot be a creator AND a victim.”

“You will not find what you do not live.”

“It’s not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you’re not.”

Writing Process
Writer's block occurs, in my experience, when you have become a perfectionist or if you trying to impose an idea or a structure too soon. Do not try to make it perfect! Get over the obstacle of the self. Limit your distractions. (Internet, cell phone, family!)    This is a work in progress. This is a first draft or sloppy copy. It is merely a ten minute exercise. It is like doodling or sketching. If it has spelling errors or grammar problems, keep going. If you find it boring, drop down a level. Write about what is important to you.

In this passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the artist Lily Briscoe is outside with an easel: "She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."

Woolf is talking about the frustration of artists and writers: what you want is not always what appears. This is common and not of concern when you are journalling. A journal is a private document. It is like developing the raw material, mining the ore. Perhaps it is a remnant.   We create documents made by hand. Flaws can be part of the beauty. A remnant, if we are to use Woolf's image, may be all you need.   Think of women who have created beautiful quilts and garments from remnants.    Once you have your raw material, then consider it without early judgment.   Discover the strengths of what is on the page.   Maybe it wasn't the initial vision, but something else as valuable, a deeper vision.   Revision is designed to develop the strengths.

If you need a safe place to keep a journal, use an online program. http://www.google.com/docs or
http://www.zoho.com/writer     If you have internet access, these allow you to access your writing (and they are password protected) from any computer at any time.   They are easy to use and free.

Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of keeping a journal. If you write down your goals, you are much more likely to achieve them. If you keep a journal during recovery from illness, your outcome will improve.    Writing is a source of strength and it help you in many ways.

Poetry: Not Feeling But Experience

2010-06-25T21:11:00.000-05:00

Rilke said, "For poetry isn't, as people imagine, merely feelings (these come soon enough); it is experiences. To write one line, a man ought to see many cities, people, and things; he must learn and know animals and the way of birds in the air, and how little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back the way to unknown places...and to partings long foreseen, to days of childhood...and to parents...to days on the sea...to nights of travel...and one must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike...and the screams of women in childbed...one must have sat by the dead in a room with open windows....But it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them and have vast patience until they come again...and when they become blood within us, and glances and gestures...then first it can happen that in a rare hour the first world of a verse may arise and come forth." (Malte, pp 25-27)

Poetry provides an experience; it is physical. The five senses are activated. Sometimes people think it is about expressing feelings, but I agree with Rilke that it is about expressing experience.   In this quote, he says that one must have integrated the experience so that it has become part of yourself, in your blood, glances and gestures.   It is, in other words, experience that changes you.    (Writing assignment: write about something that changed you).

Very good poems can change you.

Read this essay, Mark Doty writing about Rilke's poem, "Archaic Torso of Apollo."

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19707

Alejandra Pizarnik

2010-05-24T15:54:00.000-05:00

I love this fragment from poet Alejandra Pizarnik, from Argentina:

“dije you, perio me referia al alba luminosa…”

“I said I but I was referring to the luminous dawn…”

Alejandra Pizarnik: "If only I were able to live solely in ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body, redeeming each phrase with my days and weeks, infusing the poem with my breath for each word that has been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living.

"Poetry is the place where everything happens. Similar to love, humor, suicide and every profoundly subversive act, poetry is not interested in that which is not its freedom or truth. To say freedom or truth and refer these words to the world we live in or do not live in is to tell a lie. It isn't when they are attributed to poetry: the place where all is possible."

More information about Pizarnik

Why is Poetry Important?

2010-05-13T14:44:00.000-05:00

Art strengthens both community and diversity. Whatever we write about makes it stronger. Naming is very powerful.   An investment in the arts, in your own and that of others, is an investment in the soul. Writing and poetry help people during times of transition to see ourselves in a larger context.

Poetry is a pattern language. It is similar to visual art because it employs image but it creates an auditory or sound environment.

Poems have taught me important things.   They are a way of knowing.   My poems tend to have a voice that is located outside in the landscape as opposed to inside a domestic space.   I draw meaning from the natural world, from rivers and migrations.

"River begins in the other world/ without time."   (from Undertow)

"near shore another story / places that no longer know me..." (from Echo & Lightning)

My collections of poems, in chapbooks or books or in performances, are mosaics. The individual poems are arranged in a way to create a larger story. My stories are not escapist. Instead of going away from reality, they go into it in ways that alter it for me.

What Do Poems Do?

