Ecstatic Poems: Laugh Even When You Lose

Loss is Not Defeat

Poet Coleman Barks passed away recently.  At the University of Georgia English Department, he used to teach literature and creative writing.  A writer of ecstatic poems, he also translated the Sufi poet, Rumi.  The word ecstatic comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside of oneself.” It is poetry that expresses transcendence or mystical experience.  This was characteristic of the poems written by Barks, as in this excerpt of his poem "Glad."  

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

...

This poem reflects joy in losing as well as in winning. To read the entire poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Read an excerpt of a  poem by Rumi: 

Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.
...

Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.

When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,

“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”
...

From Gold (NYRB Classics, 2022) by Rumi. Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori. Copyright © 2022 by Haleh Liza Gafori. 

To read the entire poem and see a lesson plan for teaching this, go to 

poets.org

To read a poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Seared by Memory: Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out on Feb 26, 2026 at Wussow's Concert Cafe in Duluth, Minnesota

In the Blaney lecture“Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness” on October 25, 2013, at Poets Forum in New York City. (and archived on Poets.org) Carolyn Forché said,:

I know that poetry begins in a not-knowing rather than a moral impulse. A poet’s consciousness is, in this sense, improvisational and open to transformations, felicitous accidents, and an intuitive response to language-generating meaning and music—that is true whether the spark igniting the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in experience, present or remembered....

I also know that consciousness can be incised by experience, seared by memory, awakened by what is seen and lived and that the poet’s language also passes through this fire and is marked by it."

I had the pleasure of hosting this event. Thank you to the writers of these great poems & prose featured last week at Meet the Moment. Carter Meland Julie Gard Sara Sowers-Wills Jess Morgan, Anastasia Bamford Ryan Vine Jayson Iwen Liz Minette, Troy Peters, Haley Swann, Patty Fleege, Lexi Clark, Sarah Royer-Stoll, and Claudia Daly. Wussow's Concert Cafe, Zomi Bloom

Here's a sample of songs created in resistance to ICE.

Singing Resistance this winter in Minneapolis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4qXXNnjGHQ

The Streets of Minneapolis: Three Irish Women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_0PAObc4A&list=RDCi_0PAObc4A

The Rise of the North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uozLlmUhzZY

F**k ICE by Scared Ketchup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUOhAJG5EU&list=RD4PUOhAJG5EU

Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out in Duluth, Minnesota

The Libraries in Helsinki

Spending time in Helsinki....

Rikhardinkadun Kirjasto

Kansalliskirjasto

Kansalliskirjasto

Oodi
 

The UpNorth LitFest in Fosston, Minnesota September 25-26

 Come to the UpNorth LitFest In Fosston, Minnesota at the end of September for these writers workshops and a great community of people who love art and literature.

Register here: https://auroracenterforthearts.org/events/upnorth-litfest

On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes

I'm so happy to have some of my writing in this upcoming book! 

On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes 

edited by Michael Welch

Available for pre-order:  $20.00 

from https://beltpublishing.com/products/on-an-inland-sea

The thirty-two writers in this collection grapple with the vastness of the lakes and the vastness of the experience living alongside them. Gabriel Bump explores how his relationship with Lake Michigan changed after losing a friend. For another writer, the water provided an opportunity to explore a romance that would have been too complicated on land. Come dive for shipwrecks, harvest manoomin, and visit the disappearing ice caves. Witness the chickadees, smelt, and cattails, but also zebra mussels, factory runoff, and algae. Each writer's relationship with the lake is personal and unique, but that relationship to the water is also one shared by so many of us.   

Michael Welch is editor in chief of the Chicago Review of Books. His work was named the winner of the 2024 Salamander Magazine Fiction Prize among other awards and has appeared in Electric Lit, Los Angeles Review of Books, Scientific American, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and elsewhere. He received his MA in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Anthology: 6 x 9

This book will be released March 10, 2026.

Writing in the Bog

 

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Writing In the Bog Workshop

Workshop facilitated by Sheila Packa

10:00 am- 3:00 pm Meeting in the Lois King Education Center at the Zim Sax Bog, 8793 Owl Avenue, Toivola, MN 55765 (see directions below). 

Course Fee: $60/non-members (includes a FOSZB membership); $40/FOSZB members and Minnesota Master Naturalists

Activity Rating: 1

Join writer Sheila Packa for this eco-writing workshop at the Sax-Zim Bog. This will be a workshop for writers interested in crafting stories or poems with a strong ecological or environmental emphasis. The bog is a useful metaphor for the creative process, whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer. Sometimes it’s a slog. We have difficulty finding our way. The bog helps us to slow down, and at some point, cross a threshold into a creative flow. The sense of time is altered. We hope you will join us!

This generative workshop will begin with writing about the landscape. It might be the bog or perhaps another place that has marked you. Barry Lopez thought the external landscape greatly affects our psyche, or internal landscape. He says the internal landscape develops as we grow up in or live within a particular place, and our life reflects that its contours and relationships.  Using a variety of guided writing exercises, participants will have time to brainstorm, do a few writing exercises, and have discussion. As your story emerges, we will look at how to let it grow organically. Last, we will review  quick editing tips. At the end of the day, those that would like to share excerpts of their work will have an opportunity to do so.

There is no better time that now to write about landscape and the environment. Whatever you write will make it stronger! 

