What Catches Your Ear, Your Eye?

A fellow poet and long-time student of mine gifted me the use of her family’s cottage on Cape Cod. Through screen-windows and from chairs perched on the edge of a hill, I’ve passed the last week watching the tide come in an out, and the ocean beyond that. The sounds and scents of sand, pine, sea roses and rain have replaced the sounds of village life for now.

There’s a passage in the prose poem, “On Looking at the Sea,” by Thomas A. Clark that goes “As bladder wrack will float a stone, contemplation of the horizon brings a perceptible lifting of the center of gravity.”

I feel that. As quiet as my at-home life actually is, the pace of looking and perception, the sustained consideration that’s possible while away from regular life, makes possible a very different experience of the world, and of my self.

I’ve spent some time looking at paintings by Agnes Martin this week, too, after a reader suggested that the poems in my book, Pilgrim, called to mind a similar quality of quiet and stillness. See some of Martin’s work here.

“We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition.” Agnes Martin

 

I think that’s true for a lot of people, though not for me, probably because I grew up in the woods and spent a great deal of my youth alone, looking at the world from up high in climbing trees, or playing in meadows and in streams, if not alone, then with other kids who didn’t have televisions or electronic toys, and who were sent outside to explore and to be with ourselves.

I’ve also reread Anne Truitt’s Daybook: Journal of an Artist, written between the years 1973-1979, in which she documents her process and about sculpture. I was a small child during the years she said the following, about the difference between herself and her student’s sensitivity to sound:

“I wonder if my student’s senses are not actually different from mine. I overload so much faster than they do. Could it be that my baseline of stimulation at birth in 1921 in a small country town renders me incapable of adjusting easily to a range of visual and aural impact fifty-eight years later? The curve of environmental stimulation from 1921 to 1979 is steep, right straight up. Recalling my childhood, I hear birds, leaves in wind, human voices, the crumple of paper, the fall of beans in a barrel, barks, miaows, and occasionally horse’s hooves clip-clopping. That is not much sound to take in. Most of my students began to live around 1960. Muzak already filled public buildings, and what is to me, the painful rasp of the mechanical television voice threaded the daily life of householders. To compound this aural repletion with the visual, add televised images.”

I think about these things all the time. Do you? Do you think about what meets your eyes each day, and what fills your ears, and how that shapes your experience day to day?

As I began to transcribe the above passage, for the first time in over a week, the sound of a lawnmower started up somewhere in the neighborhood. A work truck beeped as it backed up and someone turned on a leaf blower. In contrast to other places in America, this is not the usual background sound in Sladeville, the former artist colony where I’m staying, probably because the sandy soil makes the cultivation of the Quintessential American Lawn a fruitless labor and foolish exercise. As a result, the landscape is left a little bit wilder, and the soundscape remains wilder too, if not just now, suffused with birdsong and wind sounds instead.

I grew up with painters for parents and these days I co-teach “Small Pages” workshops with my mother, Carol C. Spaulding, inside and outside her studio/gallery near Glen Lake, Michigan. In these day-long intensives we explore artistic practice as contemplative practice. Our next session happens on Saturday, August 20^th, and offers a day of working with painted collage and writing prompts to help foster calm and creativity, and perhaps relieve you from concerns related to audience and commerce. You can find out more on my website. Or just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the class. Our limit is 8—no experience necessary. We’ll surround you with a burgeoning summer garden, trees, flowers galore, and birdsong. We’ll also provide all the materials necessary for the course, and send you home with a custom artist’s kit.

If that date doesn’t work for you, consider joining me in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore for a three-hour nature-writing and poetry workshop on August 18^th. Enroll via Glen Arbor Art Association at 231-334-6112. Finally, this Thursday, my mom will also host a workshop to help you loosen up your mind, make some marks, and devote yourself to the joyfulness of “Messing Around With Paint.” All of these experiences are intended to cultivate a quality of presence that you can carry with you into your art—or into the world. No prior experience necessary.

Agnes Martin again: “Art work comes straight through a free mind—an open mind. Absolute freedom is possible. We gradually give up things that disturb us and cover our mind. And with each relinquishment, we feel better.”

All photos of the same view: Pamet River at Truro, Cape Cod. Late July 2016.

This Place Could Be Beautiful

I’ve been thinking about beauty and empathy and how we must cultivate these qualities and ways of being in order to take better care of ourselves, each other, and our suffering world.

And I’m thinking about this poem, “Good Bones,” by Maggie Smith, and how by chance, it connected with perhaps millions of readers via the simple act of sharing on social media, after the Orlando shootings. We need poems to help us understand and think and feel and grieve. We need to write them, read them, and share them:

This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

—Maggie Smith

* * *

I know it’s summer. The green-blue-glistening world opens its arms and we fall into it–swimming, hiking, playing, and stretching the long days to make them longer, to make them last.

