December 18, 2009

Recommended Reading: Essays on Poetry





Dobyns, Stephen. BEST WORDS BEST ORDER: Essays on Poetry. c1996, 2003. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

This is a great collection of essays about both the craft of poetry and some of the greatest poets. The writing is lucid and engaging.

Hirschfield, Jane. NINE GATES: Entering the Mind of Poetry. c1997. HarperCollins Publishers, New York.

Jane Hirschfield was a wonderful poet and these essays prove that she was an excellent essayist. If you can only get one book about writing poems, get this one! Hirschfield brings her fine concentration to the subject of writing poems and it is, to quote her, "...penetrating, unified, focused, yet also permeable and open."


Hirsch, Edward. HOW TO READ A POEM: and Fall in Love with Poetry. c1999. Harcourt, San Diego, CA.

This is a passionate book that is good for both readers and writers of poems. Highly recommended.

November 23, 2009

Echo & Lightning


ECHO AND LIGHTNING (the expanded version will be published by Wildwood River, 2010) began as a chapbook and audio CD with cello music. The poems are a love story and a story about winged migration. On the audio CD, the poems are set in an experimental, free improv cello sound, a song of ascension, composed by Kathy McTavish.  It became a full length poetry manuscript.   Now the book has two more sections that give the overall manuscript a shape of a wave.  The mid-section is from another collection I wrote, Undertow, and the third section gathers several poems from an earlier chapbook and audio CD, Fearful Journey.

The story is rooted in the body and in the landscape of the north. Sources that inspired this work are the Kalevala (the epic poem of Finland) and Finnish poets, Greek mythology (Leda and the Swan) and the Gnostic book, Thunder, Perfect Mind. The poems examine stories about intersections with the divine--maybe 'an act of God' is comprised of creation and annihilation in equal parts—and with change. Often, falling in love is like this, both mystical and unsettling. Rapture occurs when we immerse into something new that takes us outside the self. An intense experience is bound to break the ties that bind you to your old life. The deep stories in our history and culture speak of this experience. We don't expect those intersections; we don't expect loss or know how to frame death and rebirth and change.

In my view, the rituals of poetry help us mediate the world, or bring us back into alignment with the natural world.

"Wind turns the body
and ground falls away

geese unafraid of silence
or empty sky
must go must go must go…"

Ellie Schoenfeld, author of THE DARK HONEY, writes:
"And so begins one of the poems in Packa’s newest collection. These poems are the story of following one’s own instincts to, in one way or another, migrate. They bring us to the exact moment when we surrender to our truest selves, when we allow ourselves to be transported, transformed, and resurrected. In these poems this occurs with the ease and necessity of taking one breath, letting it go and then receiving another. These are ecstatic poems. They are at once ethereal and profoundly grounded in the body. This has always been one of Packa’s greatest strengths and every piece in this collection is an awe-inspiring testament to that gift. These poems can help us find our way to the places we most need to go, to where “…music you haven’t heard/didn’t know you needed/opens deep.”
After publishing this book, I found the writing of Leppä (Harold Alden) that explores contemporary Finnish shamanism and sacred arts.  He presented this diagram by V.V. Napolskikh (1992). (Vladimir Vladimirovich Napolskikh is a Russian ethnographer, ethnologist, ethnohistorian, Finno-Ugrist and linguist. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at Udmurt State University that presents a world view of the Proto-Uralic cultures:



















The assemblage of Echo & Lightning book seemed to be similar. Section I of the book with began with the wild swans, and it created a story of bird migration that was a metaphor for human experience.  I'd been fascinated with the story of Leda and the Swan, and I created three versions of what happened, told from her perspective.  Other poems seemed to arrive through my hand on the page, all exploring the image of flight and the divine.   After assembling these poems as an arc, I felt it to be a wave.  And in the design of a cresting, was the trough, or descent.  This became Section II. It was "immersion."  Perhaps it echoed my experience of near drowning as a child, but I also was at work exploring the undertow or underworld and its mythic stories.  I had not done this research, but I think the artist work accessed a symbolic language that was in my Finnish lineage and in the sacred stories of many cultures. Alden summarizes: 
Some significant features of the Proto-Uralic “world picture” above include the following:

