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