2010-05-11T16:55:00.000-05:00

It's hard to describe exactly what a great poem does. Here are some thoughts:

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
--Emily Dickinson

"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin

Listening to the Work: Thoughts on Writing Fiction and Poetry

2010-05-01T11:07:00.002-05:00

Re-vision is an important part of the writing process.     I like to break the syllable to emphasize the word, vision: to see the work again, to see what it can be.

"I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies. I don’t see any reason in fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination." Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, Gilead and Home.

This is an excerpt of an interview in The Paris Review.  This advice works well when you are writing poetry too. Something leaps out that is strong enough to build the poem around.    This is how you "listen to the work."      It begins by building on the strengths: enhance the image or the moment. Create a pattern that emphasizes the strengths.   Take out anything that isn't needed.    Read it aloud.   Listen.   Read it to somebody else. Listen.    If you have gone deep enough into the poem and become fully engaged, then you will reach the discipline of language and imagination that Robinson mentions.

Lately, I've been meditating on the fact that poems are small, but they contain memoir, music, and sometimes myth.    Often they capture a moment, a story, a particular set of sounds, a pattern. Sometimes the pattern is internal to the poem.....a metrical scheme, a stanzaic pattern. Sometimes this pattern connects to another pattern, a mythic or larger cultural story.   The author Marilynne Robinson has joined the novels to archetype and sacred stories. The poet can do this too. Poems are very small, but they contain a voice, a landscape, a world, an eternity.

If you want to read the interview with Marilynne Robinson, go to
http://www.theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5863

Duluth Poet Laureate

2010-04-22T14:32:00.000-05:00

As a poet, I look for the resonating image and pattern. In language, I explore memoir, myth, music, and patterns of the natural world in my quest. My ultimate goal is to break through to a larger vision or break open a deeper emotional landscape. This is what good poems do for the reader and writer; they are like gifts. They open us and provide sustenance for the spirit.

As a person in the role of poet laureate over the next two years, I invite people to join me along this path of sustaining the spirit.

As a teacher and social worker, I know that many people have unique and compelling visions or stories to tell. Not all of these people decide to become writers but nevertheless, they breathe their sparks into writing. Like most creative work, writing can transform the writer. This is why writing is valuable for those in transition or those that are healing. I want to provide encouragement for the community to use poetry for their ceremonies and transitions.

As a person who likes to walk along the trails of our city, following the rivers and creeks, and as a poet who has written many river poems--I am interested in exploring how larger patterns in our ecosystem and world, such as watersheds, erosion or migration can inform an artistic work. Similarly, I am also interested in and want to connect my work with the larger patterns of human experience reflected in our important cultural stories. Jungian psychology, mythology, Biblical story, fairytale, history and other ways that can help connect the individual artistic work to a larger context. In my own family history, immigration of my Finnish grandparents to Minnesota has deeply influenced my poems. My work is also deeply connected to the northern landscape.

As a poet, I like to develop and celebrate art. At their best, literary arts represent both good craft and deep quest. In poetry, the language, history, landscape, and experience emerge for that individual and collectively, for the culture. The poet Linda Hogan once told me, “Whatever you write about makes it stronger.”

A community that honors and celebrates the arts becomes a community of openness and exchange. Unique voices rise that bring images and stories that stir us. The arts foster diversity not uniformity. The community that invests in the activity of art making (and poetry is art) is preserving its culture and promoting creativity. This is why it's a great investment to use taxes to support the arts in our communities. We are all strengthened.

Toward the goal of expanding the audience for poetry and celebrating the unique characteristics of Duluth, I'd like to integrate poetry deeply into our community. The following are some activities that I've proposed. I look forward to collaborating further with the poet laureate committee to adapt them as needed and to have these activities reflect the diversity of our community.

Community Projects:

"Blessings" -- this is community wide project--adults and children—designed to help people in our community to write blessing poems. I'd like to see these blessings given with the bowls at Empty Bowl and at the free Thanksgiving Dinner at the DECC....the best of these should be made into broadsides (collaborating with visual artists) for our area hospice programs, the Women's Shelter, CHUM, the Food Shelf, Detox, and other organizations that assist the homeless or hungry to provide warmth and encouragement. Learning to write a blessing also enhances one's own relationships. We can all provide blessings for weddings, births, deaths, traveling, school or training, military service, medical treatments and healing, and other endeavors. The world will be a much better place if we can find a way to bless rather than blame.

