Visualize an edge. It can be an edge of something tangible or of experience. In as much detail as you can, feel the physical setting -- colors, temperatures (it's cold way down there Laura Nyro sings), textures, sounds -- and write what happens.
When I was a kid, younger than 10, I had a recurring dream about a narrow suspension bridge. I had to walk it to the other end, where the light was. On either side of the two-foot wide bridge was an abyss (How I knew the word abyss at the ripe old age of eight, I don't know, but I also knew the word infinity in kindergarten. "There must be an infinite number of cookies in that box," I commented during a lesson on estimates.). I knew I couldn't fall and I couldn't jump into the place of nothing, giving up. The abyss echoed with my cries, sometimes glowed red in the dark, sometimes spun a chilly whirlpool of nothingness. As unappealing as walking this bridge path was, the abyss was less appealing.
At the time, I wasn't so wide as I am now, my feet not so long, I was a delicate child, a long drink of water, my Aunt called me. I played soccer and kick ball, was the square dance expert in 4th grade. I wore shorts under my pleated, seersucker dresses and swung round and round on the parallel bar, my long stringy hair sweeping the dusty ground at every rotation. I was absolutely capable of traversing this precipice of my dream, yet I was still afraid. The bridge was invisible, surrounded by fog or dry ice, an eerie werewolf movie setting.
When my older brothers were charged with babysitting my sister and me, they forced us to watch Dark Shadows and any werewolf or vampire thriller that filled the black and white television screen of my childhood. We lived in the Pennsylvania woods, in a four-story country home with no curtains on the windows. We didn't need curtains for privacy. We had trees. My brothers would begin the evening following our TV dinners with a news story. "Did you hear about the crazy guy who escaped from the Bedlam House?" Then, as we are watching horror flicks on the boob tube, one brother disappears with the excuse of homework.
Suddenly, a knock on the door. Parents aren't due home until after bedtime. We don't lock our doors in the country. Nobody visits us at night. Stomach tightens. Eyes dart at every foreign sound.
A tree branch scratches against the night-blackened window, or is it a branch? Goosebumps.
I don't know how to swear yet and I'm not allowed to say, "Oh my God." But a hand appears, pressed against the winter window pane.
That face.
I scream.
My brother laughs. That face, my other brother leering through the window as dry-ice covers the gravesites on the television and scary music from some unremembered composer imprints my fear of fog.
I cannot walk this foggy precipice. I cannot see the pathway. I cannot see at all, but I have other senses, and I don’t know the name for it then, but I am a kinesthetic learner. I feel my way through life. So that’s what I do in my dream. Each step an experiment in survival, I inch my way along. In the dream, I never fall and I never reach the end. Black and white as all dreams, black and white as the old RCA television, I was called to live in gray and still do. There are no absolutes, only color and courage over fear, and sweet tension of cello strings in horror movies anticipating a pinpoint of light at the very end. There is only infinity and the abyss. Take your pick.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Listen In and Out
Reading Response to a lecture: Parks, Suzan-Lori. Portland Arts & Lecture Series. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, Oregon. 8 February 2007.
She skips onto the stage, tosses her waist length dreadlocks over her shoulders and plants her feet wide and pigeon-toed like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann. Suzan-Lori, who changed her name from Susan to Suzan as the result of a typo on a promo poster, dons a coral knee-length straight skirt, gray top, and calf-high black cowboy boots. With hands on hips, elbows and shoulders thrust slightly forward in oxymoronic cuteness, knees locked back, she reminds me of Bad Becky, a childhood neighbor girl. I expect Suzan to draw toy pistols from a hip holster and zap the audience with literary witticisms. Instead, this 42-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner (Topdog/Underdog (2001)) begins with, “Anna Nicole Smith died today, and you know, people laugh, and it’s supposed to be funny, but, you know, she was a person too. As nutty and wacky and loopy, she was a person, too…so just, like, wave to her as she leaves the building, because she was something.” Such compassion emanated throughout her 90 minute homily. “Listen in and out,” she advises through a slight lisp. Then she rolls to the outside of her feet in an unassuming way and asks how to “conduct oneself in the presence of the spirit.”