Sheila Packa, formerly Duluth’s Poet Laureate. All four of her immigrant grandparents settled in Zim, Sax, Toivola, and Forbes in the early 1900s. Her recent books, Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range and Surface Displacements. She edited “Migrations,” an anthology of 75 Lake Superior area writers writing about change and transitions. All of these books explore the histories and landscape of northern Minnesota. Sheila has taught Composition and Creative Writing at Lake Superior College and in the community. To learn more about Sheila and her works/style check out her website: https://sheilapacka.com/

Registration is now open!

Head over to our website to register: Writing in the Sax-Zim Bog

or

https://secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/s/n-Knzf_3qFtyb7Gaq6St2g

Map: https://saxzim.org/plan-your-visit/#wcdirections

The Line of Descent

Forrest Gander has a very powerful poem, "Line of Descent."  To say that it is rooted in the landscape is inadequate. Instead I would say that it rises out of and falls into the landscape,  as it captures a moment of immense beauty and wrenching danger.  

Ecopoetry is not nature poetry. It has little connection to the pastoral, but it does honor landscape. Ecopoetry is environmental, which expresses a shift from anthropomorphic to earth-centric perspectives. It aims to shift the consciousness away from human dominion over animals and the earth toward a more comprehensive awareness of the birthing, growing, diminishing and dying world that we participate in. It acknowledges the immensity of our surrounding landscape. It yields an understanding of resilience and fragility as our environment is altered by extraction, contaminants, and unsustainable practices. It gives us the ability to vision survival, renewal, and honoring of the waters, the plants, the animals and birds, the fields and slopes, the stones and the air.  We eat it and we breathe it. Our environment enters, changes, leaves, and still remains in our bodies. 

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. With degrees in geology and literature, he taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, he’s received the Best Translated Book Award and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.

In The Creative Independent interview, he says

...in Arkansas, where I lived in a very rural place, if you’re walking with someone down a dirt road with a hump in it, you’re separated, there’s a caesura between you. You’re looking at them, but behind them is a screen of trees, and behind the trees there’s a mountain, and those ways of conversing and seeing I think do affect our language.

Heiddeger has that nice short little book called Conversation on a Country Path where he talks about how walking with someone, you literally are sharing a vision and the pace, and that kind of walking changes if you’re in the city or if you’re in the country. I think an attentiveness to the way that place influences and is a part of human perception is something that we haven’t always taken into account.

There’s the tradition of Sangam poetry in southern India, which means convergence. And one of the two poetries that developed from that, called Akam, is this big body of poetry in which it was considered not only unethical, but really impossible to write about human subjectivity or your feelings without taking into account the world immediately around you, which was influencing you in all sorts of ways that you might not have wanted to admit.

The writing that we need is writing that opens our minds and makes us value the ground beneath our feet.  Ganders' "Line of Descent" creates that moment between a child and his father and life and death in that last line. It suspends us -- we don't know the outcome.  

 

The Crying

Thank you to Finnish musician Emmi Kuitinen for sharing her research and practice. She brought her knowledge of the tradition of laments to the participants of a workshop sponsored by the Finnish American Folk School in April 2025. Ms Kuitinen also has adapted the lament into hauntingly beautiful songs.  

In the past in Karelia, the lament was a necessary ritual. Death was a continuation of life, a journey into the hereafter. It was important to lament, or sing the dirge, to accompany the deceased on their journey, to remind the deceased of their transition. The lament also was intended to prevent the deceased from coming back as a ghost and/or bringing diseases. The itkettäjä is the person who performs the lament. The literal meaning of this word is "the one who makes you cry."  

The lament was not only for deaths. There were wedding laments. These occurred during the engagement period prior to the marriage and sung at the bride's house. Laments were made for conscripts in the military. In Russia, the service in the army lasted from five to twenty years. The mother lamented for her son. Also, there were occasional laments for certain occasions. For instance, to say thank you or to express the loss experienced as a refugee. Many lament-performers of the past would not allow recordings nor would they perform a lament disconnected from death or the serious situation for which it was intended.   

A lament is a crying with the voice, and it is not considered singing. However, it does have a set form. Nothing is said directly -- metaphors are used instead. The melody and rhythm vary, but often the lament has a descending melody characterized by improvisation and variation.  Lament language has some common elements: a free meter, parallelism, alliteration, and the use of diminutives and plurals.   

Many cultures besides Karelian culture had laments. It is an old tradition in the Middle East and in many places across the continents.

People believed if the bride didn't cry at the wedding, she would cry for the rest of her life.  Loss is part of every life, and perhaps the lament is needed in order to hold and release grief. It must be heard by others before we can go forward. A good lament makes the listener cry.  

Here is Mathilde ter Heijne - Lament, Song for Transitions post by Olaf Stueber: 

 https://vimeo.com/87757291?&login=true#_=_

Link to Emmi Kuitinen's music: Surun Synty

Please buy her album!  

The Lament

 The Lament 

Emmi Kuittinen will be leading an online (Zoom) workshop on the Karelian lament form on April 5 & 6, 2025 sponsored by the Finlandia Foundation and the Finnish American Folk School. Register by clicking this link

Poetry has roots in the old traditions of lamentation, and I will be among the participants. 

In this online workshop you will get to know the lament tradition of Karelia and Ingria. Laments were sung in parting situations and in the most important rites of human life, like marriage and death. They were used to convey feelings of grief and yearning, and occasionally even those of gratitude. There were also laments for everyday life situations to relieve sorrow.

 website: https://emmikuittinen.com/surun-synty