In the interests of providing my students (don't you love how I can own them with a single pronoun?) with a nudge into the wide world of the inter-webs where stories dwell upon dwell upon dwell, I've put some alternative "readings" on the syllabus. These begin with The Moth website.
(I'm also assigning The Onion, a TED talk, and a bevy of websites devoted to click-baiting college students. After all, we're studying creative writing, and I want to emphasize the creative part of the writing. Who knows, that is, what and where and how we'll be writing in 10, 20, 30 years? I never imagined, when I was a college senior, that I'd be tapping out a form of personal narrative into a book-sized computer and then, with a few clicks of buttons, pushing it out into cyberspace for you and other potential strangers and friends to read and even respond. Back then, we typed our workshop materials onto ditto forms, put them on a ditto machine, and cranked out 15 purple wet copies for the group.)
As I'm a fan of doing my own homework, I made sure to listen to the latest episode of Moth stories -- these are live events where storytellers (famous and not so) stand up in front of audiences without notes or scripts and tell a story. The Moth organizers, of course, first get you to pitch a potential story to them and then, if they decide to go with it, coach you into this live delivery.
And that's my way of telling you that, yes, you can't just get up there and wing it. The piece has been drafted, crafted, cut, rearranged, critiqued, and so on before it ever reaches the stage. The episode I found is titled "Facing the Dark," includes three stories. John Turtturo talks about his brother's mental illness, Daniela Schiller speaks about her father's memories of the Holocaust and her own work with psychological research on memory, and Kate Braestrup describes the importance of facing death -- in person -- in her piece, "The House of Mourning." I have to confess that this last piece is the one that most touched me, perhaps because of my own baggage with dead fathers.
Often when I'm listening to The Moth Radio Hour (it's a podcast) or StoryCorps (another podcast) or Snap Judgement (ditto), I'm struck by the immediacy of a story told in its human voice, as well as by the intimacy of the form. Instead of reading the words on the page in my own voice, at top speed, invisibly in my head, I'm using my ears to hear them, in a narrator's voice, with sound effects and pauses and (sometimes) mutual tears.
These experiences remind me that story is vital to us. It organizes the chaos of experience into sense. It makes the intangible tangible. It creates a light in the darkness. It populates the emptiness with friends.
And these oral stories also remind me where the heart of story resides: in the impulse to share our experience with others. All you need, The Moth producers remind us, is a person, a place and a problem. Then -- boom. Story happens, transforming teller and audience alike.
It's a powerful communion. And (in this case) it's free.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Mary Oliver is my Priestess of the Familiar
I suggested to others that they write about something they've read "outside of class" recently that has inspired or put them off. In other words, I've thrown down the gauntlet -- write about something that has elicited a strong reaction in you.
When I sat down today, my mind came up blank. I read and listen to a lot of things outside of class (podcasts, novels, short stories, textbooks, research articles, Facebook posts, tweets ... I'm getting dizzy just writing all of this down) but a lot of that just fades out of my brainpan nearly as fast as I cram it in.
Have I mentioned how hard it is to pay attention lately? So much for all of this mindfulness training.
Okay. I'm back.
And I've got something now. I really like Mary Oliver's poetry, and a few years ago I actually bought (on Kindle) her New and Selected Poems. Her poetry speaks to me because she's a master of the tight, concrete line, and her tone is often both wondering and severe. Her vision of nature as a repository of the divine comes the closest to my rough and incomplete vision of "god." Whenever I think about spiritual matters, I feel as if I'm trying to sketch in a very delicate mental picture with broken fat crayons. Oliver's work zings me with a kind of recognition, that low-level gut feeling of "oomph" that signals an incoming and felt truth. She's able to evoke in me a reverence for the natural world, the world outside of "people" and their "busyness," that I can only feel through poetry. It's a merging, I think, of the intellectual with the emotional, a full body sensation of discovery/recognition that I associate with moments (very brief, like nanoseconds) of mystery and revelation, of spiritual epiphany, blowing small holes in my atheist imagination.
She achieves this with simple and yet lush imagery, with a stark tone and direct vision. She embodies revelation in earthly things -- grass, beetles, birds. Like Whitman on a diet, she captures reverence in a snapshot of landscape.