I am temporarily seized by this muse, by the suggestion to treat inspiration “as an honored guest” and “entertain all my far-out ideas.” Only occasionally in my 46 years have I fully entertained the muse and my edgy, unconventional ideas. Typically, I am so consumed by a need for approval that I do not dare blurt out the true meanderings of my mazy mind. As a child, I spent most of my time in my imagination, creating fantasy lives when I was bored needing to get out of yard work, or detach from a socially painful elementary school scenario. I visited complex story lines every night I couldn’t fall asleep. I used the index finger on each hand to represent a character and created dialogues between the two fingers in the back seat of my mom’s lime green station wagon. I would whisper, not wanting to be caught, and occasionally my mother would ask what I was doing back there. “Nothing,” I would lie as I worked out the hurts of my youth on my index fingers.
Parks also revealed her imaginary childhood adventures under the piano waiting for her mother’s high heels to click by. She read Harriet the Spy and Hotel for Dogs and then, when asked, “What are you doing under there?” responded with, “I’m writing my novel.”
Wish I had thought of that line for myself.
“The play is always happening,” she declares. “I just plucked something out of the ether.” Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day for a year. Her efforts resulted in the recent publication of 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Many of the works are in production at theaters across the country. If the voices tell you to write a play a day for a year, you say “OK!” Parks explained. “In the presence of the spirit, you don’t say, ‘What do you mean?’ ”
I remember reading that Georgia O’Keefe painted a painting a day for the discipline, or perhaps to stir her artistic compost.
I started writing a poem a day for a while.
Then it became a poem a week, a poem a month, and finally a poem if I happened to be inspired and made the time to write it down.
I slighted the spirit yet again ~ didn’t even offer her a glass of wine when she came to visit because I was too determined to lead a proper life with a proper income from a acceptable job, own a house, keep it clean, go to bed by 10:00 and never reveal the true outrageousness of my spirit. After 1825 days of depression, I finally decided to quit my stable job, sell my clean house, stay up after midnight, and trust the voice that dared me to write, fill that life with constant creation and open every pore to the spirit with a resounding, “Yes!”
So here I am, signed up for a semester at Goddard and writing a Villanelle a day, well, not quite every day, but the point is, I let myself be consumed by the spirit, in love with the spirit, and I listen to words outside my own undulating mind.
My good friend and housemate Donna sent me a card while I was at Goddard. “Gazing out the window while rinsing the morning dishes, she chased her thoughts in circles, until they escaped through the screen and onto the mulberry tree. From a distance they actually made sense.” On the back of the card by Susan Mrosek it read, “A person needs a place to unfold their truths and extract the humor. That place is the Pondering Pool. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”
So here I am, in the ‘Pondering Pool’, wondering about the space between and the power of language within that space. I long to breathe only the ether that Suzan-Lori Parks speaks of; I long to be immersed in synonyms and similes, hyperbole and raw truth, the day to day 365 every day fascination with language as a symbol for enunciating our human condition. I stepped out to the edge of the tide and the shoreline; now I walk the wavy waters of artistic unknowing and, like Parks, I hope to go to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse and remember who I am and who I am supposed to be.
