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.

Translation as Discovery

Jhumpa Lahiri began her successful writing career with stories and novels. Her parents were Bengali, and Jhumpa wrote in English. After a trip to Italy when she was in college, she found herself increasingly drawn to the Italian language, and she studied it for many years. Finally, she and her husband moved to Italy, and since then she has written in Italian and translated many pieces of Italian literature, and lately Jhumpa has begun to write poetry in Italian.  In "The Joy of Translation as Discovery," she said:  

Translation shows me how to work with new words, how to experiment with new styles and forms, how to take greater risks, how to structure and layer my sentences in different ways. Reading exposes me to all this, but translating goes under the skin and shocks the system, such that these new solutions emerge in unexpected and revelatory ways. The particular ecosystem containing Latin, Italian, and English renders Italian more familiar, and English more marvelously strange. The attention to language that translation demands is moving my work not only in new directions but into an increasingly linguistically focused dimension: I would never have begun writing poetry without the intimate exposure to the Italian language that only translation can provide; this shift was particularly surprising given that I have never written poetry in English....It establishes new rhythms and approaches that cross-pollinate the process of contemplating and crafting my own work.

 Finding ways to dislodge herself from the familiar, she has entered a new phase where surprise and new ways of thinking have changed her writing life and enhanced her career.  To read more of her thoughts about this, see the full article here: 

https://lithub.com/jhumpa-lahiri-on-the-joy-of-translation-as-discovery/

more info: 

http://www.princetonmagazine.com/talking-about-reading-and-writing-with-jhumpa-lahiri/

Shanai Matteson: Writing and Art on the Iron Range

 

In conjunction with her Overburden/Overlook exhibition at the

Lyric Center for the Arts

Shanai Matteson will facilitate a roundtable discussion with women artists on the Iron Range.

Sara Pajunen

Sheila Packa

Mary Erickson

and others

Please join the conversation on Tuesday, October 26 from 7-8 pm.

Link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82953441138 

(bit.ly/onlineartshare)

Poems: Wedding Blessings

Poetry's roots come from ritual and ceremony.  Eight years ago, I was commissioned to write a poem for the wedding of two wonderful women.  I wrote two poems, the epithalamion, and another as a candle-lighting blessing for their marriage (which faced the rejection of some members of their family).  Here is the blessing poem. Now they celebrate their 8th anniversary, and they continue to make the world a better place.  #lovewins

We light these candles

for those who cannot be here today

To thank them

For the times they shared the flame

The song, the prayer, and the love

In their eyes.

We light these candles

For our own arrivals and departures

And for those

Traveling farther and traveling closer.

With the light of many others,

We light these candles

For the road to love becomes a map

That each of us must draw

ourselves.

We light these candles

Send wishes of love

That will never be extinguished.

- Sheila Packa, Night Train Red Dust (Wildwood River)

Writing Advice

In The New Yorker, Colm Tóibin on writing: "...Get an image. Follow an object. Follow the thing to see where it takes you--or follow the rhythm..."  He wasn't just talking about poetry, but novels and short stories and all writing.   

In Lithub, “The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” said William Gibson. 

Advice from others might be useful, but chances are you must follow your own path.  Find a place that you can write. I think it's important to respect your judgment about what makes a good poem.  What is your aesthetic? What do you like in other works of poetry?  If a subject presents itself to you, then write about it. Use your own voice. Listen to the work. Explore it deeply and then focus. Use your strengths.  

Joy Harjo Comes to the Northland

The anthology of poets and writers inspired by the writing of Joy Harjo is now available through the Minnesota Library Publishing Project:

https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/bringingjoy/

BRINGING JOY
MINANAAWIGWENDAMOWIN BILJIGAADEG

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation)
October 18, 2021 at 7:00pm CST on Zoom
sponsored by the Fond Du Lac Tribal Community College (FDLTCC) and AICHO.  
To register for this free virtual event go to 

https://fdltcc.edu/bringing-joy/?fbclid=IwAR1A7iiqHyujD3AdOXfHUVVVFjgtk90dCslVosE1-vq0kVFObd9FL7248

Initially this event was going to be live, but the pandemic! Join on Zoom for a wonderful reading and celebration of the United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. 

Diane Seuss

 Do you want to explore ekphrasis? Read Diane Seuss's Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl.  This poet is intense, funny, brilliant and class-conscious. Do you want to see how a contemporary poet handles the sonnet? Her new book is Frank: Sonnets.  

Read a poem here: https://lithub.com/a-sonnet-by-diane-seuss/

In 2019, Donovan writes that her poems "dance with form, turning it on its side and tearing it apart to create something new—as with the American sentences and sonnets with seventeen-syllable lines in her latest book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I love what I call ‘freaking form,’ she tells me. “Like a bathtub that can be made into a shrine to the Virgin Mary.” To read the whole interview, go to 

https://therumpus.net/2019/12/the-rumpus-interview-with-diane-seuss/

If you would like to hear her read in person at St. Mary's, register for the Zoom link:  https://www.saintmarys.edu/evening-diane-seuss-registration-form

Manifesto

 

A manifesto is defined as a declaration of one's beliefs, opinions, motives, and intentions. It is simply a document that an organization or person writes that declares what is important to them. A manifesto functions as both a statement of principles and a bold, sometimes rebellious, call to action.  It reflects your intent and your motivation.

Here are some manifestos (and some statements) from writers and artists: 

Wendell Berry

The Tracing, the path with every misstep along the way…

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Theodore Roethke

On Poetry and Craft 

In poetry, there are no casual readers.

Nothing seen, nothing said.

The lyric is almost forgotten in this time of sawing and snoring and scraping.

Energy is the soul of poetry. Explosive active language.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

Rhythm depends on expecting.