Once I read an Oliver poem to start off a faculty meeting of some sort. I picked the poem because it transports me out of my mundane academic blah-blah and into something larger than myself. And because it has a dictatorial (pedantic?) message that I like: Be better than your own stupid self.
Here it is:
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.
*
I finished reading this poem and a strange hush lingered in the room. The meeting's leader said something like, "Well, that was something," and muttered about death and darkness. Of course the poem was about death. Of course it was a little lecture on living fully and facing the "cottage of darkness" with amazement, with particularity and realness. Like Mary Oliver, I don't want to die as a tourist. I want to die as a native of the world, having lived -- like a field daisy -- with singularity. And I want to walk through that doorway with curiosity and wonder.
When I sat down today, my mind came up blank. I read and listen to a lot of things outside of class (podcasts, novels, short stories, textbooks, research articles, Facebook posts, tweets ... I'm getting dizzy just writing all of this down) but a lot of that just fades out of my brainpan nearly as fast as I cram it in.
Have I mentioned how hard it is to pay attention lately? So much for all of this mindfulness training.
Okay. I'm back.
And I've got something now. I really like Mary Oliver's poetry, and a few years ago I actually bought (on Kindle) her New and Selected Poems. Her poetry speaks to me because she's a master of the tight, concrete line, and her tone is often both wondering and severe. Her vision of nature as a repository of the divine comes the closest to my rough and incomplete vision of "god." Whenever I think about spiritual matters, I feel as if I'm trying to sketch in a very delicate mental picture with broken fat crayons. Oliver's work zings me with a kind of recognition, that low-level gut feeling of "oomph" that signals an incoming and felt truth. She's able to evoke in me a reverence for the natural world, the world outside of "people" and their "busyness," that I can only feel through poetry. It's a merging, I think, of the intellectual with the emotional, a full body sensation of discovery/recognition that I associate with moments (very brief, like nanoseconds) of mystery and revelation, of spiritual epiphany, blowing small holes in my atheist imagination.
She achieves this with simple and yet lush imagery, with a stark tone and direct vision. She embodies revelation in earthly things -- grass, beetles, birds. Like Whitman on a diet, she captures reverence in a snapshot of landscape.
Once I read an Oliver poem to start off a faculty meeting of some sort. I picked the poem because it transports me out of my mundane academic blah-blah and into something larger than myself. And because it has a dictatorial (pedantic?) message that I like: Be better than your own stupid self.
Here it is:
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.
*
I finished reading this poem and a strange hush lingered in the room. The meeting's leader said something like, "Well, that was something," and muttered about death and darkness. Of course the poem was about death. Of course it was a little lecture on living fully and facing the "cottage of darkness" with amazement, with particularity and realness. Like Mary Oliver, I don't want to die as a tourist. I want to die as a native of the world, having lived -- like a field daisy -- with singularity. And I want to walk through that doorway with curiosity and wonder.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Fairy Tales and the Lonely Child
For a second blog post, I suggested to writers that they consider a significant moment in their histories as writers. Where were you? What happened? Who, if anyone, helped you in this moment? What did you learn/realize/otherwise discover?
As an instructor and even more as a parent, I'm often struck by how difficult it is to follow my own advice, or to complete my own homework. That said, here goes.
When I review my "history" as a writer, the moment that snags in my mind most often occurs in Falk School, in Pittsburgh, PA, in the first semester of my third grade year.
Okay, here I will make a confession: I can't remember, honestly, when in the year it took place. Only that my desk didn't face a window, and so the quality of light in the memory is golden, spring-like ... which could be an effect of the florescent lights, or of the corruption, in general, of any memory that is 44 years old.
So. I'm sitting at my desk, which happens to be in the aisle facing a row of carrels. I'm writing an illustrated story about Nancy Tupperware and her magical red shoes. Nancy puts on these shoes and they allow her to fly wherever she wants to fly in the world. She uses them on Christmas eve to fly to ... memory lapse ... England? ... and there she meets with animals in a manger (THE manger? Interesting/rogue religious moment in the agnostic kid's life) who can now, since it's Christmas eve, talk to her. The conversation -- its import and substance -- has been lost, though the "fact" (sorry, couldn't resist the scare quotes OR this pretentious aside) of that conversation, animals to Nancy, remains. Then, to end the story, Nancy flies up to heaven to converse with angels.