  • A Three-level universe:  The Proto-Uralic peoples conceived of an upper or sky world, middle or earth world, and an underworld associated with water, ocean, and the north.
  • The World Tree:  Linking the three levels is a world tree.
  • Water Bird Messengers:  Also linking the worlds are the water bird messengers that travel to and from the upper world, including swans, geese and ducks. 
  • The Island and River of the Dead:  The lower world contained the “Island of the Dead” where souls go after death, and the “Subterranean River of the Lower World”, which is the prototype of the River of Tuonela in the later Finnish tradition.  This is the place of death and renewal.
  • The “Old Woman of the South” is standing at the top right of the graphic.  Siikala says, “A significant feature in the mythologies of the Uralic peoples has been the role of the female as ruler over life, death, and the directions which symbolise them, south and north.”  
Section III of the book brought myself and the reader back to earth.  Still, my exploration of intersections with the divine continued in the poems about Lot's Wife and Mary Magdalene. It seemed to be that after encounters with the spiritual, a profound disorganization occurred.  I wrote an incantation to the muse.  I wrote poems that invoked the spirit of birds for protection. I wrote about the constant flow of rivers.  

Writing this book was important for me. At the time, I was going through the breakup of a long term relationship, and that also triggered grief over the loss of my mother. It was if something in myself had died.  I had deeply immersed myself in art and writing was the only way that I was able to get through my days. 

During this time, I made a trip to Finland to reconnect with many relatives.  I took a train from Helsinki to Kokkola, and as I gazed out the window, I saw two swans flying north. My mother's cousin Mikko Himanka in Kokkola presented me with a genealogical record of our family ancestry, with my name and my son's name inside.  He opened old family photos albums, and turning the pages with a distant curiosity, I came face to face with my mother's image as a young woman, smiling, and wearing a taffeta dress that I remember as a child. I gasped.  I had found something, not her exactly, and it led me deeper.   


Leppä (Harold Alden). "Shamanism and Sacred Arts in Finland Part 2." Spirit Boat Web log. http://spiritboat.blogspot.ca/2014/06/shamanism-and-sacred-arts-in-finland.html

Echo & Lightning


ECHO AND LIGHTNING (the expanded version will be published by Wildwood River, 2010) began as a chapbook and audio CD with cello music. The poems are a love story and a story about winged migration. On the audio CD, the poems are set in an experimental, free improv cello sound, a song of ascension, composed by Kathy McTavish.  It became a full length poetry manuscript.   Now the book has two more sections that give the overall manuscript a shape of a wave.  The mid-section is from another collection I wrote, Undertow, and the third section gathers several poems from an earlier chapbook and audio CD, Fearful Journey.

The story is rooted in the body and in the landscape of the north. Sources that inspired this work are the Kalevala (the epic poem of Finland) and Finnish poets, Greek mythology (Leda and the Swan) and the Gnostic book, Thunder, Perfect Mind. The poems examine stories about intersections with the divine--maybe 'an act of God' is comprised of creation and annihilation in equal parts—and with change. Often, falling in love is like this, both mystical and unsettling. Rapture occurs when we immerse into something new that takes us outside the self. An intense experience is bound to break the ties that bind you to your old life. The deep stories in our history and culture speak of this experience. We don't expect those intersections; we don't expect loss or know how to frame death and rebirth and change.

In my view, the rituals of poetry help us mediate the world, or bring us back into alignment with the natural world.

"Wind turns the body
and ground falls away

geese unafraid of silence
or empty sky
must go must go must go…"

