Ekphrasis: Poems in the Art Community

 The Kalevala, a series of poems originally performed in the oral tradition, inspired Akseli Gallen-Kallela.  

The story of Lemminkainen is part of the Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala. Originally oral storytelling, 12,000+ verses were recorded in writing and published by Elias Lönnröt in 1845.  These creation stories, adventures, and magic charms have been famously illustrated by the Finnish visual artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela.  

This painting focuses on the Kalevala's character Lemminkäinen,  a great warrior and womanizer, who dies following his attempt to kill the Swan of Tuonela in the realm of the dead. His mother drags the black river for the dismembered pieces of her son and puts him back together.  For Lemminkainen's mother, it works. He lives again, and unfortunately, he has not learned his lesson.  

As often as visual artists illustrate and enhance stories, poets will describe and amplify visual art work. This type of poetry is called ekphrasis. It's a Greek word that means description. A famous example of an ekphrastic poem is "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Ranier Maria Rilke. You can read it here: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo

In my book, Surface Displacements, the poem, "Kalevala Viidetoista Runo/ Poem 15," is an ekphrastic poem in response to the Gallen-Kallela image.  Any mother who has lost a child can relate to the impulse to bring the child back to life.  In my poem, I speak from the perspective of the mother.  Here's an excerpt:

I take him back not into my body

that conceived, received, and raised this one

but back to his own. To the sun

...

with a needle, I pierce the broken ends

and pull my thread.

I turn the edges, commend to God.

Say, remember him.

Take this cold back to the reaching ice

seize this body with new breath.

I shake the heart to make it start ticking

and drop it into place

put back the ribs and pull up the skin.

On the stones, he gasps.

Where I have wept and pounded

on the shore where I have assembled him.  

Within the arts community, writers, composers, musicians and visual artists inspire each other. Composer Olli Kortekangas borrowed four poems from my books Cloud Birds and Echo & Lightning to create "Migrations," a cantata premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2016.  This year, composer Wendy Durrwachter is creating a musical composition for the title poem of Surface Displacements. I am honored by their artistic work and enriched by the additional interpretation and beautiful music that they create.  

Finnish Poet Risto Rasa and an American Documentary Film by Matt Carlson

 

I discovered a poem by Risto Rasa during the writing of Surface Displacements. This poem, written in Finnish and published in his book Tuhat Purjetta (trans.: A Thousand Sails) inspired me.  

Niin kuin aalto uittaa aallon 

yli valtameren, 

niin selviydymme mekin toinen toisiamme tukien.

It has been translated like this:  Just as one wave carries another / across the ocean / so we too survive, one supporting another.  In the translation, the use of the English verb 'carry' is an excellent choice that conveys the intention of the poet.  

Rasa used the verb uittaa which means 'to float.' It comes from the verb uida, to swim. It could be said this way:  "just as a wave floats another wave over the ocean....  so we too will survive by supporting each other."  

It is interesting to me, as a learner of the Finnish language, that 'to carry' in the Finnish language is "kaantaa" and 'to translate' is "kääntää." It is spelled nearly the same, but the vowel changes from a to ä. 

Risto Rasa has said that in translation, no poem is exactly the same. Something will be lost. This might be true. It is impossible to carry the definition of a Finnish word into the English language without dropping some of historic or cultural associations. 

A filmmaker Matt Carlson created a touching documentary of Risto Rasa: Sielumaisema: The Risto Rasa Project.  He has not lost very much about this poet and his work, even though he relied on a translator to interview Rasa.  The film has deepened my appreciation of this poet. One realizes how important it is to reveal the poet's landscape and his voice. I recommend that you watch this wonderful film:   https://vimeo.com/372123395

Poet Laureate Reading featuring Sheila Packa & Ellie Schoenfeld and new poets

Come join this celebration of Duluth Poets Laureate on October 19, 2022, 6 pm at the University of Minnesota Duluth library, 4th floor!  

Poets Laureate Sheila Packa & Ellie Schoefeld will read along with notable poets Dani Pieratos & Tina Wiggins Wussow. 

Organized by David Beard, professor of rhetoric at UMD, Department of English, Linguistic and Writing Studies, this is the third of reading that featured poet laureates of Duluth.  In addition, each poet laureate has invited a young poet to join the reading.  The mission of the poet laureate program is to promote poetry and expand the reading audience.   

Reading at Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College

 

Confluences: Writing, Composing, and Making Art from (or based on) Art: Artists' Talk & Poetry Videos!