She skips onto the stage, tosses her waist length dreadlocks over her shoulders and plants her feet wide and pigeon-toed like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann. Suzan-Lori, who changed her name from Susan to Suzan as the result of a typo on a promo poster, dons a coral knee-length straight skirt, gray top, and calf-high black cowboy boots. With hands on hips, elbows and shoulders thrust slightly forward in oxymoronic cuteness, knees locked back, she reminds me of Bad Becky, a childhood neighbor girl. I expect Suzan to draw toy pistols from a hip holster and zap the audience with literary witticisms. Instead, this 42-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner (Topdog/Underdog (2001)) begins with, “Anna Nicole Smith died today, and you know, people laugh, and it’s supposed to be funny, but, you know, she was a person too. As nutty and wacky and loopy, she was a person, too…so just, like, wave to her as she leaves the building, because she was something.” Such compassion emanated throughout her 90 minute homily. “Listen in and out,” she advises through a slight lisp. Then she rolls to the outside of her feet in an unassuming way and asks how to “conduct oneself in the presence of the spirit.”
I am temporarily seized by this muse, by the suggestion to treat inspiration “as an honored guest” and “entertain all my far-out ideas.” Only occasionally in my 46 years have I fully entertained the muse and my edgy, unconventional ideas. Typically, I am so consumed by a need for approval that I do not dare blurt out the true meanderings of my mazy mind. As a child, I spent most of my time in my imagination, creating fantasy lives when I was bored needing to get out of yard work, or detach from a socially painful elementary school scenario. I visited complex story lines every night I couldn’t fall asleep. I used the index finger on each hand to represent a character and created dialogues between the two fingers in the back seat of my mom’s lime green station wagon. I would whisper, not wanting to be caught, and occasionally my mother would ask what I was doing back there. “Nothing,” I would lie as I worked out the hurts of my youth on my index fingers.
Parks also revealed her imaginary childhood adventures under the piano waiting for her mother’s high heels to click by. She read Harriet the Spy and Hotel for Dogs and then, when asked, “What are you doing under there?” responded with, “I’m writing my novel.”
Wish I had thought of that line for myself.
“The play is always happening,” she declares. “I just plucked something out of the ether.” Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day for a year. Her efforts resulted in the recent publication of 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Many of the works are in production at theaters across the country. If the voices tell you to write a play a day for a year, you say “OK!” Parks explained. “In the presence of the spirit, you don’t say, ‘What do you mean?’ ”
I remember reading that Georgia O’Keefe painted a painting a day for the discipline, or perhaps to stir her artistic compost.
I started writing a poem a day for a while.
Then it became a poem a week, a poem a month, and finally a poem if I happened to be inspired and made the time to write it down.
I slighted the spirit yet again ~ didn’t even offer her a glass of wine when she came to visit because I was too determined to lead a proper life with a proper income from a acceptable job, own a house, keep it clean, go to bed by 10:00 and never reveal the true outrageousness of my spirit. After 1825 days of depression, I finally decided to quit my stable job, sell my clean house, stay up after midnight, and trust the voice that dared me to write, fill that life with constant creation and open every pore to the spirit with a resounding, “Yes!”
So here I am, signed up for a semester at Goddard and writing a Villanelle a day, well, not quite every day, but the point is, I let myself be consumed by the spirit, in love with the spirit, and I listen to words outside my own undulating mind.
My good friend and housemate Donna sent me a card while I was at Goddard. “Gazing out the window while rinsing the morning dishes, she chased her thoughts in circles, until they escaped through the screen and onto the mulberry tree. From a distance they actually made sense.” On the back of the card by Susan Mrosek it read, “A person needs a place to unfold their truths and extract the humor. That place is the Pondering Pool. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”
So here I am, in the ‘Pondering Pool’, wondering about the space between and the power of language within that space. I long to breathe only the ether that Suzan-Lori Parks speaks of; I long to be immersed in synonyms and similes, hyperbole and raw truth, the day to day 365 every day fascination with language as a symbol for enunciating our human condition. I stepped out to the edge of the tide and the shoreline; now I walk the wavy waters of artistic unknowing and, like Parks, I hope to go to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse and remember who I am and who I am supposed to be.