The literal, that grave of all the dull.

I need the botanist's leaf more than the poet's flower.

Put it this way: I detest dogs, but adore wolves.

Eternal apprenticeship is the life of the true poet.

That intense profound sharp longing to make a true poem.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

If we muddle and thump through a paraphrase, with side comments, however brilliant, we still do

not have the poem.

Talent talks; genius does.

Poetry is an act of mischief.

A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.

The greatest assassin of life is haste.

Make ready for your gifts. Prepare. Prepare.




Rosemarie Waldrop (experimental poet)

A manifesto: “shall we escape analogy”—without question mark.



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."




Frank Lloyd Wright

Form follows function – that has been misunderstood.

Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. -Frank Lloyd Wright




Pablo Picasso

"When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through

successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the

egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait."




Vladimir Nabokov

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book;

great ideas are hogwash."




Pablo Neruda

Towards an Impure Poetry (an introduction he wrote for a book of poetry)

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.

Neruda, Pablo. Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970. Ben Belitt, editor and translator. Grove

Press, c1974 (pp xxi- xxii)

In the Kalevala: Three Rivers around Pohjola

The beauty of other cultures and languages is the discovery of different ways of thinking.  New frames. I've been reading a book of essays, Mythic Discourses: Studies in Uralic Traditions, edited by Frog, Anna-Leena Siikala & Eila Stepanova published by the Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki.  I also had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Eila Stepanova sponsored by the Finlandia Foundation. This volume provides me with much more context and history as I read and study the Kalevala, the epic poem of Finland, collected from oral tradition, singing minstrels, by Elias Lonnrot. There are several translations of the book, and I have about four of those.  I've been reading the Kalevala for many years. It is a source for me, a place where I learn more about my family's Finnish history, heritage and culture. 

It takes time to see and understand subtleties. In the English language, many American and European people conceive of the afterlife with Christian perspectives. Most are familiar with the story of what happens in spiritual texts in the Christian narrative: heaven or hell.  Heaven is the most sublime place, the heavenly, blissful, sunlit blessed place with God, the creator.  Hell is the worst place, the miserable, painful, fiery, dark place with the devil.  For a time, the Catholic church held a category called purgatory.  But in the Kalevala, with its pre-Christian roots, this understanding is somewhat different  It is not even called the "afterlife" but the Otherworld, Pohjola.  The Finnish word Pohjola literally translates to North land.  

This is a different frame. The binary is less clear. Pohjola is either a womb or a grave or a strange village or country.  It is not heaven, it is not in the sky. It is an island set upon open waters. The concepts of Tuonela or Manala refer to the realm of the dead or the underworld. Rivers must be crossed in order to find Pohjola, and the rivers are the Rivers of Tuonela, Pojohola, and Manala which have dangerous rapids and waves like vertical swords. Not many return, it could be said.  Not any.  

In old tradition, in the time of Kalevala rune-singers, a lament singer must perform at funerals in order to ensure a safe passage for the deceased.  Eila Stepanova provides fascinating information and stories about the women's laments alongside the Kalevala.  Here is a description of the presentations and I have also included a link to both lectures.  

Women’s Laments alongside the Kalevala: Forgotten Symbols of Finland’s Nation-Building

Eila Stepanova discusses Karelian laments in the context of national romanticism in Finland starting from the nineteenth century up to the present day, beginning with Elias Lönnrot, who was also the very first collector of this tradition of women’s poetry. In the context of national romanticism in 1800s, this genre of traditional poetry was important in Finland’s nation-building project but has been forgotten in the shadow of Lönnrot’s Kalevala.

Eila Stepanova is a Finnish folklorist specializing on Karelian and more broadly on North Finnic lament poetry. She received her doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki. She is recognized as the foremost active expert on Karelian laments and as an expert in Karelian culture more generally with a variety of fieldwork experience. Stepanova is currently executive director of the Society of Karelian Culture (Karjalan Sivistysseura).

The Viking Age in Finland

The Viking Age is a period of history that has fascinated people for generations, and interest in it has only grown in recent years with the popularity of programs like The Vikings. Popular knowledge of the Viking Age has tended to focus on Scandinavians and their westward expansion across the North Atlantic. In this talk, I will introduce the Viking Age as a period of mobility and cultural contacts that also extended to the east along inland routes. In these regions, speakers of the language that would eventually become the Finnish, Karelian, and Vepsian languages were also active participants. I focus on territories where Finnic languages were spoken or where they would be spoken later. Today, we tend to imagine where languages are spoken on a map more or less along the lines of where they were spoken in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the Viking Age, however, the situation was very different. Most people don’t realize it, but the Viking Age was pivotal in the histories of Finnish and Karelian languages and cultures, ultimately leading them to be dominant in the areas where they were familiar in recent centuries.

Frog is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in early Finnic and Scandinavian contacts and cultural reconstruction. He received his PhD from University College London in 2010 and an Associate Professorship from the University of Helsinki in 2013. From 2011–2014, he was co-coordinator of the Viikinkiaika Suomessa – Viking Age in Finland project, which produced the books Fibula, Fabula, Fact: The Viking Age in Finland (edited by Joonas Ahola and Frog with Clive Tolley, 2014) and The Viking Age in Åland: Insights into Identity and Remnants of Culture (edited by Joonas Ahola, Frog, and Jenni Lucenius, 2014). 

The direct link the lectures is here: https://youtu.be/7E5oQeYQdUY.  Eila Stepanova is first.  Frog is second. 

Here is a link to the pdf version of Mythic Discourses: Studies in Uralic Tradition.  If you are interested, I encourage you to buy the book. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/5cd85324-37ee-4644-98d7-15b0c7d6ffa7/9789522227638_mythic_discourses.pdf