So many people whose lives are flourishing around us proceed from a resilience born from tragedy, trauma, and deep loss. . . In speaking with survivors about sexual violence and its aftermath, I’ve come to appreciate the word resilience.
Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery, talks about resilience and suggests 3 Good Books on the theme.
See 3 Good Books at Push Pull Books.
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor . . .
Since we're together we might as well say:
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won't you be my neighbor?
Won't you please,
Won't you please?
Please won't you be my neighbor?
Won’t You Be My Neighbor
by Fred M. Rogers
With over 80 designated neighborhoods, Denver is flush with friendly corners, hidden gems, and sketchy stretches. Tell us about yours!
The Denver County Fair Poetry Contest, in partnership with Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Tattered Cover Book Store, is looking for poems on the theme of Neighborhood.
Poems may be any style and length — but must relate to the Neigborhood theme. Contest is open to any adult with a Colorado address. Poems must be previously unpublished and have not received awards in other competitions. One poem per entry fee. Multiple entries accepted. All judging is blind.
Poems are read by a panel of literary professionals, including Vicki Hellmer, Dee McDonald and Joseph Hutchison - Colorado’s Poet Laureate!
Deadline: July 15, 2016.
First Place: Blue Ribbon + Lighthouse Writers Workshop Gift Certificate + Tattered Cover Gift Token + $20 + featured in Poetry Performance
Second Place: Red Ribbon + Tattered Cover Gift Token + featured in Poetry Performance
Third Place: White Ribbon + Tattered Cover Gift Token + featured in Poetry Performance
Finalists: Tattered Cover Gift Token + Featured in Poetry Performance
BONUS! Winning poems will be displayed as public art installations as part of Write Denver, a cool new project of Lighthouse Writers.
How to Enter:
1. Get Competition Info here: http://www.denvercountyfair.org/#!enter/c1ila
2. Use the online entry form to pay your $5 fee: http://www.21stcenturyfairs.com/denver-county-fair.html.
This provides you with FREE ADMISSION to the Fair.
3. Submit your poem by July 15 via email to: poetry@denvercountyfair.org.
Include your name, address, telephone number and confirmation code (proof of payment).
Attach the poem in a Word Document or paste in the body of your email.
Winning poems will be on display at the Denver County Fair, July 29 - 31 2016, and winners and finalists are invited to read their poems at the Denver County Fair Poetry Performance on Sunday, July 31, 2016.
Poem Entry Deadline: July 15, 2016
Finalists Announced: July 28, 2016 by email
Winners Announced: Friday, July 29, 2016 at the Denver County Fair
Winning Poems Displayed at the Denver County Fair, July 29 - 31, 2016
Winners & Finalists Poetry Performance: 12pm on Sunday, July 31, 2016
For more info: Drew Myron, Director of Poetry, poetry@denvercountyfair.org
I didn’t intend to be a poet.
Or write with troubled teenagers.
Or hold the hand of an elderly woman while we read “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
I tend to gravitate to vulnerable populations — from homeless teens to end-of-life elderly. I like artists and outcasts, those of us on the edges.
But let’s back up.
My writing life began years ago as a newspaper reporter. Over the years, writing has allowed me to wear many professional hats: grantwriter for nonprofit organizations, corporate communications for large companies, freelance writer, and publicist.
I’m also a poet, and for years I wrote in the dark, keeping my writing as a deeply personal, never-to-be-revealed part of myself. When I began to take my poetry seriously, I discovered that writing needs air. It needs life. It needs to come out of the journal and given space. It needs to come off the page and into the world.
Through a series of turns, each which unfolded one after the other until it felt natural this evolution, my writing has found a place and purpose beyond my own small self. I’m here tonight to say It’s Not All About You. Or Me.
This isn’t a sermon, but it feels like a message that took me too many years to understand, and too long to put into practice. So, yes, I’m now preaching the gospel of writing beyond yourself. Of sharing your writing with people and places, and in ways that make a difference.
