Wrestling with Angels

Sometimes, I struggle with my decision to live in a small town surrounded by wilderness. When that happens, the mountain landscape flatlines; I yearn for crowds, performances, provocative lectures that yield to conversation, jazz bands at 3 am.

For that reason, I’m grateful to have the Ashland Chatauqua Poets and Writers Series within an hour’s drive (if the mountain pass is open). While only a couple of writers are presented annually, over the last years, Chautauqua has hosted writers as various as Li Young Lee, Barry Lopez, Eavan Boland, and Mark Doty, among others. Along with reading, each writer gives a master class for teachers.

I want to thank my friends Vince and Patty Wixon for insisting I attend the October event with poet and essayist Tony Hoagland.

In his extended workshops “Five Powers of Poetry,” Hoagland teaches the foundations for writing poetry as a distinct neuroskill set with muscles that can be built through regular practice We explored the first power: the immediacy, persuasive powers, and pleasures of making images. Because images carry complex messages with both intellectual and emotional content, Hoagland says, they are the source of much of the pleasure of poetry.

 “Get students to write one line that gives them pleasure,” Hoagland advised as he launched us in a series of exercises imitating other poets and invoking imagery. Because so many of my recent writing attempts had fallen flat, I felt a little intimidated, but Hoagland’s exercises were so simple, I quickly fell into improvisatory mode, imitating snippets of poetry and rhetorical phrases borrowed from other poets.

Before long, I’d written one of those lines that gave me pleasure:

What matters is

a bag of groceries left

at the bottom of the stairs--

the hallway dark

no one watching. 

In an instant, language and imagination had connected. The phrase contained an entire narrative because the image was as undeniable as the values in a black and white photograph.

I was writing, and nothing matches that pleasure.  

“Not to be able to express yourself is a penitentiary,” Hoagland said, and I had felt it over the last weeks. If wrestling with one small phrase was enough to set me free, then I had books and books filled with phrases to play with when I got home—plenty of angels I can wrestle with over the long and isolated months of winter.  

For more information about the Ashland Chautauqua Poets and Writers Series, visit: http://www.chautauquawriters.org/ 

To learn more about the “Five Powers of Poetry, visit:

http://www.fivepowerspoetry.com/thefivepowers.html

 

 

 

100,000 Poets for Change in Yreka, CA

On Saturday, September 29, 2012, four women poets--Dori Appel of Ashland, Oregon, Maria Elena Fernandez of Mt Shasta, California, Flannery Clouse of Yreka, California and I--met to read in a coffeehouse, Nature's Kitchen, in Yreka.

This was part of the international movement, 100,000 Poets for Change--an event that fostered 800 events in 115 countries.  Organized online and largely through FaceBook, poets and musicians gathered in Madagascar, Mali, and Mauritania to build global social and cultural awareness and to encourage solidarity among artists and musicians.

Yreka is a small mountain town surrounded by ranches and wilderness. I was curious to see what issues would emerge and how we might fit into this global community.

At first, when asked to read, poet and owner of Nature's Kitchen, Flannery Clouse said, "Since change is inevitable, I'm for it."  We laughed at our dilemma. As a writer, I don't see myself as attempting to change cultures and societies when I write--my only focus is to shape images, ideas, impressions into language and to shape that language into a satisfying whole.

In preparation for the reading, we all had to think about what change we wanted to see and to look at our writings to discover what social and cultural issues were already there in the work.

In the course of the reading, a theme emerged from our personal writings that had political heft. In one poem, Fernandez exposed the depth of Demeter's pain at her daughter's kidnap and rape. I read "Leda Talks Back," a poem that pulls back the curtain of Romanticism reveals the ugly truth of that rape.  These poems stand as voices against the recent political "War on Women."

Clouse (above) even surprised herself by writing a long and blatantly political ditty for the occasion. In one verse, she dealt with the current view expressed by one conservative who is still being supported by many of the Republican mainstream:

     Akin has said
     If a woman's raped right
     She can't have a baby
     Because she's too tight.
     Roe vs. Wade
     Must be unmade
     Because we all know that
     All of this rot
     About a woman's say
     In her body's parley
     Is a freakin' feminist plot.

For more information about the global event, visit: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

"What will happen if we stay here . . . "

Fed up with the heat and smoke-filled air from fires in the mountains surrounding my home, I managed to get away for a few days camping in the Crescent City/ Brookings area--the tsunami region on the Pacific Coast.

I half-expected to find the beaches strewn with radioactive debris from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Instead, I found the cooling mists of renewal, the continuing play as the sea arranged and rearranged its assemblage of bones, shells, feathers, and seaweed. The sea, the great artist, granted its dignity to old strands of kite string, to sand-creased plastic bags, even to the bottles we humans have so carelessly discarded.



Because I kept busy walking and running in the surf, I barely touched the novel I brought with me, but I did take time to read each night from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J.D. McClatchy. I kept returning to these lines from the German poet Ingeborg Bachman that echoed my feelings as I picked up plastic and glass from the sand:

          What will happen if we stay here,
           homesick to the root of our flowing hair,
           and ask: what will happen  
           if we survive beauty's trial?

True, a novel by Melinda Field, Wise Women Ink, 2011

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, great literature grows from two stories: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In Melinda Field’s first novel True, the character of young Cat sets events in motion--she is both on a journey and the stranger who comes to town.

Abandoned by her Mexican father, Cat has been raised by a drug-addicted mother and grown up tough in the streets of Phoenix, AZ. When her mother is taken to prison, Cat is forced to move to a small town and live with her Native American grandmother, a woman she has never met. To further complicate matters, the town is an isolated, predominantly white, ranching community in Northern California.

For Cat, this is a coming-of-age story. The brutality she encounters and the consequences will mark her life forever. But the novel True is much more.

The ensemble cast of characters, a diverse group of women brought together by their love of horses and their shared adventures in the mountains, is focused through Emma, a midwife who ultimately becomes Cat’s guardian. Each woman faces life-changing challenges, so that in True, Field reveals how we are always coming-of-age no matter where we find ourselves.

True is set in the contemporary west and Field evokes a palpable sense of place.  From the dusty heat of a Phoenix motel, redolent of curry and disinfectant--to the cider scent of an orchard, the crunch of apples underfoot—to the sharp-scented sage and dangerous shale of a mountain trail, the salt and blood of fear when a rattlesnake or mountain lion appears—True will transport readers from their easy chairs to a wild and authentic place.

There’s still a month of summer left. If you’re looking for a book to take with you to the beach or a book that is a vacation in itself, I invite you to read True.

For your hard copy or ebook, visit http://www.amazon.com/True-Melinda-Field/dp/097620083X

Posting this video (by MadiDreamBelieveAct) to introduce the Zen Ox-Herding Painting/Poems. As you read, reflect on how this might resonate with your own strivings as an artist and writer. Your comments are always welcome.

desire

unlike trees
who learn to lean
with the winds
we lean into them

heads bowed
shoulders hunched
thrusting--
skirts and coats
billowing behind

storm clouds
gushing
across the sky

These stanzas grew out of the image of a woman walking into a headwind on the beach, her clothing filling and flapping like sails in the wind.  I was struck by the effort and intention in her movements. Language can be loaded: desire often has a negative connotation, while purpose and intention carry positive overtones. Meanwhile, the movement of the figure is as natural as the clouds.
If you have written a short piece driven by one image, share it in the comments.