November 6, 2022 at 3 pm at the Nordic Center, 23 North Lake Avenue, Duluth, MN Book Celebration & Reception

A Poetry Reading and Artists' Talk:

"Confluences: Writing, Composing, and Making Art from Art"

by poet Sheila Packa and Sara Pajunen (musician, composer, artist), Wendy Durrwachter (musician & composer) Kathy McTavish (digital artist and composer), & Leslie Hughes (textile artist).

Sometimes an encounter with certain artworks, music, or images of others can open a door and trigger a procession of images, associations, and reveries. This installation is a collection of work that reflects such encounters. Digital poetry videos, music, and textiles that are made in response to poems. will be installed. 

The audience will be invited to participate by way of postcards (bring your own or pick one up at the event) to write or draw an image, association, or reverie triggered by another's piece of art.

Link to web page with poetry videos, visual art, and audio exhibited at the Nordic Center:   https://www.sheilapacka.com/3rivers/index.html

Sheila Packa is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota thanks to a legislative appropriation from the MSAB arts and cultural heritage fund. This event also has been made possible by past grants from the Finlandia Foundation National and the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.

For the preservation of wilderness and among many searching for home, this poet travels through mining excavations and waterways vulnerable to environmental contamination and climate change in Minnesota, where the Northern Continental Divide crosses the Laurentian Divide and creates three watersheds that flow into the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and Hudson Bay. These images capture the beauty of the north, and these stories, historical and contemporary, honor the resilience of people who arrive or are displaced, whose language is replaced by another language, and who find a fluid space full of risk and possibility.

What Use is Poetry?

In Meena Alexander's poem “Question Time,” she writes, “What use is poetry?” and “We have poetry so we do not die of history.” Poetry can provide a documentary, an artistic investigation at the same time that poetry can become an ode sung to the beauty and resilience of the landscape and its people. The landscape of northern Minnesota is unique because the Northern Continental Divide crosses the Laurentian Divide, creating three watersheds. Water flows north to Hudson Bay, south to the Mississippi, and east to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River/Seaway. In this water-rich place, mining of iron ore and taconite has removed billions of tons of earth. This region is now at risk of copper sulfide mining.  

The poems in my book explore displacements of many kinds: of land, people, language, and wildlife. Poems document events such as floods and erosions, flights of birds and snail trails, mine pits and lakes, laborers and excavations for the removal of minerals. Poems go in, under and through waterways, in boats, into memory and history. 

The title poem of Surface Displacements is a long poem that gathers images of displacement, waterways, and brief narratives of immigrants crossing by water and land. One can’t help being aware of people who are displaced: immigrants fleeing war, violence, climate conditions, or otherwise untenable situations. Or not just immigrants, homeless people who wander the streets of every community. There are many reasons that they are there: poverty, trauma, mental disorders, and/or addictions, Battered women often must flee their homes in order to find safety. Teenagers sometimes find themselves on the streets as runaways from family violence or dysfunction. The migration of people is as steady as the migration of birds. 

Poetry is a language inside the language. In a poem in next to no time, years can collapse. Whole eras can elide into a few lines, or one moment can be forever held still. Poetry has underwater currents or forces. Muriel Rukeyser says “poetry can extend the document” in a footnote to her poems in “The Book of the Dead,” a section of her 1938 book titled U.S. 1. It is about the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, which killed at least 476 coal miners, mostly African American migrant workers, between 1930 and 1935. Her poems incorporate archival material about the mining disaster with lyric intensity. The title alludes to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Mayan Book of the Dead, evoking the power and weight of those ancient funerary texts. In this way, the form of a poem along with its sound patterns, images, associations, and metaphors can bring together the said and unsaid. On a page, a poem has empty spaces that can be understood like the negative space in a drawing. Stanza breaks might be viewed as bends or turns in a river. Line endings in a poem form a shoreline to launch from and land upon, an empty and wave-washed beach, an edge where we can hold the losses and make new paths, where we search and find things new.

See more about the book at www.wildwoodriver.com

QUILT: Read Between the Lines

In some ways, writing a book of poems is similar to making quilts. Often I write poems in response to visual art or music. These are called ekphrastic poems. Lately, I've been honored to learn others are using my poems to create music and visual art.  The composer Wendy Durrwachter recently received a grant to create a piece of music based on the title poem of my book, Surface Displacements.  

The quilt artist Leslie Hughes created this piece of art after reading my book, Surface Displacements.  Hughes' quilt is hand stitched and titled "Read Between the Lines."  To thank her, I sent her a poem Quilt, published in The Mother Tongue. 

