"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?

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.

"art of the glimpse"

Irish writer, William Trevor calls the short story the "art of the glimpse."

What is your story or poem trying to glimpse into? Once you know the answer, your structure can be created and refined.

First, you may need to write yourself to the place where the glimpse is revealed through journaling, freewriting, writing from prompts, or writing letters from characters.

If you've been keeping journals for a long time, read back through them to find those glimpses.

Have you ever found a forgotten story in your journals that offered a glimpse for your revision? Please tell us about it in Comments.

cast a spell

Here's a simple exercise, a warm-up, taken from sentence modeling exercises. Choose one line from your journal, then repeat the word order pattern until you have several lines that mirror one another in form but differ in content. Finally change one or two of the lines to create some variation and surprise.

cast a spell between the rows
heave hope into the trees
scratch sadness in the dirt
wake plans from the dream
sip wisdom from wet grass
and trouble from the glass beads
imagine death in the eiderdown
shovel anger over clouds
scrape anxiety on the pavement
burn despair into the pages
caress letters of the old ones
sing warmth out of wood
and softness out of hard shell
call back memory from the clearing
cast a spell between the rows.

Have you ever used a parallel structure to create a poem or to develop an idea in prose? Share your poem in comments or post a line that presents an unusual grammatic structure for us to play with.

sad couplet

He let go of my hand;
I never saw him again.

Shaman's Eye by Beth Beurkens, Sky Ladder Press, 2009.

In her first book of poetry, Beth Beurkens, M. A., adjunct instructor in Women’s Studies at College of the Siskiyous, offers the reader a perspective through the eye of the shaman. Traditionally, the shaman is aided by spirit allies in making an ecstatic journey through the veils that separate the human from the spirit world; the purpose of the journey is to treat illnesses in the individual and in the community. Beurkens’ book is an invitation to understand poetry as a shamanic practice and to experience life through the shaman’s reverential and animistic worldview.
Beurkens begins by invoking the spirits of “ancestral shamans” who appreciate that everything is alive and a site of potential consciousness: “crimson dawn chants/ jaguar night riffs”. The Milky Way is the bridge in “Shaman’s Bridge” and the shaman travels across it by the beat of the drum: “the drum is the horse/the moon is the shaman’s eye/ the sun, her heart”. Like the poet who works with the meter and rhythm of language, the shaman moves on the rhythms of the drum. Both the poet and the shaman also practice attentive listening.

I hear the reed-like song of Pleiades
glass-tinkling hum of Milky Way
as a wild child in the Midwest
I could hear corn roses
sunflowers
This alert presence keeps them open to discovering realities accessible only through heightened states of consciousness: “my cells open like hungry mouths/of fledglings”

all the ancient stories say
creation is
pulsing vibration
the gods
singing
dancing
uttering magic

Open and empty, the theme of hollow spaces runs throughout the poems. In “Longing for the Cure” “bare stalks of words” are “hollow ideas.”A circle of women in “Gathering the Pieces” pass around an “antique talking stick” made of “dark bone tusk’ and the “stories” they tell are “pressed/ into the hollow bone mass”. The speaker in “Lost Bearings” begins to “fill/ the well”. But emptiness appears as a necessary condition of shamanic practice: “Power pours in the shaman’s hollow bones” in “Ambrosia of the Spirits”. Hollows also appear in the shape of the poems. Unexpected empty spaces appear between letters on the page and in a circle of women’s names that takes concrete shape to create a passageway within the text. “I’m an empty vessel/ a tabula rasa/ a begging bowl” the speaker says in “Shaman’s Death,” and in “Hollow Bamboo”:
Mine is the crooked path
of bones and stones
the hollow bamboo

In “About These Poems,” Beurkens writes that “words have a semi-sacred status and, as instruments of power, are understood to carry healing.” As such, Shaman’s Eye might well present unexpected benefits for the reader.

Poem Ending with a Line from Lao Tzu

The road is silent. Who knows where

these voices come from that say

the road is calling. The road is a mirror

where a girl leans forward to inspect

the arch of her brow. The road stretches

along her curving arm, winds

across her belly, over thighs

to turn at her bare feet. The road

branches and leafs out into cloud.

The road repeats. It seeps into dreams

where mule deer cross to make

another road. It begins in sunlit dust.

It does not end in starry arches

but widens and turns back.The road

grinds over empires and disappears

in the forest. Over the rim of the hill,

across a hazy clearing, a traveler

gives birth to the road in his boots.

Wait. Watch. Walk. Wonder.

Become one with the dusty road.

You can launch a poem or complete a landing with a favorite line taken from a poem, novel, essay, letter, blog . . . Add your favorite lines to comments and share the inspiration.

Talk of War, Talk of Peace

Talk of War, Talk of Peace

All day long, working in the cafe,
there's talk of war, talk of peace.
People we haven't seen in weeks
coming in to eat, to seek reassurance,
talking about the thirst for oil,
wondering about the draft, saying
bombing and wedding in the same sentence.

We commiserate and many advise
others to pray. Those who bring in
newspapers will leave them--smudged
photos of the latest explosion, fanned
across the table. After lunch, we gather
crumpled napkins along with faces of
kidnap victims and prisoners. We sort them--
one batch for the trash, the other
stacked and folded for the evening fire.

Snowfall low over the mountains.
I sweep the walk and polish windows.
I stamp the checks and count the cash.
I weigh out apricots, raisins and dates
arranging pound and half-pound bags
into perfect pyramids, ready for trade--
any shopkeeper, any one of ten thousand
days in any marketplace in the world.
It will be dark long before I get home.

Tincture for Writer's Block

Five movies. Five books.
Three myths or fairytales.
Ten friends. Four homes.
Six subjects you want
to live long enough to study.
Seven foods to cook for family.

What horrified your parents?
What made them scold you?
What was forbidden,
what ways of life?
How did you know?
What did they do?
When did you cease
to be a child?
How did you finally
become an adult?

List fortunate accidents.
Lucky breaks.
Ideas. Causes.
Institutions you challenged.
Enemies you fought.
Vows you made.
Vows you have broken.
Tell me when
you told your first lie.

How have you been hurt?
How have you been helped?
How have you helped in return?
How have you helped in return?

Just as language is a carrier of meanings, a tincture is a liquid carrier for the healing components of an herb. What tinctures have you applied to get back into flow?

Weather Watch

Heavy snow and roads
so icy, cars swim
through shoals of frozen fog.
I turn around
three miles out,
retreat to my cabin
in the North Hills.

Through the round window
a triangle of blue
surrounded by roses
of clouds unfolding--
beyond a darker swath
blurs the horizon
warning of more storm.

Frivolous to write
of nothing but weather
when soldiers follow orders
to drop bombs on strangers,
when families leave blankets
in homes claimed by bankers,
when the bright river where we
once caught rainbow trout
with our bare hands, now
swills with brackish foam.

But mountains spew themselves
to sand, the mightiest pine
will blaze up into ashes,
while this sky abides,
the most constant presence,
even as it folds inward
and pelts the roof with hail.