Arbor Day or Earth Day: "Poet Trees": plant a tree and place a poem --either an excerpt of or an entire poem written by a poet in this region on a wooden panel or sign: the harbor - pier or bridge area, Park Point, the Rose Garden (wedding poem here), Munger Trail, Seven Bridges Road, the creeks in Duluth: Miller Creek, Chester Creek, Tischer Creek, Lester River, the Lakewalk. I look forward to developing this idea with area trail enthusiasts, environmentalists and citizens interested in the city parks and trails and the Lake Superior Hiking Trail.

Poetry Readings / Events

Hawk's Ridge fall bird migration: "Migrations" Invite poets to share their work that relates to birds, flight or migration (migration of any kind)...the place that we left, the place that we are going....with a special invitation for poems about or from women in transition....

Grandma's Marathon & or Lake Superior Hiking Trail/ ultra-marathon: "Long Journey" -- poems that relate to the theme of journey (of any kind) or quest, with a special invitation for poems about the body and healing.

Gales of November: "The Body, The Vessel" I would propose a multimedia performance that would feature a handful of poets, musicians, and modern dance that pays homage to the lake, the boats, and our history of staying afloat....

Workshops:

"Blessings: Poems for Commemoration" - I'd like to offer a guideline with a few writing exercises for all interested persons, writers or not, about how to write a blessing poem. This could be posted online for individuals, teachers, group leaders, and others to use. Poems like these are useful for commemorating a dinner or special event such as a wedding, birth, graduation, a long journey, moving into a new house, entering military service or any field of work, relationship transitions, and death. They are valuable for those in crisis. It is a gift of love that family, friends and others will appreciate.

"Getting Out There" a day long workshop presented by me and a few other poets on publication and alternative modes of poetry presentation: UTube, blogs, MP3 files, chapbooks and collaborations.

"Poetry & Quest" -- Poetry is both craft & quest. Many workshops and classes focus on improving craft--word choice, lines, stanza, meter, rhythm and sound. These are important. This workshop focuses on another part of the poet's job: quest. Participants will write about their own individual motives and goals in their writing. We will examine aspects of "voice" and pattern. This is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of archetypes, but as a way for poets to consider their larger themes. I will present some thoughts about archetypal patterns in relationship to writing, revision, and manuscript development.

The Quest --King Arthur
The Fall & Ascent--The Bible
Trading with the Gods--Greek Mythology
Spells and Tasks--fairy tales
Guidance on the Journey--Tarot, Runes, I-Ching
Carl Jung--Dreams, Archetypes and Jungian Psychology
Nature--migration, flow, wilderness, the elements

Please share your thoughts with me. I’d love to hear your feedback. And if you are a member of the Duluth area and want to participate, please send me an email at sheila@sheilapacka.com

Blessings

2010-04-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

Creative work is a flow experience.   In flow, a writer has deep focus and attentiveness.   It feels outside of time.    Hours can go by without notice.   Of course, it is sometimes difficult to get across the threshold.   Distractions abound.    It's important to allow yourself enough unscheduled time to daydream, muse, and then fall in.

Lewis Hyde, author of THE GIFT, takes the idea of flow a bit farther. He urges artists and writers to understand the psychic rules of flow. In order to continue to receive, one must continue to give. It is like a river. It is like pot-latch. The giving of gifts to others not only nurtures and supports them; the giving allows one to empty oneself in order to receive.    We should not be attached to things, and we should not be so attached to our work that we can not let it go into the world.

I wrote this poem (from THE MOTHER TONGUE):

JOY

to reach down this far
releases me
the place inside
has been broken open
by necessity
I don't know what I've lost
I don't know that I have lost
I'm broken open
the floor that made me contain
allowed me to fill, be filled
is gone
I am without bottom
without a way to hold
all the things coming into me
they fall from me
I am the opening
the sluice gate
am swept with the force
yet hold open
what I pray for is endless
is the constant source
the river never running dry

Some people have asked me if the poem is about death. Perhaps it is. My father died the year that I wrote it. Like most people, I appreciate the effect of change. You gain people, places, things but also along the way, you lose people, places, things. At times, it is excruciating.   I named the poem, Joy; my mother gave me the name Joy as my middle name. Anguished awe. Painful ecstasy.

Creative work is good work. We write things, we put them out there. The work might change in this process; it might change us; it might change someone else. We don't know. It perhaps is not of concern; what matters is that we give of ourselves.