Writing saved my life.
As a teenager I found my way out of suicide and into the school newspaper, (and I was lucky to have a teacher who encouraged me along the way). Writing allowed me to look outside myself, and to explore what was happening in the world around me.
I went to college, enjoyed an internship at Rolling Stone magazine in New York and when I graduated I landed a job as the editor of a community newspaper in eastern Washington. There, in Goldendale, in a town of 3,000, I was a one-person show, working as reporter/editor/photographer/layout/obituary writer and phone answerer.
For 20 years, I’ve run my own marketing communications company, working with ad agencies and businesses to create a variety of marketing materials. Last week, for example, I wrote video and radio scripts for skincare products. This week, I worked in a nursing home where I get to spend time with the very ill and the very old. For National Poetry Month I shared with the residents Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson and Naomi Shihab Nye. And when they said, “I don’t like poetry,” I said, “Well, you just haven’t met the right poem yet. Here, try this one.”
Writing is the vehicle to get out of myself, to explore the world, to understand how I, and others, feel.
Unless you
visit the dark places, you’ll never
feel the sea pull you in and under,
swallowing words before they form.
Until you visit places within you
cloistered and constant, you will travel
in a tourist daze, wrought with too much
of what endures, depletes.
If you never turn from light, close
your eyes, feel the life inside, you’ll leave
the church, the beach, your self,
knowing nothing more.
Unless you are silent, you will not
know your urgent heart, how it beats
between the thin skin of yes and no.
- Drew Myron
My most fulfilling work has been with youngsters and families in need. I started and ran the writing programs at Seashore Family Literacy on the coast in Waldport, Oregon. I worked with ages 9 to 19, leading workshops, afterschool programs, summer writing camps, and ongoing mentorship of young adults.
I never liked kids. But spending time with these kids my heart expanded, my fear melted. Working with kids who have rough lives has healed my own, has stretched my heart. I’m always amazed there is still room in there, in my heart.
I think we all just want to be heard, to be seen. And that’s why I gravitate to bedraggled kids, sad teens, lonely seniors.
Don’t get me wrong, I have ego. But I spend a great amount of time feeling scared and small, and find solace in recognizing that we’re all scared and small. I’ve been published in literary journals, and have many times attended those mammoth writing conventions, like AWP, but it’s the one-to-one connection I crave.
For those of us, like Pendleton poet Shaindel Beers, whose writing illuminates the experience of children and war, or Bette Husted who shares the challenges of poverty and rural living, we’re not going to get accolades or fame, but that one-to-one exchange, that personal impact, that moment when you say to another, in words or in presence, “I hear you. I see you. I am writing with you, for you, through you” — that’s when you shine, when your writing and life make sense.
How to breathe
I’m trying to learn something about love,
how it gives what cannot be seen.
We cannot sense space without light
can’t understand light without shade.
In my lungs, the tight narrow space
where breath is taken and given away
I’m trying to learn something about faith
like a farmer, a fisher, a lover wounded and waiting.
Memories lodge in orchards, airways, docks.
Things we make, break, mark.
The natural world has much to teach about order —
how to live in storm and sun, ebb and flow.
Geometry holds the mind
while memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us
how to hold the darkness
how to breathe.
- Drew Myron
Don’t be misled. This isn't a Mother Teresa complex. I’m not trying to save the world; I’m trying to be in it. And writing is the way I am most present, most engaged, most real.
So, here’s the call to action. (I told you this was church):
How can you apply your writing to real life?
How can you get out of your journal and into the world?
It sounds lofty, but really, it’s easy. It takes so little to make a difference, and this is both very hopeful and profoundly sad.
Here are a few suggestions. I can tell you from very first-hand experience, this will improve your writing and your life. And may help someone else to boot.
Read & write with children.
Schools and community centers are hungry for volunteers. And children are hungry for undivided attention from an adult who cares.
Meet your neighbors, have a party.