Ellie Schoenfeld, author of THE DARK HONEY, writes:
"And so begins one of the poems in Packa’s newest collection. These poems are the story of following one’s own instincts to, in one way or another, migrate. They bring us to the exact moment when we surrender to our truest selves, when we allow ourselves to be transported, transformed, and resurrected. In these poems this occurs with the ease and necessity of taking one breath, letting it go and then receiving another. These are ecstatic poems. They are at once ethereal and profoundly grounded in the body. This has always been one of Packa’s greatest strengths and every piece in this collection is an awe-inspiring testament to that gift. These poems can help us find our way to the places we most need to go, to where “…music you haven’t heard/didn’t know you needed/opens deep.”
After publishing this book, I found the writing of Leppä (Harold Alden) that explores contemporary Finnish shamanism and sacred arts.  He presented this diagram by V.V. Napolskikh (1992). (Vladimir Vladimirovich Napolskikh is a Russian ethnographer, ethnologist, ethnohistorian, Finno-Ugrist and linguist. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at Udmurt State University that presents a world view of the Proto-Uralic cultures:



















The sections of Echo and Lightning are oddly similar. Section I of the book with began with the wild swans, and it created a story of bird migration that was a metaphor for human experience.  I'd been fascinated with the story of Leda and the Swan, and I created three versions of what happened, told from her perspective.  Other poems seemed to arrive through my hand on the page, all exploring the image of flight and the divine.   After assembling these poems as an arc, I felt it to be a wave.  And in the design of a cresting, was the trough, or descent.  This became Section II. It was "immersion."  Perhaps it echoed my experience of near drowning as a child, but I also was at work exploring the undertow or underworld and its mythic stories.  I had not done this research, but I think the artist work accessed a symbolic language that was in my Finnish lineage and in the sacred stories of many cultures. Alden summarizes: 
Some significant features of the Proto-Uralic “world picture” above include the following:

  • A Three-level universe:  The Proto-Uralic peoples conceived of an upper or sky world, middle or earth world, and an underworld associated with water, ocean, and the north.
  • The World Tree:  Linking the three levels is a world tree.
  • Water Bird Messengers:  Also linking the worlds are the water bird messengers that travel to and from the upper world, including swans, geese and ducks. 
  • The Island and River of the Dead:  The lower world contained the “Island of the Dead” where souls go after death, and the “Subterranean River of the Lower World”, which is the prototype of the River of Tuonela in the later Finnish tradition.  This is the place of death and renewal.
  • The “Old Woman of the South” is standing at the top right of the graphic.  Siikala says, “A significant feature in the mythologies of the Uralic peoples has been the role of the female as ruler over life, death, and the directions which symbolise them, south and north.”  
Section III of the book brought myself and the reader back to earth.  Still, my exploration of intersections with the divine continued in the poems about Lot's Wife and Mary Magdalene. It seemed to be that after encounters with the spiritual, a profound disorganization occurred.  I wrote an incantation to the muse.  I wrote poems that invoked the spirit of birds for protection. I wrote about the constant flow of rivers.  

Writing this book was important for me. At the time, I was going through the breakup of a long term relationship, and that also triggered grief over the loss of my mother. It was if something in myself had died.  I had deeply immersed myself in art and writing was the only way that I was able to get through my days. 

During this time, I made a trip to Finland to reconnect with many relatives.  I took a train from Helsinki to Kokkola, and as I gazed out the window, I saw two swans flying north. My mother's cousin Mikko Himanka in Kokkola presented me with a genealogical record of our family ancestry, with my name and my son's name inside.  He opened old family photos albums, and turning the pages with a distant curiosity, I came face to face with my mother's image as a young woman, smiling, and wearing a taffeta dress that I remember as a child. I gasped.  I had found something, not her exactly, and it led me deeper.   


Leppä (Harold Alden). "Shamanism and Sacred Arts in Finland Part 2." Spirit Boat Web log. http://spiritboat.blogspot.ca/2014/06/shamanism-and-sacred-arts-in-finland.html

November 20, 2009

Fearful Journey

Fearful Journey is a collaboration with Kathy McTavish, cellist. We recorded this chapbook collection of poems with her experimental, ambient cello sound available on CD and as mp3 files on our websites. We have done several performances of this and other new work. A listener described our concert/reading of these love poems as “hauntingly beautiful.” An excerpt, from “Love Goes On:”

Love is this circle that we’re in,
outside, inside, unsayable, unspeakable,
creator and destroyer. Love, love, love
how grief rises
into dark stars.