It can be hard to write under such circumstances, especially when we still work full-time, still need to look after our children and others. And yet some of us must find a way to write no matter what. It’s how we make sense of our experiences, and it’s how we savor and attend what matters most. Writing is a way of giving form to the fast-moving, the slow moving, and even the ineffable elements of life. An art practice is a way of being alive and to put it aside for too long is to dull or ignore something important. It can feel like we’re missing what we most need and want to attend to with our fullest presence.

If you would like to make time and space for your writing in the next eight weeks, please consider joining me for Summer Poetry Apprenticeship program. I’ve created the structure and will provide you with brief weekly readings and prompts to help you build a discipline and generate new work by writing in a regular way. You’ll also have the option to conference with me privately via phone or video chat, and I always offer feedback on work in progress. We begin Friday and go until August 19th. Enroll here.

“The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.” —John Cage

If you live in western Massachusetts, I’m teaching a two-part generative writing workshop at IS183 during July:

Evocative Nature: Creative Writing in Connection with Nature: July 12 & 19, Stockbridge, MA.

 

And later this summer, I’ll be back in Michigan for two more face-to-face workshops:

Field Notes: Writing in the Natural World on August 18, within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Glen Arbor, MI.

Small Pages: Collage and Writing as Contemplative Practice on August 20, at the Carol C Spaulding Gallery/Studio near Glen Lake, MI.

When We Leave the Fray—and Write

I like to wash,
by way of experiment,
the dust of this world
in the droplets of dew.

—Basho (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa)

We prefer to think that we can have it all—house, family, career, friends, a public life, and also write—but for most of us, it’s hard to juggle all of this and enjoy ourselves, much less write well. The sense of panic and dividedness within aspiring writers who lead truly full and demanding lives eventually grinds them down. Their writing suffers, and very often it eventually stops, or else it happens only in fits. So many of my students and clients struggle with this—even the truly serious ones, for whom writing is a true vocation—and I worry about the implications this has for our health, our lives, and broadly speaking, even for our society. Even if you don’t aspire to write, I believe that the epidemic of busyness is ruining people’s lives.

With these challenges in mind, my workshops are designed to provide structure, time, and the conditions necessary for thinking and writing. I provide instruction on craft, creative ways to get started, and helpful guidance when you get stuck. In this setting, the nervous system settles down and the body begins to remember how good it feels to do one thing at a time. To dedicate some attention toward doing that thing with our whole selves. Even a half-day workshop can awaken the sense—a memory perhaps—of how important this is for those who wish very much to write, even if only for themselves.

One such opportunity happens a week from now, on June 18. Maybe you’ll join me as a way of taking a break from the intensity of family life now that school is out, and as a way of attending to your inner life. If you bring a sister, brother, or friend, perhaps you’ll discover something that you can do together going forward, and a way of reinforcing your commitment to creative practice. Most of us don’t do this entirely alone—a companero helps. Solidarity breeds courage, conviction, and actual creative work that you can point to and say: I made this.

Poetry in the Park: A Writing Workshop at Thoreson Farm happens June 18, 10:00-3:00, near beautiful Glen Arbor, Michigan. Join me for a day of writing, reading, and discussion at historic Thoreson Farm, which is situated within the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore and near Lake Michigan.

Using writing prompts and other creative exercises, we’ll turn our awareness to the landscape around our studio as we consider the natural world and our place within it, asking how our observations can more intimately inform our writing, and nurture our inner lives.

While concluding the day with several drafts of new poems is a goal, I’m also interested in providing participants with a retreat from the busyness and sensory overload that accompanies modern life. This is an opportunity to slow down, quiet our minds, and wake up sensorily in order to write.

This is a generative workshop. Writers of all levels are welcome, including those working in other genres.

Now enrolling via Glen Lake Artist Association: $95 ($85 for GAAA members)

I also have room for a couple more people in Small Pages: Writing and painting as Contemplative Practice on June 25.

Something Beautiful: Flowers and Creative Flow

It’s late spring as I write this: season of wildflowers, season of long walks outdoors. Have you noticed the birdsong? Peepers at night? The flowers coming and going along roadsides and in meadows? Every day delivers something gorgeous to look at and smell.

I’m in residence at an artist colony in upstate New York, where I’ve worked many times over the years, usually on poems, sometimes on essays, most recently on a book, and always in a state of blissful flow. Yes, this is a kind of artist Utopia where those who receive the invitation are given time, space, quiet, and wholehearted encouragement to pursue our work. As an added benefit, meals are shared with fellow artists, providing a rich conversation rarely found in regular life.

