Upcoming Readings: Fall 2023

It's almost winter!  But before that, here is a list of events that I will be doing. 

Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 5 pm: Finlandia Foundation North: Poet Sheila Packa to Present Program at Finnish-American Meeting at Kenwood Lutheran Church, 2720 Myers Avenue, off Arrowhead Road in Duluth. The meeting is free and open to the public.

This is also a meeting of the Lakehead Chapter of the Minnesota Finnish-American Historical Society on Thursday, September 21st at 5pm. We will begin with our Business Meeting at 5pm, followed by coffee at 5:30 pm and our program by Sheila Packa, a poet, writer, and teacher with Minnesota and Finnish roots. Duluth’s Poet Laureate in 2010-2012, Sheila has written five books of poetry, has taught creative writing at Lake Superior College and other community venues, and has published her work in literary magazines and anthologies. She has received awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, two Loft McKnight awards, and a Loft Mentor award in poetry, among other achievements. Her program "Three Rivers: A Poetry Reading” will include a short presentation about a few Finnish poets and an invitation for the audience to write a poem as a guided writing prompt. The author will have her books available for sale. 

October 10, 2023: Twin Ports Perceptions Panel at the Duluth Public Library (downtown) at 6 pm

This fall, the Twin Ports Perceptions project will invite six award-winning Twin Ports authors (three from each side of the bridge) to participate in two moderated panel discussions to talk about how they portray Duluth and Superior in their work, how they grapple with issues of regional identity, and the challenges and joys of writing about where they live. You’re invited to join the discussion and add your perspective to these conversations. How would you characterize the “personalities” of the Twin Ports?

The first discussion will be held at Superior Public Library (1530 Tower Avenue, Superior) on Tuesday, September 26 at 6 p.m. and will include Anthony Bukoski, Carol Dunbar, and Barton Sutter. 

The second discussion will take place at Duluth Public Library (520 West Superior Street, Duluth) on Tuesday, October 10 at 6 p.m. and will include authors Linda LeGarde Grover, Jayson Iwen, and Sheila Packa. Both discussions will be moderated by retired librarian/author/historian Teddie Meronek.

You’re encouraged to familiarize yourself with the work of the participating authors ahead of the event by picking up a free booklet containing writing samples from each author. Booklets can be picked up
at the Superior Public Library in early September and will be available while supplies last. A downloadable version of the booklet is also available on the library’s website. Copies of the authors’ books can be checked out from your public library or purchased locally at Zenith Bookstore, the Bookstore at Fitger’s, and Barnes & Noble.

Two cities. Two nights. Two discussions. Endless possibilities. We hope you’ll join the conversation.

This program is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens our democracy through educational and cultural programs that build connections and understanding among people of all backgrounds and beliefs throughout the state. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funding was also provided by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

October 15, 2023: 10 am to 5 pm at the Twin Cities Book Festival in Progress Center at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, St. Paul, Minnesota.  Sheila Packa will have an exhibitor table at the book fair.   

Spring 2024: Moving Words at the Aitkin Library - more details to be announced

Twin Ports Perceptions: Superior, WI and Duluth, MN

 

Writing about Landscape

How does landscape impact the creation of poems or stories?  Zora Neale Hurston described aspects of the self in geological terms, saying our memories come from the weight, fire, and pressure of the landscape where we came up.  

This fall, the Twin Ports Perceptions project will invite six award-winning Twin Ports authors (three from each side of the bridge) to participate in two moderated panel discussions to talk about how they portray Duluth and Superior in their work, how they grapple with issues of regional identity, and the challenges and joys of writing about where they live. You’re invited to join the discussion and add your perspective to these conversations. How would you characterize the “personalities” of the Twin Ports?

The next discussion will take place at Duluth Public Library (520 West Superior Street, Duluth) on Tuesday, October 10 at 6 p.m. and will include authors Linda LeGarde Grover, Jayson Iwen, and Sheila Packa. Both discussions will be moderated by retired librarian/author/historian Teddie Meronek. 

You’re encouraged to familiarize yourself with the work of the participating authors ahead of the event by picking up a free booklet containing writing samples from each author. Booklets can be picked upat Superior Public Library in early September and will be available while supplies last. A downloadable version of the booklet is also available on the library’s website here. Copies of the authors’ books can be checked out from your public library or purchased locally at Zenith Bookstore, the Bookstore at Fitger’s, and Barnes & Noble.

Two cities. Two nights. Two discussions. Endless possibilities. We hope you’ll join the conversation.

This program is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens our democracy through educational and cultural programs that build connections and understanding among people of all backgrounds and beliefs throughout the state. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funding was also provided by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" - A Dialogue about Poetry

Recently, I read an interesting review of Peter Sacks, the literary critic turned poet turned visual artist. "An Artist's Archeology of the Mind" by Joshua Rothman documents Sacks' intensely private and solitary art practice, and the time he spends with each canvas to paint, layer textiles, lay in text, cover, burn, and  reveal the complexities of history, landscape, and the mind.   

Rothman mentioned a book of literary criticism that Peter Sacks wrote, examining the form of elegy. Rothman quoted the poet T.S. Eliot, and from Eliot's essay about poets:

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together….

The review is great, and I believe that what Eliot says is true.  The individual poet's attention turns to disparate things: images, phrases, sounds that finally coalesce into a poem. Eliot's essay always uses he/his pronouns to indicate poets, a convention considered appropriate in his era, but it is clearly sexist. However, Eliot was a master of his craft, and for that, his thoughts are worthy of consideration. Further along in the essay, T.S. Eliot writes: 

…the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

The particular medium, the genre of poetry, is built from a disparate collection of things, chosen by the poet. The poem begins to take on its own life.  T.S. Eliot further says: 

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. 

The purpose of a poem is not to express feelings, in other words. Poets are not different from other people; they aren't more sensitive than others nor have better refinement of feelings. 

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. 

It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere…

This thought has been echoed by several poets.  Lorine Niedecker's poem, "The Poet's Work" goes like this: "I learned/ to sit at desk/ and condense// No layoff/ from this/ condensery."  This is true in my experience writing poems: one writes and revises, takes out words, takes out lines, and searches for a metaphor and a pattern, a set of images, a pattern of rhythm and sound that makes the poem into an instrument that the reader experiences.  The best poems connect to the body and breath. They have a physiological element.  T.S. Eliot ends his essay with this thought:  

There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

As with any creative work, discovery is part of the making. A good poet is willing to suspend previous ideas or plans for the poem, is willing to ignore convention, to put aside personal feelings, and is first and foremost, attunes the attention to emerging opportunities or elements that arise within the making of a poem.