QUILT by Sheila Packa 

old garments cut into pieces
stitched into the fabric
so many women

cutting scraps into corners
into houses into entire lives
held with thread

pulled by the sharp needle
one eye
closing on the world

the way it was
the way it is
with an underside

a pattern not completed
fraying yet being mended
by hands

always being useful
washing, pressing out
the wrinkles

finding what shapes
will fit together
gathering into circles

to fasten the layers
over the hard frame
talking secrets

over the design
the thimbles click
the knots are tied

Upcoming Readings - Fall 2022

October 19, 2022, Wednesday, 6:00 pm.  Poet Laureate Reading at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Kathryn A. Martin Library, featuring Sheila Packa and Dani Pieratos.  Ellie Schoenfeld and Tina Higgins Wussow.  

October 27, 2022, Thursday, 7:00 pm, Quaker Meeting House, Duluth, Minnesota. Bart Sutter and Sheila Packa poetry reading. Piano by David From. Reception to follow.  

November 6, 2022, Sunday, 3:00 pm. Nordic Center, Lake Avenue, Duluth, MN.  Book launch! Sheila Packa reading from her new book, Surface Displacements, along with an art installation. Art talk: Confluences: Writing, Composing, Making Art from Art by poet Sheila Packa, composers Sara Pajunen, Wendy Durrwachter & Kathy McTavish, & quilt artist Leslie Hughes. 

November 9, 2022, Wednesday, 5:00 pm, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, Cloquet, Minnesota.  Sheila Packa, reading from new book, Surface Displacements.  Reception at 4:30 pm.  This event at 5 pm can also be viewed live on Zoom. Here is the link: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/4618587742

The Craft of Writing

The Craft of Writing, a conference sponsored by Wisconsin Writers Association, is happening on September 30 and Oct. 1, 2022 at Barkers Island Inn & Conference Center in Superior, Wisconsin. I'm on a panel "Tips and Tricks for Writing Across Genres" with four other great writers: Jan Jensen (fiction), Christy Wopat (nonfiction/memoir), Dale Botten (screenwriting), and Chris Monroe (children's book author/illustrator.   There are also wonderful presentations and opportunities to meet people and talk about the craft of writing. 

Follow this link to see the detailed schedule.  Register today! https://wiwrite.org/Fall-Conference-2022

Talking About A Poem

"I don't like poetry," some people say. Others say they don't understand it, and that's why they avoid it.  

So, how does one read a poem?  I like to look at the beginning line and the end line to see where the poet enters and where the poet leaves.  

In this wonderful poem by Adam Zagajewski, the opening line immediately has a narrator ("I"), action, and setting. The I might be the poet himself, or it might be a persona that the poet has created for this narrative.  Ambiguity in a poem is common. It allows the reader to find more than one meaning.  "I" could even refer to the reader. 

Then, the pronoun "you" refers to the souls of the dead. The poem appears to be addressed to the souls.  The narrator asks "where are you?" It is an existential moment, definitely.  After the question, the forest images predominate. Using figurative language, the narrator says, "I heard the green leaves dream./ I heard the dream of the bark from which/ boats, ships and sails will arise."  Figures of speech, or figurative language, is characteristic of many poems. Metaphors use one thing to explain something else.  Imaginative images and scenes like this give the reader a vision of time and beautiful transformations.  Then the birds come in "on the balconies of branches," each singing a unique song "...not asking for anything, with no bitterness or regret,/"  Here the birds are described in human terms.  

Next, a turn. A leap. In a sonnet, this shift is called a volta. I like to think of this moment as similar to a bend in the river that brings you to a new vista.  It brings us to the ending: "I realized you are in singing..." The ending line has a new pronoun, not "I" or not "you" which have occurred in the earlier lines, but "we."  The word signals a shift. Now the narrator and souls are drawn together as a we, or perhaps it's the narrator and audience or readers that are drawn together.  It's a satisfying answer to the initial question.  

Repeated words, phrases or images are important. Rhythm and sound are important, because all of this forms a kind of music. In this poem, it is a call and response form. "Where are you? ....Where are you?"  and "I heard...  I heard..."   and then, "...you (souls of the dead) are in singing,/ unseizable as music, indifferent as/ musical notes, distant from us/ as we are from ourselves."

Unseizable. A lovely word and a lovely rhythm in this phrase. Notice the line breaks. A line break does create a sort of pause, a hesitation, and here the line break that occurs after "distant from us" (of course, the birds are distant because they are far above and of course souls of the dead are far) does something new. There is a subtle shift, for the next line reads "as we are from ourselves." Now that's surprising. The poet is saying that we don't know ourselves, that we have parts of our being we cannot easily reach, and perhaps we cannot ever reach. The ambiguity expands meaning. He might mean himself, he might mean the reader.  