Last week, a fellow writer reminded that the very first time I came here, back in 2007, I made a ritual of cutting flowers each afternoon after writing all day, and placing them in vases around the lodge: on the sill in the kitchen, on the large oak dining table where all 20 of us met for dinner, in my room.

In a poem from my first chapbook, The Grass Impossibly (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2008), I wrote about this:

I change the flowers in the kitchen

knowing you will notice them

and say nothing.

from “Grace”

Copying that out just now, I’m reminded of a statement by the designer Saul Bass who said: “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” These words often come to mind when I’m making something for the pure happiness of doing so, without thought for an audience or anyone else’s sense of value.

I’ve been drawn to flowers since I was a child. For several years, I even worked on an organic flower farm, harvesting all morning, and arranging bouquets for wholesale all afternoon in the old barn. There were five or six of us on the flower crew, and it suited me to wake early and work surrounded by rows of calendula, snapdragon, zinnia, dianthus and weather. I remember, with particular fondness, the conversations I had with my friend Jennifer, a visual artist, who seemed to feel the same kinship between our farm work and the creative process.

These days I pick flowers on my walk to the post office, or on the way to the compost pile, which takes me past Virginia bluebells, buttercups, lilacs, blue Siberian irises. I always gather a little greenery, too, before placing everything in jars or vases all over the house, at least one per room. I enjoy coming across these little outburst of color and fragrance throughout the day, and I’ve noticed how much my husband and daughter appreciate them, too.

I prefer when my flowers don’t look too fused over, so this is one of those creative acts that’s all about making something lovely without over-determining the outcome. Of course I think about color, composition, and form, but not as I do when editing a poem or essay. It’s much more spontaneous, less concerned with craft, per se, and while totally informed by my aesthetics, I never ask myself if what I’m making is any good, or if anyone else would want it. I just make my bouquets and know they add something important to our home, whether anyone says so or not.

This sequence involving impulse/immersion/manifestation that happens when I’m handling flowers is a powerful experience of creative flow, one that reminds my muscles (and all of me) what it feels like to lose myself to a process.

A similar quality of ease and unselfconscious attention could describe James Schuyler’s many poems about flowers. He’s a master regardless of his subject, but he’s my go-to poet when I want to imagine gardens, especially out of season, and I always marvel at the ease of his lines, where his mind wanders, and the way he brings his reader into the moment with his admiration of particular flowers.  Here are a couple of favorite passages to show you what I mean:

 

A yellow light
in blue light.  Twilight
and hydrangeas watery
through hedges.  Was the hideous
lesson worth the pleasure?

from “The Exchange”

But that bluet was

the focus of it all: last

spring, next spring, what

does it matter? Unexpected

as a tear when someone

reads a poem you wrote

for him: “It’s this line

here.” That bluet breaks

me up, tiny spring flower

late, late in dour October.

from “Bluet”

                           I’ll

soon forget it: what

is there I have not forgot?

Or one day will forget:

this garden, the breeze,

in stillness, even

the words, Korean Mums.

from “Korean Mums”

Oh oh oh. He is so good. If you’re not already familiar with Schuyler’s poetry, get thee to a bookstore at once. And consider living with more flowers. Both of these things will make you happier.

Marigolds in Bird Vase, Melanie Parke, 2015

Of course, visual artists take flowers as their subjects all the time. I especially adore Melanie Parke’s floral still-lifes and interior scenes with flowers. I have one of her river scenes hanging in my office—a gift from my parents when I received my Masters—but I long to live with one of her big canvases, especially one with flowers, windows, water. You can follow her on Instagram which may well be as enjoyable as having FTD deliver tulips to your door.

Orange Pekoe, Melanie Parke, 2016

My mother, painter Carol C Spaulding also loves and paints flowers. In addition to oil, she often works in gouache, a flexible, water-based medium that we’ll introduce to participants in our upcoming workshop, Small Pages: Writing and Painting as Contemplative Practice. If you join us, we’ll surround you with flowers and paints and poems, and share some of our ideas about who to use these practices as methods of self-inquiry, meditation, and pathways to a more fulfilling creative life. We have just three places left in our June 25 session, but you can also join us on August 20. Both workshops take place inside and outside her studio near Glen Lake, Michigan, on the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula. Use the form to enroll. No previous experience required.

Must Love Flowers, Carol C Spaulding, 2016

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Why Do You Make?

An art practice is a way of being alive. A way of giving shape to a life. A way of making meaning, figuring out what you think/feel/see/need/want, or deem important.