Ash Wednesday
This is my fifth year with ash on my forehead. The church I attend conducts a moving Ash Wednesday service that invites us to make clay sculptures, burn what we need to let go of, wash our hands in warm water, anoint ourselves with oil, take communion, and receive the ashes of atonement. I've written several poems about this experience over the years. Here they are:
(2003)
I am not afraid to drive in the rain
to church
with the radio and me blasting
Melissa Etheridge
I am your passion, your promise, your end.
I am not afraid to drive to church in the rain
out of ashes and darkness
into New life
and wilderness
I am not afraid to step in
to a moment of clay
shell empty
not afraid to create thick red lilies
out of playdoh
with round pure white centers
that rest against a receptive bowl
Can I not do with you
just as this potter has done?
I hold in my praying hands
the clay
and fear not.
I am not afraid to dip my fingers
in the swirling warm waters of salvation
while hips sway
and sweet vanilla oil of forgiveness
drips from my heart
I am not afraid to remember
communion
union
I burn fear and spread the ashes
a cross
my forehead
oh blue flame of eternal love
enter my heart in the place of forever
refined
I am not afraid to step out
exit prayer
enter poetry
on secular sidewalks
I wear a bold testament to faith
a scarlet “A”
unAshamed
I step out
into darkness
fearless in my knowing
that I alone
am marked
I long for a hand of friendship
as stranger’s eyes avert
as if I am disabled
handicapped by my declaration of faith
I sit through the stories of women I don’t know
women I have yet to love
and I quiver with the first gasp of fear
I am no longer home
here
I ask how am I to move with Grace
between poetry and prayer?
Only if my poetry is my prayer
Take me back to sanctuary
certain of You
and not afraid
I press my wrists to my inscribed forehead
not out of shame
but as a way to quiet my faith
and humble my love
humble as dust and ashes
I am not afraid to leave the familiar
and enter the unknown
I am not afraid to drive home in the rain
alone
and, and, and
Finding Form (March 2004)
"Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?"
Put your hands in the clay
Put my hands in the clay
Let the heat of our hands
the heat of our histories
sculpt the cool amorphous mass
Let the heat of our hands
our fingers
curl, stretch, dig,
unfurl our lives
sculpt our love
Let the heat rise above the coolness
of fear and unknowing
Rise and shape the new
Encountering Dangerous Beauty (2/11/07)
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands,
parched places of apathy, or are you
agitated in desert wastelands ~
awake in the dark light where mystics stand,
or do you slump in your usual Sunday pew?
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?
Do you fill your life with privileges of every brand
or do you empty your cup of all you once knew ~
agitated in desert wastelands.
What do you require to acquire? How do you fill your hands?
Can you reduce possessions to just a few
or are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?
Commercialize, privatize, merchandise: your life in a can.
What do you get from all this? What do you construe ~
agitated in desert wastelands?
To bloom in the desert, don’t you understand,
you must let go of the last hope of morning dew.
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands
or vitally agitated in desert wastelands?
(2003)
I am not afraid to drive in the rain
to church
with the radio and me blasting
Melissa Etheridge
I am your passion, your promise, your end.
I am not afraid to drive to church in the rain
out of ashes and darkness
into New life
and wilderness
I am not afraid to step in
to a moment of clay
shell empty
not afraid to create thick red lilies
out of playdoh
with round pure white centers
that rest against a receptive bowl
Can I not do with you
just as this potter has done?
I hold in my praying hands
the clay
and fear not.
I am not afraid to dip my fingers
in the swirling warm waters of salvation
while hips sway
and sweet vanilla oil of forgiveness
drips from my heart
I am not afraid to remember
communion
union
I burn fear and spread the ashes
a cross
my forehead
oh blue flame of eternal love
enter my heart in the place of forever
refined
I am not afraid to step out
exit prayer
enter poetry
on secular sidewalks
I wear a bold testament to faith
a scarlet “A”
unAshamed
I step out
into darkness
fearless in my knowing
that I alone
am marked
I long for a hand of friendship
as stranger’s eyes avert
as if I am disabled
handicapped by my declaration of faith
I sit through the stories of women I don’t know
women I have yet to love
and I quiver with the first gasp of fear
I am no longer home
here
I ask how am I to move with Grace
between poetry and prayer?