(This probably means that I was writing this in November or early December, in anticipation of Christmas.)
I am writing this story in order to share it with my friends. My best friend, Madeline Schwartz, is back now after spending second grade with her family in France. Maybe I'm writing this story in order to capture Madeline's attention, to win her back. As I color in the magnificent vibrance of Nancy's electric red shoes, I'm thinking of Madeline and her deep brown eyes, her wavy dark hair, her delicate olive skin. I want her to like this story. I want her to think it's a wonderful story, a magical tale. I want her to admire me as much as I admire her and the mysterious, fabulous "fact" of her new ability to speak French.
I can't remember if Madeline liked the story -- or if she ever read it. I do remember that after third grade we moved to Louisiana for a year and that marked the end of my friendship with Madeline. When we came back, I don't remember her in my fifth grade class. She took up ballet and I played the piano. She stayed at Falk and my parents shipped me off to the public middle school. We reconnected briefly when we were both in separate colleges, but she said, once, while going somewhere with me and my mother, "Laurie, you have the same stupid sense of humor you had in the first grade." And that I mark as the end of it all. No flying shoes, no talking animals.
Perhaps this tidbit of memory, which still has the power to shame me, survives to remind me that Nancy's magic was reserved just for me. The notion of flying, of speaking to animals and angels, of crossing barriers and expanding connection through conversation, movement, magic -- all of these are achieved through poetry and story. But especially story.
I think what I've learned, looking back on myself, hunched over my desk writing that story, drawing in Nancy and her shoes (and her billowing dress, like a mushroom umbrella in the lined sky, bobbing over the crooked manger below), lovingly laboring over those red shoes, is that I was a lonely child who found a gorgeous and busy life in books. There was nothing I enjoyed as much as losing myself to a fictional world -- fairy tales, the house at Pooh Corner, the wizard of Oz and the oddball hybrid characters (all of them infused with magic). I could forget about my desk in the walkway, my accomplished French speaking friends whose invisibility still lingers in my memory like a careful erasure, my forbidding (step)father, and the palpable feeling of uncertainty and fear that stalked me in my own house.
The story I was living at the time, my reality, was both boring and repressive. I certainly experienced joy, I won't lie. But most of that joy -- if it happened in my "real-life" narrative -- was both temporary and tenuous. The joy I experienced while reading and writing was enormous, and life-giving, and a balm to the solitary child bent over her notebook at the battered desk. It wrapped that child up in a warm sunshiny light, and allowed her to fly to far off lands, the author of her destiny and her destinations.
As an instructor and even more as a parent, I'm often struck by how difficult it is to follow my own advice, or to complete my own homework. That said, here goes.
When I review my "history" as a writer, the moment that snags in my mind most often occurs in Falk School, in Pittsburgh, PA, in the first semester of my third grade year.
Okay, here I will make a confession: I can't remember, honestly, when in the year it took place. Only that my desk didn't face a window, and so the quality of light in the memory is golden, spring-like ... which could be an effect of the florescent lights, or of the corruption, in general, of any memory that is 44 years old.
So. I'm sitting at my desk, which happens to be in the aisle facing a row of carrels. I'm writing an illustrated story about Nancy Tupperware and her magical red shoes. Nancy puts on these shoes and they allow her to fly wherever she wants to fly in the world. She uses them on Christmas eve to fly to ... memory lapse ... England? ... and there she meets with animals in a manger (THE manger? Interesting/rogue religious moment in the agnostic kid's life) who can now, since it's Christmas eve, talk to her. The conversation -- its import and substance -- has been lost, though the "fact" (sorry, couldn't resist the scare quotes OR this pretentious aside) of that conversation, animals to Nancy, remains. Then, to end the story, Nancy flies up to heaven to converse with angels.