A poem like this captures a moment, a place, and a person who has longing. It speaks of spiritual truths to the reader: we have loss, a connection to the souls of the dead. We have lost loved ones, friends, people in our community, and we have also been aware of an internal loss, the inability to know our own self, our connection to our own being.  The phrase "Where are you?" now takes on this new meaning.  

In just a few lines on the page, this poem says so much concisely. The words and images have beauty.  One poet said that poems are made of forces.  If so, what are the forces operating inside this poem?  There are no definitive answers, no right interpretation or wrong interpretation, only things to ponder. There are impressions. Resonances. Echoes. There is breath. There is light and music.  

To find out more about this poet, go to https://poets.org/poet/adam-zagajewski

 

It's Here! Surface Displacements

Surface Displacements has become a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in February 2023, 

Read my new work published by Wildwood River Press! These poems travel through mining excavations and waterways vulnerable to environmental contamination and climate change in Minnesota, where the Northern Continental Divide crosses the Laurentian Divide and creates three watersheds that flow into the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and Hudson Bay. These are stories and images, historical and contemporary, about people who are displaced, whose language is replaced, and who find a fluid space full of possibility.

The cover is an aerial image by Sara Pajunen, and the book design by Kathy McTavish. 

Available through any bookstore or at https://www.wildwoodriver.com/

We also love to support independent bookshops or  https://bookshop.org/books 

ISBN 9781947787360

Praise for the book

“In Surface Displacements, the spirit of the ancient Finnish shamans breathes again. Sheila Packa’s best early poems recalled her youth on Minnesota’s Iron Range, growing up in households where Finnish was still spoken, where the immigrant towns were gritty working-class, in a landscape of mine pits, forests, and water. That environment remains her fundamental source, though now everything has changed, changed utterly, as Packa has learned, with increasing confidence, to incorporate history, science, and myth, even as her language has grown more musical, her poems more spiritual. Like the old shamans, she has become a shapeshifter, able — through the dreamy trance of poetry —to speak in the voice of a snail, rivers and lakes, an entire landscape and its people.” —Bart Sutter, author of So Surprised to Find You Here

“There is a beckoning, a teaching, a singing and lamenting in Sheila Packa’s Surface Displacements. In rivers, headwaters, displacement and the otherworld we are given ways of navigating earth’s trauma in the sink and rise of all that is broken, all that survives. Whispers, dialogues, and the power of forgotten language are forged in the stellar poetic title poem that speaks of both beauty and loss. This is an important book of place, that calls out truth, journeys into landscape, history and the natural world. Ancestry runs through this book as challenge and praise, a way of naming that offers 'the tongue with the old root.' Packa dives into the body of language and voices the body of the earth with skill and relish. 'To speak is to mend' is an invitation to us all in this intimate and compassionate calling out of the elegant and fragile wonders of this world.” —Diane Jarvenpa, author of The Way She Told Her Story and The Tender Wild Things

“Surface Displacements is a Lake Superior epic, an Iron Range chronicle, a Northland saga in which the human psyche merges with rock and water. This book has a heartbeat, and its rhythms are those of Great Lake seiches and flooded open pit mine waves. This poet’s practice is not only one of noticing but also of becoming, as self and landscape merge. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that humanity and geography have always been one, and Packa’s words remind us of what we know in our bones: that life is movement, displacement, and constant 'shift(s) from state to state'; and also that we are connected to a core of belonging forged from earth and spirit. These gorgeous poems are incantations of legacy, deep roots, disturbance, destruction, flight, and transformation.” —Julie Gard, author of Home Studies

"Through the art of attention, Sheila Packa elevates the landscape of northern Minnesota to the holy. Each poem is a room rich with texture, imagery, and sound that resonates long after one puts the verses down. This is a book to simultaneously lose oneself and find oneself in." —Darci Schummer, author of Six Months in the Midwest

In Gratitude

Thank you to these three organizations for grant support for aspects of this project: for time at my desk to develop the manuscript and for help with travel expenses to Finland for research and to attend an artist's residency at Arteles in Hameenkyrö. In addition, available at the end of December 2022,  a web-based film with an excerpt of Surface Displacements to use for promotional purposes and suitable for use as an installation in gallery spaces. 

Sheila Packa was a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity was made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. She was also a fiscal year 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

    

Sheila also received an Individual Artist Career Development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in 2015. This activity is made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, thanks to appropriations from The McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Legislature and general and arts and cultural heritage funds.

This book project, originally titled Three Rivers, was also made possible with the support of a grant in 2016 from Finlandia Foundation National, www.FinlandiaFoundation.org. Finlandia Foundation National awards funds to projects related to Finnish-American and Finnish history, heritage, preservation, arts and culture.