I’m not sure why everything these days has to be commodified—as though that’s the only measure of value. Actually, I know why. It’s our economic system, that’s why. But this is not the only reason to do something. It’s not the only reason to direct one’s attention, or engage one’s hands, or make something.

We must detach ourselves from this idea that only that which enters the market or receives public acclaim matters, or has worth.

When a writer or artist becomes troubled (we all will at some point) with the question of whether anyone will want what they’ve made, whether it’s good, or whether it can become a way of earning a living, I can’t offer an answer. But I can offer another question:

Why do you make what you make (poems, images, songs)?

What does it give you that nothing else does? What does it allow to happen?

I have a friend who makes the most beautiful meals. It’s the taste of the food, and how she presents it, but it’s also the way she’ll pause to read a poem or sutra before beginning to eat. It’s the conversation, lights off, just one taper candle lit. The gentling of the room. The gentling of everything as we partake of a daily ritual. Ordinary and sublime at the same time. This is how she lives. I am inspired by her, and also try to make meals a time when beauty and poetry has a place. I know my family benefits from this. We begin eating after we’ve taken a deep breath and allowed some silence to settle around us.

I have a seven year old who makes little boats out of leaves and wood that she finds around our yard. I watch her through the kitchen window as she carefully adds a white clover and a purple violet to the twig mast of her vessel. She does this to make it beautiful, and because she thought of it. I don’t think this boat will ever float on water, though there’s a river nearby. Soon she’ll move on to something else—mining for quartz in the driveway, or blowing dandelion seeds. Floating is not the only reason to make a boat. This is how she plays.

Do you make anything for the pure satisfaction of making it? What about the pursuit of beauty, an idea, or a shapely line? What about the quiet we find inside ourselves when we sink into our interior? When we get lost in the work—even if only momentarily?

This approach to making has the power to transform busy, harried, overwhelmed lives into temporary autonomous zones where a single thought can happen. Where we can pay attention. Where poetry resides.

If you have thoughts on this matter of making, please share them in the comments. I’m preparing a series of articles for Culture Keeper magazine where I’ll continue to think about what we make, and why, so I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Poem by Cid Corman

Upcoming courses (click for more info):

June 21 Day Poetry Challenge (Online) June 1-21

Writers Retreat Practicum (Interlochen, MI) June 17

Poetry in the Park: Workshop (Glen Arbor, MI) June 18.

Live Your Art: Retreat and Creativity Incubator (Interlochen, MI) June 20-22

Small Pages: Writing and Painting as Contemplative Practice (Glen Lake, MI) June 25 (Co-taught with painter Carol C. Spaulding.)

Salience on the Surface of the Psyche

One of my daily pleasures involves my search for poems and passages that provoke “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”. (Gaston Bachelard).

For example, here’s a lune (a three line poem with 5/3/5 syllables) by my pal Joseph Massey, whose books I’ve spent the last several weeks reading and rereading:

In Cid’s voice

     you think there should be

more, but this

                 this is all there is

Joseph loaned me a another book yesterday, too, in which I found this statement from Henry David Thoreau: “All true greatness runs as level a course, and is as unaspiring, as the plow in the furrow. It wears the homeliest dress and speaks the homeliest language.”

In the introduction to that book—Poems 1962-1997, by Robert Lax—John Beer goes on to say “a life that through its immersion in and attention to the homeliest experience might find itself a home everywhere and nowhere.”

Yes. To immerse and give attention. To find and see and be with things that on the surface seem ordinary. To feel at home anywhere. Through the patient, daily, habit of writing and reading poems, I practice this immersive attention which is about being present to what is and claiming more and more territory, whether physical or psychic, in which to explore this way of being in the world as a way of life.

Other recent finds include this poetry installation in St. Paul, which I learned about from a Lansing poet who’s launching a similar project at Michigan State University. Can you imagine living in an urban place where you’re never more than a few minutes walk from a sidewalk poem? St. Paul has published more than 700 poems in concrete since 2008. I want to see more poems in places where we least expect them. If you know of other examples these kinds of projects, leave me your links in the comment section.

He kissed the girl / in the ballerina skirt. / It was a long one—/ like the kiss / drenching her sneakers / in tulle.

 

And because I’m just so tickled that this happened, here’s a short non-fiction piece that I wrote this spring about falling in love on a subway platform many years ago. It appeared in the Metropolitan Diary section of The New York Times last month.