(This probably means that I was writing this in November or early December, in anticipation of Christmas.)
I am writing this story in order to share it with my friends. My best friend, Madeline Schwartz, is back now after spending second grade with her family in France. Maybe I'm writing this story in order to capture Madeline's attention, to win her back. As I color in the magnificent vibrance of Nancy's electric red shoes, I'm thinking of Madeline and her deep brown eyes, her wavy dark hair, her delicate olive skin. I want her to like this story. I want her to think it's a wonderful story, a magical tale. I want her to admire me as much as I admire her and the mysterious, fabulous "fact" of her new ability to speak French.
I can't remember if Madeline liked the story -- or if she ever read it. I do remember that after third grade we moved to Louisiana for a year and that marked the end of my friendship with Madeline. When we came back, I don't remember her in my fifth grade class. She took up ballet and I played the piano. She stayed at Falk and my parents shipped me off to the public middle school. We reconnected briefly when we were both in separate colleges, but she said, once, while going somewhere with me and my mother, "Laurie, you have the same stupid sense of humor you had in the first grade." And that I mark as the end of it all. No flying shoes, no talking animals.
Perhaps this tidbit of memory, which still has the power to shame me, survives to remind me that Nancy's magic was reserved just for me. The notion of flying, of speaking to animals and angels, of crossing barriers and expanding connection through conversation, movement, magic -- all of these are achieved through poetry and story. But especially story.
I think what I've learned, looking back on myself, hunched over my desk writing that story, drawing in Nancy and her shoes (and her billowing dress, like a mushroom umbrella in the lined sky, bobbing over the crooked manger below), lovingly laboring over those red shoes, is that I was a lonely child who found a gorgeous and busy life in books. There was nothing I enjoyed as much as losing myself to a fictional world -- fairy tales, the house at Pooh Corner, the wizard of Oz and the oddball hybrid characters (all of them infused with magic). I could forget about my desk in the walkway, my accomplished French speaking friends whose invisibility still lingers in my memory like a careful erasure, my forbidding (step)father, and the palpable feeling of uncertainty and fear that stalked me in my own house.
The story I was living at the time, my reality, was both boring and repressive. I certainly experienced joy, I won't lie. But most of that joy -- if it happened in my "real-life" narrative -- was both temporary and tenuous. The joy I experienced while reading and writing was enormous, and life-giving, and a balm to the solitary child bent over her notebook at the battered desk. It wrapped that child up in a warm sunshiny light, and allowed her to fly to far off lands, the author of her destiny and her destinations.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Reading and Writing with Anne
Hello again after a long time away.
In my course for the semester, we're reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, some of us for the first time and some of us for the nth time.
I've always loved the way that I can hear Anne's voice burbling through the pages into my brain. It's as if I'm sitting across from her in a cafe, and she's filling the airspace with her wall-to-wall technicolor humor and anecdote.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be Anne -- I wanted to command that attention from readers, to have that kind of hold over an audience, to fill so much space with my mind (despite my, our, somewhat unassuming bodies). Now I just like reading, or re-reading her, and thinking about the rich and wild tumble of her metaphors as she rushes (like snowmelt) down the mountains of her own creating. Perhaps it's because I'm working on my own practices of mindfulness that I can now sit on the riverbank and simply let the wild water foam past me, instead of dipping my legs in, or feeling the urge to jump in with her and be swept away.
I do admire Anne's ability to let it all hang out -- to speak of herself and what she calls her mental illness with casual (offhand? blase'?) confidence. And I've identified with her immediate need to apologize for that move, to confess her self consciousness. Anne and I seem to want our readers to love us, warts and all, though we are convinced that we are unworthy because of the warts. We want, in other words, our readers to love us when we can't really love ourselves.
But I think I'm getting better at that -- loving myself, or at least being kind to myself -- and maybe that has something to do with the fact that I've stopped writing. Okay, no. I've stopped writing with purpose, or with the purpose of being published, and have accepted the role of teacher/coach instead. And though I have to fend off well-meaning acquaintances at cocktail parties who want me to tell them all about the great book of poetry I'm in the process of creating with lies about my poetry production (it's easier than listening to their well-meaning but aggressive pep talks), I'm beginning to be "fine" with the fact that I'm a teacher first, and a sometimes-writer second.