Only if my poetry is my prayer
Take me back to sanctuary
certain of You
and not afraid
I press my wrists to my inscribed forehead
not out of shame
but as a way to quiet my faith
and humble my love
humble as dust and ashes
I am not afraid to leave the familiar
and enter the unknown
I am not afraid to drive home in the rain
alone
and, and, and
Finding Form (March 2004)
"Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?"
Put your hands in the clay
Put my hands in the clay
Let the heat of our hands
the heat of our histories
sculpt the cool amorphous mass
Let the heat of our hands
our fingers
curl, stretch, dig,
unfurl our lives
sculpt our love
Let the heat rise above the coolness
of fear and unknowing
Rise and shape the new
Encountering Dangerous Beauty (2/11/07)
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands,
parched places of apathy, or are you
agitated in desert wastelands ~
awake in the dark light where mystics stand,
or do you slump in your usual Sunday pew?
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?
Do you fill your life with privileges of every brand
or do you empty your cup of all you once knew ~
agitated in desert wastelands.
What do you require to acquire? How do you fill your hands?
Can you reduce possessions to just a few
or are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?
Commercialize, privatize, merchandise: your life in a can.
What do you get from all this? What do you construe ~
agitated in desert wastelands?
To bloom in the desert, don’t you understand,
you must let go of the last hope of morning dew.
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands
or vitally agitated in desert wastelands?
Monday, February 12, 2007
The Birds
While in Vermont we visited an odd little science museum begun by Horace Fairbanks. There were several "paintings" made from butterfly wings and bugs, yes, really beetles and things. I was most drawn to the taxidermy exhibit of tropical birds of paradise followed by the fashion exhibit of the hats made out of these birds.
Price of Beauty
The birds of paradise pay
fascinating feathery frills
marketed for millinery trade
magenta bellies and emerald throats
Fascinating feathery frills
a plume craze into extinction
magenta bellies and emerald throats
women wear the males on their heads
A plume craze into extinction
one ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
women wear the males on their heads
courtship props of the highest price
One ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
I would just die to have that hat.
Courtship props of the highest price
the birds of paradise pay
The birds of paradise pay
fascinating feathery frills
marketed for millinery trade
magenta bellies and emerald throats
Fascinating feathery frills
a plume craze into extinction
magenta bellies and emerald throats
women wear the males on their heads
A plume craze into extinction
one ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
women wear the males on their heads
courtship props of the highest price
One ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
I would just die to have that hat.
Courtship props of the highest price
the birds of paradise pay
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Villanelle
Looks like blogging is going to help me in my studies. I am researching poetry forms, looking at villanelles right now and would love your feedback. What does the poem say to you? Apologies for the MLA citing in the intro...I need to write a critical, formal essay and these are my notes:
The villanelle began as an Italian rustic field song, sung as a round, which most likely accompanied various stages of farm tasks. This poetic form might be classified as a work song, a form most identified with African-American heritage involving repetition with the rhythm of the task. The song-like origins of the form unconsciously allow us to enter the language of spirit. A liberated language, beyond words, beyond utterances, beyond non-verbal communication, the language of spirit is an integration of all three forms of communication in a story without syntax – a story that divorces itself from context in order to generate the new. The villanelle was revived by the French, via Jean Passerat who gave the form its current metrical and rhyme structure. Oscar Wilde unleashed the form into the 20th century with his villanelle written in 1891. The contemporary appeal for such a rigid form, according to Strand and Boland (8), is that it refuses a linear narrative, and instead cultivates a spiraling repetition that allows both the reader and the poet to experience a transformational déjà vu. Like the double helix at the core of our being, a spiral motion and shape allows us to witness where we have been without going back and glimpse at where we are going without charging forward before we are ready. “Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, finally, of dissolution” (Strand 8). The villanelle is a form that remains in the present; an ideal form for holding in the thin places of our lives while still having the velcrox of the known with the possibility of re-configuration or resurrection into the new unknown. As Dorothee Soelle says in her book on mysticism and resistance, “We need a new language in order to plunge into the cloud of unknowing” (Soelle 59).