 

If you want to deepen the presence of poetry in your life, please consider these upcoming writing opportunities with me:

Summer Poetry Apprenticeship: (July 1-August 19, 2016) An 8 week writing regimen and correspondence course for poets with a genuine interest in reading contemporary poetry, writing new work, advancing their craft, and adding more structure and accountability to their writing life. Includes a weekly installment of stimulating readings and original writing prompts, as well as two 25 minute private conferences with me via phone or video chat where can can discuss your work-in-progress and other issues related to the process. Use this opportunity to kickstart your creative practice or develop a body of work. $240

Small Pages: Writing and Collage as Contemplative Practice (August 20, 10:00 am-3:00 pm Glen Lake, MI) Join painter Carol C Spaulding (my mother) and me for a summer day of guided writing and collage experiments at her studio near Glen Lake. We’ll play with a range of interesting materials and prompts (paper, paint, texts), while considering what it means to cultivate creative practice as a pathway to a richer, calmer inner life. We’ll leave aside any of our concerns about art as a form of public expression or professional activity and look instead for ways to loosen up, get lost, and enjoy  we do for its own sake. All levels. Now enrolling. $175 (includes all materials)

 

Small Page by Carol C Spaulding

 

These Simple Rules to Live Within

I awoke this morning with the first orange glow of sunlight against a hill of white pines and to the sound of a mourning dove. Today I’ll fly south to spend time with my friend Brit and her baby Mara. Among other things, we’ll pay homage to one of our early influences, by reading his work again, together, and drinking wine. I’ve known Brit since we were young poets together in workshops at Interlochen Arts Academy, writing and living under the daily influence of Jim Harrison’s fiction, essays and poetry. I consider him a “Tutelary Spirit” (to use Rilke’s term), and though I never met him personally, she did. We’ll celebrate the profound impact he’s had on us, but it’s also hard to accept that he’s gone. It’s the end of an era for us.

One of my teachers in those days, Michael Delp, probably didn’t pass a day of his life without quoting Harrison, whose books subsequently provided the foundation of my earliest creative writing studies. Because of this,  at 17 I was initiated into a society of fellow poets, readers, lovers of rivers and lakes, and free minds who tend to veer away from the establishment, and live closer, as close as we can, to something wilder and more atavistic, even. As the tributes appear in the wake of his death earlier this week, I realize we are legion. A lot of people, and not just writers, have appreciated Harrison and what he has taught us.

With writer Brit Washburn at the Pier Wright exhibit, Oliver Art Center, summer 2015. We’ve been reading and writing poetry together since 1991.

This week I’ve been rereading the two books that have meant the most to me, realizing how they’ve shaped my world view and way of life, and how a few lines  in particular have provided what I think of as guidelines for living:

“I wanted to be worthy of this waking dream—” (Missy, 1966-1971)

“It is hard to learn how to be lost after so much training.” (Theory and Practice of Rivers)

“One day standing in a river with my flyrod / I’ll have the courage to admit my life.” (Looking Forward to Age)

“Dance with yourself with all your heart / and soul, and occasionally others, but don’t / eat all the berries birds eat or you’ll die.” (Homily)

“The days are stacked against what we think we are.” (Theory and Practice of Rivers)

“We die from want of velocity.” (February Suite)

“To remember / the soft bellies of fish / the furred animals that were part of your youth / not for their novelty / but as fellow creatures.” (February Suite)

“to be a child that wakes beautifully, / a man always in the state of waking.” (Three Night Songs)

“But often at night something asks / the brain to ride, run, riderless . . .” (The Sign)

“I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization / I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.” (Drinking Song)

“Poetry must die so poems will live again.” (Ghazal XXVIII)

“Those poems you wrote won’t raise the dead or stir the / living or open the young girl’s lips to jubilance.” (Ghazal LXV)

“All those poems that made me soar along a foot / from the ground are not so much forgotten as never / read in the first place.” (Letter to Yesenin, 2)

“We are each / the only world / we are ever going to get.” (Returning to Earth)

“What sways us is not each other / but our dumb insistent pulse beating / I was I am I will I was” (Returning to Earth)

“I want to have my life / in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes, / crow call, marsh hawk swooping over grass and weed tips. / Let the scavenger take what he finds. / Let the predator love his prey.” (Returning to Earth)

“In a bed of reeds I found my body and entered it, / taking my life upon myself, the soul made comfortable.” (Marriage Ghazal)

“Give all you can to the poor.” (Homily)

“With all this death, behind our backs, / the moon has become the moon again.” (New Love)

“I’ve decided to make up my mind / about nothing, to assume the water mask, / to finish my life disguised as a creek, / an eddy, joining at night the full, / sweet flow, / to absorb the sky, / to swallow the heat and cold, the moon / and the stars, to swallow myself / in ceaseless flow.” (Cabin Poem)

“And you my loves, few as there have been, let’s lie/ and say it could never have been otherwise.” (Looking Forward to Age)

While writing this, I came across an essay I wrote back in 2010, “How to Love a Lake,” in which I quote the most important line of all:  “We don’t get back those days we don’t caress, don’t make love.” (Letter to Yesenin, 21) I’d forgotten I’d written that, but it’s further evidence of how these lines have lived within me all these years. How I’ve lived them.