Is your neighborhood like mine? All different ages and backgrounds and interests, and though we wave hello from the car, we don't really know each other. So, get to know your neighbors with a party. Everybody brings a snack and something written — a poem, a book, a favorite quotation, a fortune cookie . . . The written word, in all its many forms, serves as your common bond and your launching point to real connection.
Start a writing group.
I was born in Oregon, moved away, returned in my 20s, moved away, and returned 12 years ago.
When I moved back, I knew no one and was desperate for writing companions, so I put out a call for writers. I placed flyers around town, in cafes, the laundromat, the post office (the true gathering place of any small town), and I offered soup. Our first meeting was in November, during a storm of howling wind and sideways rain, and I was sure no one would show up. Why would they? Who was I? What did I think I was doing?
Well, 10 happy people showed up at my house that dark and stormy night. And that writing group turned into a monthly gathering that led to an annual reading event that drew an audience of over 80 people — primarily non-writers — each year. One thing leads to another and another . . .
Visit a nursing home.
Read, talk, just be present. It takes very little effort to brighten the life of the lonely, and in turn, this will brighten you. Sounds trite, but it’s anything but. Many of the residents, once avid readers, have lost the ability to see, think clearly, and to read. Bring a book of poems, or short stories, or a newspaper, and be a personal reader.
Pair up with an artist.
You write in response to their art, or they create art in response to your writing. This will stretch you more than you’d imagine. My friend and I collaborated on a painting and poetry project while her husband was dying. This process, and the results, were full of heart and healing.
Get poems in public.
I’m the Director of Poetry for the Denver County Fair, isn’t that a great title? Six years ago we started a poetry contest and each year it grows more popular. We now get more poems than pickles, pies or pigs! And the contest was so fun we added a poetry performance. And that was so fun we added a poetry booth where people pay for poems written on-the-spot. And it just goes on and on . . .
The point of all this reaching out, stretching and giving, is that writing needs air. Writing, and writers — that’s all of us — thrive when we get out of the journal, get off the page, and walk into the world.
Bathroom Stall
The stranger who has wet herself tips her head close to yours.
You just want to shop, buy vegetables for dinner, some sort of meat. You don’t have time. It’s late, or early, your list is long. You’re wearing the good skirt, the one that skims the waist, slims your legs. But there’s her dress, now sopping. She’s bunching the fabric, trying to hide the accident, and this small dank space smells like a pen of puppies.
You must be an angel, she says.
You’re no angel. You’re removed, mysteriously lifted from the stench of spreading urine. You banter, a light voice over her heavy motorized cart as you hoist her hips and raise the dress from fleshy legs. You’re talking over the shame you both feel.
Will you open this diaper, she asks? You rip the package, and help her in. Her ankles are thick, her socks wet. Where pity, shock or sorrow should be, you feel absence. You wipe her legs, the seat of her cart.
She’s not crying, not yet. But she’s breathing hard as she palms an inhaler, the same one you carry in your purse. When I get upset, she says, dragging long on a small puff. It’s then you crumble. She is you. This will be you. This may already be you.
Everything moves slow in this confessional. It takes four turns to maneuver the cart out of the stall. At the sink, you wash away secrets. At the door, she stops, reaches in her cart, says, Let’s have a snack. You don’t want to eat sweets in a dirty grocery store bathroom.
You feel sick. You hesitate. But it’s all she has to give, so you say, Let me help you open that. This gesture, this simple fix, it’s all you have, too.
- Drew Myron
Let's face it, not everyone can write. Even on our bad days, when we’re stuck and blocked and whining, we’re better writers than most of the population. No really. We often take for granted what comes to us naturally.
Not everyone has your skill and heart. You have so much to offer. I’m pleading with you now, to share your words, to share your self.
— A presentation by Drew Myron for the First Draft Writers' Series, at the Pendleton Center for the Arts, in Pendleton, Oregon, on May 19, 2016.