Maybe that falls under Anne's urgent message to us: write because we want to write, because we need to write, and not for the so-called "fame" or "fortune" that being "a published author" is supposed to bring us.
In my course for the semester, we're reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, some of us for the first time and some of us for the nth time.
I've always loved the way that I can hear Anne's voice burbling through the pages into my brain. It's as if I'm sitting across from her in a cafe, and she's filling the airspace with her wall-to-wall technicolor humor and anecdote.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be Anne -- I wanted to command that attention from readers, to have that kind of hold over an audience, to fill so much space with my mind (despite my, our, somewhat unassuming bodies). Now I just like reading, or re-reading her, and thinking about the rich and wild tumble of her metaphors as she rushes (like snowmelt) down the mountains of her own creating. Perhaps it's because I'm working on my own practices of mindfulness that I can now sit on the riverbank and simply let the wild water foam past me, instead of dipping my legs in, or feeling the urge to jump in with her and be swept away.
I do admire Anne's ability to let it all hang out -- to speak of herself and what she calls her mental illness with casual (offhand? blase'?) confidence. And I've identified with her immediate need to apologize for that move, to confess her self consciousness. Anne and I seem to want our readers to love us, warts and all, though we are convinced that we are unworthy because of the warts. We want, in other words, our readers to love us when we can't really love ourselves.
But I think I'm getting better at that -- loving myself, or at least being kind to myself -- and maybe that has something to do with the fact that I've stopped writing. Okay, no. I've stopped writing with purpose, or with the purpose of being published, and have accepted the role of teacher/coach instead. And though I have to fend off well-meaning acquaintances at cocktail parties who want me to tell them all about the great book of poetry I'm in the process of creating with lies about my poetry production (it's easier than listening to their well-meaning but aggressive pep talks), I'm beginning to be "fine" with the fact that I'm a teacher first, and a sometimes-writer second.
Maybe that falls under Anne's urgent message to us: write because we want to write, because we need to write, and not for the so-called "fame" or "fortune" that being "a published author" is supposed to bring us.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Another rainy Tuesday
We're getting to the part of the academic year when some of us are set "free" to learn on our own for a few months -- read, write essays, ponder course design, gaze at our navels, refresh and renew.
As part of my new position, however, that will not include me ... for the first time in forever. I'll be coming in every weekday to take care of business. Usually, I'm not really all that good at summer "breaks." Unstructured time is difficult for me. A certain kind of chewing restlessness sets in around the middle of June and begins to nibble at my brain function. Perhaps this structure and responsibility, this attention to long term projects, this more structured "learning," will be good for me.
I'll get back to you on that after I go through a few months of it. I think the trick will be in keeping track of what I should be accomplishing, setting goals for myself -- concrete, achievable goals -- and coming up with something like a time line. The thing about teaching is that you're regularly and predictably accountable to others. You've got deadlines and expectations and concrete goals (in writing). I should make up a summer syllabus for myself, that is.
Going to do a word box poem today. I'll select 5 words and see where they lead me. The words are:
mail carrier, eyeball, coffee, condo, and lexicographer.
Oh boy.
*
Alter Ego
I'm a half-closed dysfunctional eyeball
floating in anti-matter, a destroyed and
destructive god of the anti-domestic,
a ripped shirt, laddered tights, highball
sucking pierce machine, the lexicographer
of your personal apocalypse, composing
all the terms for disaster known to human
unkindness, the mail carrier come with letters
from the unconscious. Inside this cardboard condo
you call a mind, I nudge awake your incipient
chaos with a shot of scalding espresso, whip you
into several frenzies, until you're knocked into
the ditch like a bundle of bones -- emotional
roadkill. I'm your alter ego, your inner child,
your id, your dark side, your shadow, your
unforgotten Other -- all the parts of you
you thought you'd buried. Surprise!
This is me, now, ringing your bell:
the walking dead, the dirt and fingernails
and fungus and rot you thought
(all those years ago) you'd left behind.