Harrison died in his study, pen in hand, working on a poem. Farewell Jim Harrison, it’s hard to imagine myself without the wisdom your poems and stories have provided for all these years. Fare-thee-well.

Additional Remembrances:

NPR Remembers Jim Harrison.

The Washington Post remembers Jim Harrison.

Jim Harrison interviewed in The Paris Review by Jim Fergus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring Calendar + Sharing the Process

Last night I fell asleep reading Anne Truitt’s Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, recommended to me by a fellow Michigan poet. It’s one of the most beautifully written, insightful accounts of the creative process I’ve ever come across:

“I notice that as I live from day to day, observing and feeling what goes on both inside and outside myself, certain aspects of what is happening adhere to me, as if magnetized by a center of psychic gravity. I have learned to trust this center, to rely on its acuity and to go along with its choices although the center itself remains mysterious to me. I sometimes feel as if I recognize my own experience. It is akin to meeting a friend in a strange place, of being at once startled and satisfied—startled to find outside myself what feels native to me, satisfied to be so met. It is exhilarating.”

Even before I accepted myself as a writer, and before I embraced my work as inviolable, I wanted to draw closer to that center. Do you know what I mean? That gravity?

Interlochen, MI 
Questions related to the process of coming home to one’s self as a creative entity and force is at the heart of my 4th annual Live Your Art: Retreat and Creativity Incubator at Interlochen College of Creative Arts (June 20-22). There are six spaces left, but this will fill to capacity soon.

The Art of Observation: Notebooking for Poets (April 21) Things begin in notebooks. They germinate and take shape there. This three-hour workshop offers concrete strategies in the deliberate acts of noticing, writing and thinking, and will provide examples and ways of working out your ideas that will feel natural, spontaneous, flexible and yet disciplined.

The Human Pang: Writing About What Matters (April 23-24) A weekend writing intensive in which we’ll read and write and think about the ways poetry connects us to our common humanity, often describing ourselves to ourselves in our most intimate yet universal moments of life. Leave with new poems and strategies for deepening your home writing practice.

Traverse City, MI
On April 18 I’m cohosting, with Chelsea Bay Dennis of The Conscious Entrepreneur, C. Bay Design, and Fulfillament, You Are A Great Story: Using the art of narrative to shape others’ understanding of who you are and what you do. This session isideal for artists, freelancers and entrepreneurs. More info here.

A special request: If you’re considering signing up for any of my Michigan workshops, I encourage you to commit as soon as possible. As these workshops involve complicated and costly travel for me, I need to confirm enrollment fairly early, though I realize that waiting to register until the last minute is convenient for many modern humans! Deciding on your course of action in advance allows all of us to prepare and engage with a depth of intention that will serve your art and your life.  

Massachusetts
I’m co-teaching, with a master printer, Press Your Poem: Letterpress Poetry Workshop at Big Wheel Press in Easthampton, MA (April 9), as part of BookFest. It will be loads of fun to print your poem using letters you’ve made in hot lead. I also blogged about my love of letterpress over here. 

Online
Spring Poetry Apprenticeship (April 8-May 27), a chance to build skills, birth new work, and receive mentorship and feedback in a structured program for serious poets, regardless of experience.

Looking ahead, A Body of Work: Manuscript Incubator (May 13-July 29) Three months of study, mentorship and editorial feedback as you develop a chapbook manuscript. We’ll work together to give your work shape and order, and to refine every aspect of your vision before you submit it to a contest or press. The course provides time for your work, and skilled guidance, at an affordable rate.

When I started blogging four years ago, I simply wanted to externalize my otherwise solitary and internal process. I consider my blog my public heart, a visible notebook, a place to make connections. I’ve learned that writing about the creative process and sharing my discoveries as a reader and appreciator of art and ideas is something I enjoy and recently, more readers are affirming that it’s useful to them, too. My latest essay wonders about the worth of one’s work, as so many of us do. Is this line of questioning a female thing? Or just an artist thing? I’d love to know what you think about this topic.