It is hard to explain what comes first, the music or the poems. Our work emerges in a mutual solitude and yet music may trigger an invisible procession of images (as Cavafy said) that I make into poems and the poems sometimes trigger new compositions. We are not striving to illustrate either the poems or the music, but to create work that stands alone and in resonant proximity with the other.

Ranier Rilke said, “A togetherness of two human beings is an impossibility and, where it does seem to exist, a limitation, a mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides of their fullest freedom and development. But granted the consciousness that even between the closest people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them."

Sometimes we have a “word fast” which is a mutually agreed time without talking. As artists, we want to nurture each other’s work and allow enough time and space for creating or simply gazing, musing or meandering in the internal or external landscape.

Even when I work with other writers, I do like to be careful with how I give feedback. There is value in critique, of course. I prefer to make observations and talk about my response to the work instead of telling people how to fix things. It’s a subtle distinction. Advice of this kind may impose an aesthetic or style that is not helpful to developing an individual and unique voice. Solutions best come from inside, from careful deliberation, from the source of the work, from it’s own internal logic or pattern. Solutions come from deep engagement with the work, from disciplined effort, and the attempt to do the best work one has ever done.

Sources: for me, it’s migration. Fearful journey.

November 18, 2009

Blindfold: Poems and Sexuality

Audre Lorde, in her book Sister Outsider, wrote an essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” that has been significant to my work. She was a black lesbian feminist whose work transcended all the categories. When she looks back on her life, she writes that what she regrets the most are her silences. “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She suggests that we can learn to work through our fears just as we learn to work through our tiredness, and that speaking and taking action will form a bridge to others and transform fear into connection.

My book of poems, The Mother Tongue explores coming of age, women's sexuality, and how one's relationship with one's mother influences both. These topics often are surrounded by silence. The book's midsection was the "Torrent," a collection of erotic poems. The poems had emerged at the age of 50, between an intersection of falling in love and exploring a visual art exhibit of lesbian pornography that had become a collection of postcards, Drawing the Line from the Canadian artists collective Kiss &Tell: Susan Stewart, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Lizard Jones. The exhibition of photographs, toured Canada, the United States, and Australia in 1988. Kiss and Tell asked viewers to write comments on the walls alongside the images (men wrote theirs in a book in the center of the gallery), and these comments were then published with a selection of the photographs in a pull-out postcard book. At the same time, Cecelia Lieder, a visual artist/ printmaker and gallery owner invited me and other writers to create work for an exhibit she had scheduled called “Erotic Justice.” Erotic Justice is a phrase used by Hildegaard of Bingen, a medieval Christian mystic and nun, and recently, Matthew Fox.

How is justice erotic? I wondered. Or how is the erotic connected to justice? Well…perhaps both are a journey, a process of give and take. Eventually, the poem emerged, “Blindfold.” I wrote several other poems that were published in a small chapbook titled Erotic Justice published by Calyx Press in 2007 and eventually in The Mother Tongue.

Poetry that is written in response to visual art is called ekphrastic. Many poets have used visual art as a source. I began writing this particular erotica as an exercise in writing ekphrastic poems but the poems themselves shifted in both image and intent away from the postcard photographs and toward that concept of erotic justice. It was erotic, but also about love and art, and it was set in the context of a life, within a family, and a community. This is very different than most erotica which is often separate from anything except the love relationship, and it is far different than pornography which seems to separate itself from relationship in its focus on bodily sensation or gratification. The image of the blindfold, connected both to justice and erotica, teaches us things. In justice, it allows us to be objective and to apply the same rules to all. It heightens all other perceptions. In erotica, it acknowledges the blindness that we have as we enter love relationships. Secrecy is like a blindfold. It might heighten experience, but it limits us.

I wrote an article "Crossing Borders" for NEW WORLD FINN about a conversation I had with the Finnish writer Tiina Pystynen. She writes memoir and fiction. Her latest book is a graphic memoir that explores erotic art and also pornography from a feminist perspective. The book examines the sexual in many ways and is silly, awkward, curious and profound.