As part of my new position, however, that will not include me ... for the first time in forever. I'll be coming in every weekday to take care of business. Usually, I'm not really all that good at summer "breaks." Unstructured time is difficult for me. A certain kind of chewing restlessness sets in around the middle of June and begins to nibble at my brain function. Perhaps this structure and responsibility, this attention to long term projects, this more structured "learning," will be good for me.
I'll get back to you on that after I go through a few months of it. I think the trick will be in keeping track of what I should be accomplishing, setting goals for myself -- concrete, achievable goals -- and coming up with something like a time line. The thing about teaching is that you're regularly and predictably accountable to others. You've got deadlines and expectations and concrete goals (in writing). I should make up a summer syllabus for myself, that is.
Going to do a word box poem today. I'll select 5 words and see where they lead me. The words are:
mail carrier, eyeball, coffee, condo, and lexicographer.
Oh boy.
*
Alter Ego
I'm a half-closed dysfunctional eyeball
floating in anti-matter, a destroyed and
destructive god of the anti-domestic,
a ripped shirt, laddered tights, highball
sucking pierce machine, the lexicographer
of your personal apocalypse, composing
all the terms for disaster known to human
unkindness, the mail carrier come with letters
from the unconscious. Inside this cardboard condo
you call a mind, I nudge awake your incipient
chaos with a shot of scalding espresso, whip you
into several frenzies, until you're knocked into
the ditch like a bundle of bones -- emotional
roadkill. I'm your alter ego, your inner child,
your id, your dark side, your shadow, your
unforgotten Other -- all the parts of you
you thought you'd buried. Surprise!
This is me, now, ringing your bell:
the walking dead, the dirt and fingernails
and fungus and rot you thought
(all those years ago) you'd left behind.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
missing the poetry fix
Hello, darlings.
It's now May and I'm going to confess that I miss the ability to center myself every day with a poetry exercise. (Did you know, however, that if you post a poem to your blog you can't submit it to a poetry journal for potential publication? Nope. See, self publication counts. Oh well.)
Yesterday, instead of writing a poem, I did a guided meditation in my office to "rededicate myself to lovingkindness." Oh, snap -- new age strikes. Instead of being loving and kind, however, as the soothing Irish voiced man suggested, I soured by mid-day and by the end of the day, when I arrived into Dave's space, I was the same old rant bag as usual.
I've got about 10 minutes before I have to head into an action packed day. My Google calendar is a solid blob from 10-3:30 or so, with a small break before a dinner gig. All of this celebrating is making my waist thick and the numbers on the scale rise. I couldn't zip my jeans yesterday. Blargh.
Maybe I'll write a poem a week now. How's that sound?
Today's challenge: What does your shadow do while you're sleeping?
*
While I'm Sleeping
My shadow stretches out
to fill me,
leaking
into my fingers and toes,
erasing
my wrinkles,
returning me to a dewy
youth.
It's a heavy liquid
that defies gravity,
lifting me
like dream ether
into strange heights
where flickering images
mix
past and present,
hinting at the future
(black mirrors
hold a world
of bending shadows
that touch me
with chilly
fingertips)
when I will be
all shadow
all
the time.
It's now May and I'm going to confess that I miss the ability to center myself every day with a poetry exercise. (Did you know, however, that if you post a poem to your blog you can't submit it to a poetry journal for potential publication? Nope. See, self publication counts. Oh well.)
Yesterday, instead of writing a poem, I did a guided meditation in my office to "rededicate myself to lovingkindness." Oh, snap -- new age strikes. Instead of being loving and kind, however, as the soothing Irish voiced man suggested, I soured by mid-day and by the end of the day, when I arrived into Dave's space, I was the same old rant bag as usual.
I've got about 10 minutes before I have to head into an action packed day. My Google calendar is a solid blob from 10-3:30 or so, with a small break before a dinner gig. All of this celebrating is making my waist thick and the numbers on the scale rise. I couldn't zip my jeans yesterday. Blargh.
Maybe I'll write a poem a week now. How's that sound?
Today's challenge: What does your shadow do while you're sleeping?