Letterpress Poetry Loves

The first poetry broadsides I remember encountering were made by Ken and Ann Mikolowski at The Alternative Press in Grindstone, Michigan as part of their project to put free poetry into the hands of the people. Ken was my professor and mentor at University of Michigan, where he exposed me to many poets of the Beat and Black Mountain schools, many of whom he’d published during the 1960’s. I have an Allen Ginsberg poem around here somewhere. Ken was generous with his artifacts and often passed along items that later became part of the special collections library at that institution.

Some of the press’s poets and artists were asked to complete, often over the course of years, 500 one-of-a-kind postcards in a series for distribution to subscribers and fans. Ken encouraged me to consider doing this, too, as a way to push my work or to flesh out an idea. While I’ve never committed to 500, I’ve often used versions of an extended series or sequence to stretch myself. A formal constraint of some kind will often break through old habits and initiate new modes of work.

The Alternative Press broadside that I’ve kept closest to me all these years is this one:

The Alternative Press

Then there’s “September, Inverness,” by Robert Hass, printed in 2006 by Chad Pastotnik at Deep Woods Press in Mancelona, Michigan. Part of a limited edition of 200, I received it as a gift when Hass presented an Earth Day lecture at Interlochen Center for the Arts during a literary symposium I was a part of. For many years it hung in my bathroom and I reread it often while brushing my teeth. It’s near my writing desk now. I feel I have an especially intimate relationship with this poem after so many years of sharing close quarters with it.

I wish I were able to get a better photo for you. The Somerset Textured paper is a lovely white, has a deckle edge, and is quite lovely to touch and look at, though I keep this one behind glass.

A couple of years ago the matter of Letterpress and poetry came up again, thanks to writer Katey Schultz, who was at that time working on a series of Alaska poems to be printed by a letterpress artist. I was so inspired by Katey’s plans, and by the art form that had brought me so many personally significant pieces of art over the years, I started looking for ways to learn more, and perhaps have some broadsides made to accompany my new book of poems.

Here’s one of my very first printing attempts, aided by a private lesson from Melanie Mowinski at PRESS: Letterpress as Public Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. Melanie persuaded me that doing it myself would be a worthwhile experience, and show me new things about my poem. Hand-setting type, one tiny letter at a time, will do that. I had many new ideas about the role of white space, and about layout, during that January day in her studio.

It’s a fragment from the poem ‘Bell,’ which appears in my book Pilgrim. I decided that as a first-timer, I’d focus on just a few words, thus reserving some attention for the visual elements, minimalist though they are. It was a revelation. Almost all the writing I’ve done since that experience a year or so ago, has relied on a deeper process of reduction. A new engagement with the idea of visual poetry.  It’s all about working my way to those brief essences, which is also the inspiration for a workshop I’m co-hosting, with master printer William Muller on April 9th, 10:00 am-2:00 pm as part of Easthampton BookFest.

It’s called Press Your Poem: Letterpress Poetry Workshop.Come create and print poems in Big Wheel Press’s light-filled space at the Cottage Street Studios. They even have a Ludlow, so you’ll get to make your own hot lead type based on the font of your choice from Bill’s sizable collection. We have room for twelve participants. Details and registration are here.

Working at Big Wheel Press in Easthampton, MA

If this sort of thing interests you, here’s a concise history of the poetry broadside, over at Kenyon Review Online.

 

Worth

A while ago I received a phone call from a fellow writer and friend. She wanted to know if there was any value in the manuscript she’s been working on, mostly in isolation, for the last year or so. She’d had only occasional opportunities to share the work with others, and felt she lacked perspective, perhaps in part because she was also consumed with raising a child, and felt discouraged on professional fronts. She wasn’t asking for a critique, but she needed some sense that she should keep going. In other words, did it make any sense to keep working on those poems? 

How often have I asked myself whether what I’m doing is worth anything? Certainly no month goes by without the thought, though some weeks can bring it up every day. And when I ask that question, am I questioning the work, myself, or where it meets the world? 

Is this a female thing? Or just an artist thing?

I’m recalling this conversation the morning after beginning Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays, ‘Men Explain Things to Me,’ and so of course I’m reflecting on why I, and many of my female colleagues, continue to grapple with the value (and perceived value) of our ideas: the worth of our work in the world. I have many thoughts about this, of course.

Solnit writes “Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.” This I know and believe. What more is there? Well, it still requires practice, obviously. I’ve found that solidarity with like-minded people is also helpful. Total isolation is not, though sometimes one wonders who to talk to about these things. It’s not a conversation enough people seem interested in having, though it concerns our very lives, and it’s so much bigger than our art, which is simply one way to show up and speak and think. It’s about having a pluralistic society, in which a broad range of skills and contributions and ways of being can have a place.