If a man falls in a forest
will he rise
from clay and solitude, by degrees,
through a blessed throat of communion cries
he lies
naked among russet leaves.
Will he rise?
Winter skies ~
dream haloes light frozen trees
and a blessed throat of communion cries.
He relies
on the night watch, crouching, clutching rib and knees
Will he rise?
What if the male of the species dies?
Released to a starry night crossing, he pleas
through a blessed throat of communion cries.
What if he lives, cornered, at sunrise,
strapped in gun-metal gray, old way, patriarchal seize
Will he lie or will he rise
through a blessed throat of communion cries?
The villanelle began as an Italian rustic field song, sung as a round, which most likely accompanied various stages of farm tasks. This poetic form might be classified as a work song, a form most identified with African-American heritage involving repetition with the rhythm of the task. The song-like origins of the form unconsciously allow us to enter the language of spirit. A liberated language, beyond words, beyond utterances, beyond non-verbal communication, the language of spirit is an integration of all three forms of communication in a story without syntax – a story that divorces itself from context in order to generate the new. The villanelle was revived by the French, via Jean Passerat who gave the form its current metrical and rhyme structure. Oscar Wilde unleashed the form into the 20th century with his villanelle written in 1891. The contemporary appeal for such a rigid form, according to Strand and Boland (8), is that it refuses a linear narrative, and instead cultivates a spiraling repetition that allows both the reader and the poet to experience a transformational déjà vu. Like the double helix at the core of our being, a spiral motion and shape allows us to witness where we have been without going back and glimpse at where we are going without charging forward before we are ready. “Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, finally, of dissolution” (Strand 8). The villanelle is a form that remains in the present; an ideal form for holding in the thin places of our lives while still having the velcrox of the known with the possibility of re-configuration or resurrection into the new unknown. As Dorothee Soelle says in her book on mysticism and resistance, “We need a new language in order to plunge into the cloud of unknowing” (Soelle 59).
If a man falls in a forest
will he rise
from clay and solitude, by degrees,
through a blessed throat of communion cries
he lies
naked among russet leaves.
Will he rise?
Winter skies ~
dream haloes light frozen trees
and a blessed throat of communion cries.
He relies
on the night watch, crouching, clutching rib and knees
Will he rise?
What if the male of the species dies?
Released to a starry night crossing, he pleas
through a blessed throat of communion cries.
What if he lives, cornered, at sunrise,
strapped in gun-metal gray, old way, patriarchal seize
Will he lie or will he rise
through a blessed throat of communion cries?
Monday, February 05, 2007
To the Manor Born
This is the Manor House at Goddard where I had most of my classes last week. Lovely snow! So Vermont-esque. I don't know how much I'll be able to blog in the future as I pursue my studies, but I'll try to put stuff on as it comes.
Imagine it is Still Ground Hog Day
I'm a bit behind in blogging.
Groundhog Day
Unearth us
rain or shine
from the bowels of history
from the womb
out
to the light of our future
now
rain and shine
there are shadows
but they no longer confine
to yesterday
to unspoken mystery
they are
our shadows
and we fear not
stepping in
to our divine
rain and shine
so sublime
today
is the day
step out
to step in
to shine
and re-define
Groundhog Day
Unearth us
rain or shine
from the bowels of history
from the womb
out
to the light of our future
now
rain and shine
there are shadows
but they no longer confine
to yesterday
to unspoken mystery
they are
our shadows
and we fear not
stepping in
to our divine
rain and shine
so sublime
today
is the day
step out
to step in
to shine
and re-define
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