*
While I'm Sleeping
My shadow stretches out
to fill me,
leaking
into my fingers and toes,
erasing
my wrinkles,
returning me to a dewy
youth.
It's a heavy liquid
that defies gravity,
lifting me
like dream ether
into strange heights
where flickering images
mix
past and present,
hinting at the future
(black mirrors
hold a world
of bending shadows
that touch me
with chilly
fingertips)
when I will be
all shadow
all
the time.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
30 means freedom! But freedom from poetry ... is that really a good thing?
This will be my last "poem a day" entry for April. It's sort of bittersweet. On the one hand, I'll be happy to leave this self-imposed challenge aside for a while. On the other hand, writing a poem a day does pique my creativity and my zest for spring. In other words, this "chore" brings on a personal rebirth of sorts. Not sure if I should let that settle down again.
My prompt for the day will be: http://poetryprompts.tumblr.com/post/142634525032/national-poetry-month-prompt (Write a love poem to your hometown.)
*
Love Poem for Pittsburgh
Dear steel city, Burgh of black soot
and rotten air, milltown of ethnic neighborhoods,
Appalachian twang, and borderline Midwest
politesse, thank you for taking me in
when I was three, for introducing me
to Elmer Street and ginkgo trees and
Mr. Rogers (my television friend),
for Liberty Elementary and Falk School,
for EJ across the street with his Big Wheel
(first fiancee) and for The Catman
with his marmalade beast
on a long stalking leash.
Thank you for cracked sidewalks, for
potholes and Negley Hill, for sledding in
Mellon Park on snow days, and for the slush
that froze our jeans as we schlepped home
in a bunch, all the neighborhood kids,
dragging the toboggan. Thank you for
Carnegie Mellon, where I learned
to be a writer and started my journey,
for Shadyside and Squirrel Hill and Oakland,
for Dave and Andy's ice cream, for your
global smorgasbord and greasy spoons,
for three green rivers and fireworks
on the Point, for art festivals
and brick houses and Mom's apartment
on Wightman -- her sanctuary.
I didn't love you in middle school
(in fact I probably hated you). It seemed
you were callous, that you wanted us
to break our adolescent hearts against
each other, and I was happy to leave you
for Mexico, but distance must make
the heart grow fonder, and so I returned
and learned to love you again
as helped me come of age.
Dear Pittsburgh, I wish you all
the best, though we'll never be together
again. Keep Mom safe. Hold my memories
in place. I'll lie, then, and call you
"home," and say I loved you best.
My prompt for the day will be: http://poetryprompts.tumblr.com/post/142634525032/national-poetry-month-prompt (Write a love poem to your hometown.)
*
Love Poem for Pittsburgh
Dear steel city, Burgh of black soot
and rotten air, milltown of ethnic neighborhoods,
Appalachian twang, and borderline Midwest
politesse, thank you for taking me in
when I was three, for introducing me
to Elmer Street and ginkgo trees and
Mr. Rogers (my television friend),
for Liberty Elementary and Falk School,
for EJ across the street with his Big Wheel
(first fiancee) and for The Catman
with his marmalade beast
on a long stalking leash.
Thank you for cracked sidewalks, for
potholes and Negley Hill, for sledding in
Mellon Park on snow days, and for the slush
that froze our jeans as we schlepped home
in a bunch, all the neighborhood kids,
dragging the toboggan. Thank you for
Carnegie Mellon, where I learned
to be a writer and started my journey,
for Shadyside and Squirrel Hill and Oakland,
for Dave and Andy's ice cream, for your
global smorgasbord and greasy spoons,
for three green rivers and fireworks
on the Point, for art festivals
and brick houses and Mom's apartment
on Wightman -- her sanctuary.
I didn't love you in middle school
(in fact I probably hated you). It seemed
you were callous, that you wanted us
to break our adolescent hearts against
each other, and I was happy to leave you
for Mexico, but distance must make
the heart grow fonder, and so I returned
and learned to love you again
as helped me come of age.
Dear Pittsburgh, I wish you all
the best, though we'll never be together
again. Keep Mom safe. Hold my memories
in place. I'll lie, then, and call you
"home," and say I loved you best.
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