Let me be clear: I’m not questioning the worth of art or artists, but for reasons I’m still exploring, there’s a stealthy voice (Voice of Society? Voice of Disinterested Friends?) that insists on asking what anything I do has to do with anyone or anything else. This is the result, in part, of working in solitude, of being a quiet and private person in a loud culture, of being a minor poet in a time that values celebrity and narrowly defines success, and maybe it’s the result of being unattached to an institution that would, in theory, make space for creative work, though my colleagues at colleges, for example, seem similarly engaged with versions of the inner dialogue I’m describing.

Solnit: “To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.”

Which makes me think of the beautiful, radical, soulful June Jordan, who said: These poems / they are things that I do / in the dark / reaching for you / whoever you are / and / are you ready?

I read my friend’s manuscript with these things in mind, and I read it as one who also needs, despite a deep faith in my words, some indication that I’m connecting to others when I speak or write.

After writing the poems that would become my book Pilgrim, I made a similar call and confession to a friend. Because I had done that work without a writing group or a consistent reader, I had had to learn to trust myself in order to keep working. Or at least I needed to trust myself in a new way. It felt powerful to write and not think about what a workshop would say, including the nice things I enjoyed hearing from my former writing group. Instead, I chose to focus on what I needed and desired to say, and I forgot about everything else for a while.

After my publisher accepted Pilgrim, and even after she’d started working with the book designer to make it a real book, I began doubting what I had submitted. I’d held back those concerns long enough to write the poems, but some kind of new-to-me anxiety caught up with me, and this shook me. I mean, Who am I trying to impress? Who cares anyway?

I wasn’t writing those poems to win prizes or to get somewhere professionally. They were, and are something else to me, but I had to clarify that, again, at that moment. My poems are what I make. I write them to create something with my own “dirty little hands”, as the late journalist, David Carr, encouraged the young journalists he mentored to do.

It’s not so different from my commitment to laying a beautiful table, using my grandmother’s linens and good silver, even on a Monday night. These acts originate in my commitment, my pact with myself, to pay attention to life—my one and only life—and the little world I inhabit. They also give me pleasure, make me happy, and provide a way to create beauty, through meaningful work, using really basic materials.

Homemade peach jam by artist and writer Suzi Banks Baum. Antique linen from my grandmother. Photo taken at Millay Colony of the Arts, Austerlitz, NY

Finally, I confessed my angst to a friend, and she agreed to look at my poems. She didn’t dish up praise, or console me with empty words of reassurance, and to be honest, this wouldn’t have helped me anyway. Instead, she described her experience as a reader. She had read the poems, understood some things about what I had done, and valued them (and me) enough to put all of that into a few sentences about what it was like to encounter what I’d given her.

This was the antidote. I calmed down. Not because she said that the poems were “good”, but because she articulated what happened when she approached them as an interested human, not a critic, though she has that ability, too. (Psychologists will remind us that it’s a fundamental human need to be seen.)

I wish more readers felt empowered to respond this way. Reflecting on what we read is not solely the domain of experts. Certainly we can speak of literature in terms of what’s good, and what’s bad (at least according to our particular taste and sensibility), and most people also want to talk about what they “like,” but reading is richer than that.

We’ll sometimes have complex responses to what we read, and sometimes this leads to arguments, or changes of heart, or Aha moments, and I really enjoy talking about these things with other people. It’s one of the best ways to get to know someone, as well; it’s not small talk, and it’s a kick to examine what moves in us during the otherwise private experience of a text. It’s a kick to talk about something that goes deeper than surfaces, too, which is what so much of our fast-paced world is focused on these days.

This shift—from negatively ruminating in solitude, to facing what I’d made and talking about it with  friend—did everything to change my relationship to that body of work. It also affirmed my belief that we all need at least one ally who gets what we’re doing, gives some sort of a damn, and can talk to us about it.

I say this with new conviction, even as I am known to quote William Stafford’s poem, “Nobody Cares,” which I happen to see as both hard truth, and a form of fundamental freedom. (In other words, if no one cares, I can carry on without worrying about what anyone else thinks, especially during the generative phase.)

Eventually, though, it turns out that I do need someone else to care, and so I’ve worked to cultivate a few people who want to have these sorts of conversations with me: about my work, about theirs, and about the other work that matters to us. All kinds of work—not just poems.

Now, when I finish something, I say “This is what I made.” It’s a way of honoring my effort, as well as my limits. It’s what I did, not what I could have done, or might prefer to have done. This idea has lead to a series of conversations with other artists and I’m looking forward to publishing some of those in a series for Culture Keeper . These ideas also inform my approach to mentorship and shape the material we cover in my apprenticeship program.