The simultaneous experience of receiving while losing, the feeling of love and grief at the same, is echoed in cosmology. The universe began with simultaneous creation and destruction.   We have both light and dark matter.   So it is not a question of either/or; we have both love and grief.   Perhaps the real question is how does one direct one's own abilities--which force will you feed?   What is your quest?    What forces rise up from your ancestral roots, what growth can you accomplish, what have you come to say?

I found this Pueblo Blessing:

Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.
- Pueblo Blessing

Synesthesia & Art Fusion

2010-04-13T20:29:00.000-05:00

Godard the French film maker said of his work that it was "as if I wanted to write a sociological essay in the form of a novel, and all I had to do it with was notes of music."      Poetry and film are related genres: both employ image, word, music.   They operate the same way. I like poetry that cross pollinates with painting, sculpture, photography, music, composition, film, theater, dance. Even better to combine it with other ways of knowing: science, navigation, philosophy, history, religion, alchemy.    Poetry is a form of waking.

I think of it as paradox, the combination of opposites.   Not dialectic, but ecstatic.   Not static, but in motion.

Poetry is a live painting for the ear, or music made by taste and touch that reaches you deep inside.   It's time travel by smell.    It tells you about yourself by water or wind or stone or flames. If it's a pattern, if it's a ritual, if it's a dance.   It will sing to you, unsettle you, bring you back to yourself, change your life. And all you have to do it with is the alphabet and empty space.

Why I Write

2010-03-12T22:54:00.000-06:00

I write because I was born into two languages: Finnish and English. Both sets of my grandparents were Finnish immigrants and they learned very little English. I write because there was so much they couldn't say.    I write about migration of many kinds. Birds, grandmothers, desire.   My grandmothers' lives were very difficult.   They both gave birth to several children, ten in my mother's family and eight in my father's. There wasn't enough food sometimes, there wasn't enough of anything.   I write because I could not bear my mother's secrets.   I write out of a need to dance.

As a little girl, I was located in between lakes, near burial mounds of the Ojibwe, between iron and taconite mines, between Finnish and English, between two sisters, on a small farm with a few horses, a few cows, chickens, dogs, cats, and a garden. Each evening, when the sun set behind the pines, it ignited the water with its fire, and the shining broke through the stand of trees like glitter. Mornings, I heard a sound in the morning unlike any other.   It was more of an echo than a sound. It was more of a calling than an echo. Maybe I was used to unknown words; for some reason, I called it "warding."   I thought it was the sound of the sun coming up but I later found out that it was the train hauling iron ore from the mine.   The sound was the sound of wheels on a track.   The very earth was being moved away.

I write because there is so much that the earth can't say.    I write out of restlessness and grief. I write out of awe.    I write because the world presses itself upon me: iron, rivers, birds, trees, lakes, light.   I migrate.

Poems are a doorway in ordinary experience to a place that you haven't seen before. It's where you live. Poetry dislocates you in a familiar way. It is a staunch for old wounds.   Poetry uses the same language that dreams use, only it isn't a dream.   Poetry uses the language to get around the language toward the silence of a river.    Beneath your feet, the river erodes the banks, takes you in like it takes in the sand and the roots and the light.    All in.

sending poems out

2010-03-11T22:20:00.000-06:00

Poets and Writers Magazine has a great website. Check it out to find a database of literary magazines and contest information. These listings will help you decide where and when to send poems or stories:
http://www.pw.org

The Academy of American Poets has a great website of poets, poems, bios and articles about poetry.
http://www.poets.org

A website that might help you keep track of your submissions: http://www.duotrope.com

Marianne Moore

2010-02-23T19:19:00.000-06:00

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "Lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

--Marianne Moore
from the poem "When I Buy Pictures"

The Quest: What Can't be Taught in a Writer's Workshop

2010-02-21T23:48:00.000-06:00

It’s true, poetry workshops can be helpful. I've been to workshops that I've enjoyed. I've led workshops. At some point, it is always necessary to invest time in solitude. Recently, I ran across this interview with Gregory Orr, excerpted here:

"To me poetry is both Quest and Craft. The quest aspect: what poetry means to you as an individual who has decided to orient her life in relation to this thing called 'poetry'—no one can really solve that for you. You search for guides and poetic forebears, but it's a personal search and struggle. Workshops necessarily stress craft, they can do only so much in relation to quest. But craft is easier than quest and less lonely. You can learn craft; you can improve, you can utilize your intelligence to master it. Why not call poetry Craft and forget Quest, or give the quest aspect short-shrift? That's the temptation that workshops breed. We know that. I guess the main defense would be to be forewarned. To tell yourself, "yes, this workshop response matters, but what is it that I personally need to learn or understand that poetry is trying to teach me?"