I trace the development of women’s sexuality to the mother. The topic was surrounded by secrecy as far as my mother was concerned, but I was able to make observations and catch snippets of conversation about love in her life. At the age of twenty, before I married for the first time, I asked her for her secret of a happy marriage. She and my father had been married for nearly 30 years at that point. “The honeymoon is not over,” she said enigmatically. Nothing more. I understood that she was happy in her relationship and that she found it exciting. It influenced my attitudes as much as anything in the culture (at that time, it was the era of women’s liberation and the birth control pill). So I proceeded into adulthood, experiencing sexual relationships and eventually finding myself in relationship to another woman. Closeted, within a secrecy with walls of fear. Eventually love took the walls down.

It was these musings that led to the book of poems. And yes, my mother’s mother tongue was Finnish. But mine, I think was love.

October 4, 2009

Roots & Landscape

What do your roots have to do with what you write? Find contemporary poets from the country or place of your ancestors and consider the connections: image, metaphor, word choice, world view. Language transmits culture in so many ways and even as language changes, culture comes through.


My grandparents on both sides immigrated from Finland, so I’m third generation. My roots are strongly in the Finnish culture. I grew up around the language, my grandparents spoke Finnish almost exclusively and my parents spoke Finnish fluently. I had an aunt and uncle who married Finnish immigrants and this kept the language even more strong. However, I didn't learn Finnish. My mother, so determined to be an American, didn't want an accent. We spoke English. But Finnish culture is still present in every other way.

When I went looking for contemporary poets, I found a collection of women poets called Enchanting Beasts, edited and translated by Kirsti Simonsuuri. It was published by Forest Books in 1990. In the introduction, Simonsuuri eloquently examines the diversity and links Finnish poets in that volume, referring to “mythical darkness…invisible dimensions…poets of language…lyrical, imagistic space filled with forests, water, winds, and the eternal movement within.” Poets of any culture may find themselves exploring all of these, but her words draw me into that circle and I’m very pleased to be there. You can find portions of the text online at http://www.nuorenvoimanliitto.fi/beasts







Poets have so many influences. Heritage is important as are many other things. It happens that the landscape I grew up in, in northern Minnesota, is similar to that of Finland. The landscape that I live in now is still the same—indelible it is in me.

August 21, 2009

Waking: The Process of Writing the Poem

"The poet doesn't invent. He listens. " -- Jean Cocteau

Recently, I've been doing poetry in performance with Kathy McTavish. It is a blend of composition and improv, based on the concept of deep listening. Pauline Oliveros, a composer, used this phrase to describe a deep attentiveness to the moment. Kathy's ouevre is based on her deep attentiveness in performance--her cello is both a resonant and responsive instrument that draws the listener into its sound. Her cello triggers images....like the invisible procession in this poem:

God Forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. -

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

This poem is a very good example of deep listening, of being attentive to the moment. Cavafy or God directs Antony away from negativity, the endless chatter of the anxious mind. Useless, he says. Pay attention. An important thing is going on--this loss, this beauty, this gift.

When it comes to writing or revising poems, one of my mantras is "listen to the work." In other words, in its first lines the poem sets up a rhythm, sound, pace, image, pattern, that should be developed within the work. It requires the poet to be attentive, to pay attention, to focus on what has begun and then to bring one's skills with language into play. If one makes a mistake, it can be lucky. If you don't quail or cross it out or backtrack, the mistake could bring you to a new and interesting place. As Cavafy says, "...listen--your final delectation--to the voices,/ to the exquisite music of that strange procession."

When it comes time to read or perform the work, my listening continues. Often, revisions occur on stage because I now hear the poem the way the audience does. Try reading a rough draft poem to your writing group or to a friend. It is likely you will immediately become aware of its flaws. Virginia Woolf believed that deletion is one of the writer's greatest skills.

I prepare for a poetry/cello performance by assembling poems into a narrative arc. Sometimes the arc will be based on something that has been on my mind, "Waking" was a recent theme related to the Rumi poems, my own wakefulness at night, and the idea of attentiveness. I collect more than I'll read and during the performance, I will select the work based on what is in the music or what the music wants.
Each performance is different. The opportunity for performance has spurred many more poems -- because I don't like to bore myself with repeating the same things. I strive for confluence, a flowing like a river flowing, always beginning.