Drew Myron is author of Thin Skin, a collection of photos and poems. She frequently collaborates with artists and her work has appeared in numerous galleries, books, and literary magazines. She heads a marketing communications company with a focus on hunger, homelessness, literacy, and health. As a journalist, she’s covered news, arts, entertainment and travel for a variety of print and online publications.
John Atkinson, Wrong Hands
Remember when "blogging" was a ridiculous made-up word? And sharing your personal thoughts on the internet was just weird and self-involved?
It's all still true, but I've been blogging for 8 years so I guess I've acquiesced. Drewmyron.com, established 2008. Happy Birthday to me!
Eight real-life years is equal to 20 internet years. So, yes, I've made the leap from flipphone to smartphone, from cotton to cashmere, from Friends to Veep. Time flies when you're writing to yourself (and hoping a few peer over your shoulder and give an occasional nod).
Blogs are dead! You've heard this, too? Most of my blogger friends have left the party. But I'm still here, the clumsy guest who just won't leave, even as the hostess nudges me with, Can I get your coat? Your keys? A life?
But, wait, you're still here too. Hello, so nice to see you. I like your dress, and your shoes. So tell me, are you a writer? what's your favorite book? do you want to be blog friends?
Let's keep this party going.*
*with a nod to Pink and the prehistoric Myspace era.
Education turned to outrage, turned to literary activism for Roberta (Bobbie) Ulrich.
Now in her 80s, she's worked 50 years as a groundbreaking journalist.
Learn more about Ulrich at 3 Good Books.
What I Learned From My Mother
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
— Julia Kasdorf
Oh, Emily, we feel your pain.
I've got letters in my hand and letters in my head. Let's write!
Some of my most satisfying writing is rooted in letters. In these of-the-moment conversations, nothing is planned, prepared, or overthought (though, admittedly, sometimes overwrought).
Try This: It's Mother's Day season. Write a letter to your mother, or the person you wish were your mother, or a letter to yourself about your mother, OR, if you are a mother, write a letter to your child, or the person you wish were your child . . .
You don't have to send the letter. Just be willing and real. Keep the mind open and the pen moving.
If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it. Or burn it.
Get Inspired: How much do I love letters? I'm now reading books of letters:
Dear Mr You
by Mary-Louise Parker
Yes, the author is an actress (loved her in West Wing) but she's not one of those annoying has-beens who dabble in books, y'know like launching a perfume or recording an auto-tuned song. Parker is a writer's writer: sharp, tender, perceptive, and this is a collection of letters written to men, real and imagined, who have shaped and informed her life.
Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room
by Kelli Russell Agodon
This book of contemporary poems is dedicated to "those who write letters to the world" and includes letter-poems both funny and profound, such as Letter to An Absentee Landlord, and Letter to My Sister, Who is Still Drowning.
The Beauty of the Husband
by Anne Carson
In what she calls "a fictional essay in 29 tangos," Anne Carson writes to and about a husband as their marriage falls apart. Inventive and bold, Carson defies definition — is this poetry? prose? shadow and tricks? — and that's what makes her work so viable, so strong.
His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.
. . . How do people
get power over one another? is an algebraic question
you used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.”
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.
Start now: Write a letter. If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it, burn it, or just let it go.
1.
The best thing I’ve heard this week: I enjoy you.
And this: Thank you for talking to me.
2.
People shouldn’t feel so grateful to be heard, to be seen, but there’s so much loneliness it permeates the pores.
I'm trying to say it takes so little to be kind. And if my occasional glimmer can brighten a moment, that strikes me as both hopeful and sad.
3.
Last night in a dream, my tooth was rotten. I could touch the soft bone of decay. And the dream asks the dreamer: In your life, what must go?
Before she died, we ate rainbow sherbet. It tasted so good. I think of that now, how that’s the best way to live, savoring the sweet right to the last.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, poems, and more. What are you thankful for today?
Oh, what joy! It's Thankful Thursday and Poem in Your Pocket Day.
As part of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day encourages you to carry a poem and share it with others.