The full interview is at http://www1.american.edu/cas/lit/folio/spring2004inter.html

Gregory Orr makes an important point. When workshops or writers groups meet, we talk about craft but quest is also equally important. While another writing group member might offer a good suggestion, you can’t “go that way.” The suggestion might not fit the need because of the self’s deeper quest.

It takes a long time to master craft. Orr offers an interesting question: what is your poetry trying to teach you?

Sometimes, we are so close to our own work that we can’t see it objectively. There are things that you can do to step back from the mirror. Literature is a coin of two sides, writing and reading. The work that you are drawn to reading again and again contains a key to your own writing. Notice what you are reading and why you like to read it. Consider the kinds of poems (written by other poets) that you love. What kind of quest do these poems reveal? What are the life questions? Your own fascinations and obsessions reveal things about you. Another way to gain some distance is to ask a friend to make some observations of your work. This time, don’t ask for feedback about craft, but do ask for reflections about quest related to a specific group of poems that you wrote. Expect an interesting conversation.

This is not about writing “wisdom poems.” In a quest, the answers are hard won and long in coming, if they come at all. The issues are deep and deeply troubling; the best that one can do is to name the question. Think of Chiron, the wounded healer. Think of the Odyssey and King Arthur. Think of Lord of the Rings. These great stories illuminate a path for your own work.

Pablo Neruda: Toward an Impure Poetry

2010-01-29T12:54:00.000-06:00

Pablo Neruda: "It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things - all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denial and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigals, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding-willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment-moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice."

Immersion

2010-01-11T23:52:00.000-06:00

The new performance work that I do with cellist Kathy McTavish falls between genres (see samples http://www.cellodreams.com/music02.html). It isn't song lyric and it isn't linear. It isn't narrative but it does rely on narrative structures, some related to myth.    The cello, freestyle, improvisional, experimental sound, pulls you into the subconscious.   I begin with submersion.

Roberto Bolano's novel, The Savage Detectives, begins with the narrator's statement that he joined the school of 'visceral realists.'   Next paragraph, he says he isn't sure what that means. Nevertheless, he's in it and the novel unfolds from there.    I too search for the word that can define this writing.

The sources of my work are diverse--first, Finnish folk literature. The Kalevala was an oral tradition: a creation story told (in rhapsodic meter) while playing the folk instrument, the kantela.   The epic is pre-Christian and contains many things, the creation story of the universe, charms, magic spells, stories of the magic singer, North Farm, weddings, feasts.   In the beginning, the Kalevala portrays the world as all water, without shore.

Second, dream is a source.   The work I've been doing isn't exactly surreal. It's isn't exactly magical realism.  I've found a new term:  irreal.   Irreal describes the work of Franz Kafka.   It puts you in another world and speaks to you of life. It isn't a term that is used very much, but it does help describe the other world of 'undertow,' our new work in progress.

I do like the words of Rene Magritte, "...If 'dreams' are concerned in this context, they are very different from those we have while sleeping. It is question of self-willed 'dreams'...which are not intended to make you sleep but wake you up."      Some of the writers I have long admired: Clarice Lispector (Hour of the Star, Family Ties, Foreign Legion, The Passion According to GH), Jorge Luis Borges (Dream Tigers, Ficciones, Labyrinths), Eduardo Galeano (Memory of Fire), Arguedas (Deep Rivers).   Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.   Ava and Aureole by Carol Maso.   These are stories of longing, mystical and somehow the author dislocates the reader in a most satisfying way. They are definitely not plot driven, and not even especially character driven, but perhaps soul driven.

Third, my source is music and art, especially abstract expressionism and conceptual art.   I find that the other art genres can trigger my own work.      The language is musical, with internal rhyme, assonance and consonance.   Other things feed my work: fear  (what Kathy calls "trembling before God") or existentialist anguish and / or spiritual crisis that comes from life: the loss of loved ones, disaster, precipitous change.   The writing grapples with that.      In revision, I have reached into myths (Leda & the Swan, Orpheus and Euridyce), Biblical story, Tarot, and other art (the visual art of Hyman Bloom) and literature (the writing of mystics).   It is ethereal but completely rooted in the body, and visceral, but in the other world.   A touch sidereal, surreal, magically real, irreal.    For Bolanos, definition is only the beginning.  The writing of Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking) says, "never mind mind...."