You don't have to ask me twice; I revel in an opportunity to share poetry. On this Thankful Thursday, I sing the praises of poems carried, clutched, and shared.
What's in your pocket?
Feeling overwhelmed, uncertain
and full of wonder is not a feeling I’ve
yet escaped and don’t hope to escape.
— Peter Rock
Peter Rock is the author of seven novels and a short story collection.
His best-known book, My Abandonment, [one of my favorite novels] is based on the true story of a father and his 13-year-old daughter who lived in an urban forest in Portland, Oregon. His most recent novel, Klickitat, is a young adult novel centered on two sisters and wilderness survival.
Peter Rock is now featured on 3 Good Books, a blog series I host in which I ask writers to share their favorite books on a given them.
Some of the saddest words in the English language are ordinary, generic and Relaxed-Fit-Khakis.
— Dale Harabi
Not Your Average Jean Jacket, The Wall Street Journal
More great lines:
Selfishness and greediness . . .
Fresh writing shines across forms. Not just your standard novels and poems, but in billboards (The Joy Team), water bottles (Vitamin Water), coffee lids (Dutch Bros), horoscopes (Holiday Mathis) and more. I could go on (and have) but it's your turn now. Read a great line lately? Please share!
Ahhh, April. Flowers bloom, birds sing, and poets shine under the new spring sun.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month — the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets marking the event in myriad ways — I’m taking part in the Big Poetry Giveaway.
How It Works:
1. Start here.
I’m giving away three poetry books. No pressure. No obligation. No cost to you.
2. Enter the drawing.
Type your name and email address in the comments section of this blog by end-of-day on April 30, 2016. I'll draw three names and mail the books to the winners. That's it. Easy, huh?
3. Win even more.
Visit Allyson Whipple, master hostess of the 7th Annual Big Poetry Giveaway. On her blog you’ll find a list of participating bloggers. Visit her blog to increase your chances of winning books (and meeting fun, nice writers and readers).
4. Have fun.
Open your mind. Insert poems. Live more deeply, madly, moonly.*
Enter my drawing to win these great books:
The Less I Hold
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Selected Poems
by Barbara Crooker
Thin Skin
by Drew Myron (that’s me!)
* with a nod to e.e. cummings
Spring, like poetry, makes us humble, writes Annie Finch.
And giddy. I'm drunk on blue sky and sunshine. In this string of clear days, I revel in the loopy leaps of e.e. cummings. I'm at one with bees buzzing the blossoms, and the squirrels fatly lapping the trees. Spring unspools, turns me astonished and grateful.
We made it? Yes, we made it through winter's gloom!
Is it any wonder National Poetry Month is in April, smack-dab in the flush of spring and all its poetic possibilities?
O Sweet Spontaneous
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
— e.e. cummings
Read: Spring Ahead, an essay by Annie Finch, at the Poetry Foundation.
It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?
Ruth Madievsky blends the mind of medicine with the heart of art. She is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California's School of Pharmacy and a research assistant at an HIV clinic specializing in maternal care.
At 3 Good Books (the blog series I host), Ruth shares her favorite books on the theme of Medicine & The Arts.
Propofol
My kidneys are leaning into the wall of my back
like a pair of boxing gloves,
the way my grandfather is leaning
into the idea of an operating table,
a paralytic agent, his body
a space station for someone else's hands.
I work in the hospital where it will happen.
I work and wait for the part
where the lungs I keep wanting this month to be
stop huffing propane, stop threatening
to make like my patient's veins
and collapse. Inside
the sterile compounding room,
I shoot drugs,
down an IV bag's gut. I listen
to the outer-space hum of machines
that eat the air out of the room.
There is nothing sexy
about incision.
There is nothing about the phrase
nasogastric tube
that makes me want to look
both ways before crossing the street.
I want to hold him
like he is something other
than a mucus membrane.
Like maybe the planet inside him is Pluto,
like it's not really a planet at all.
— Ruth Madievsky
from Emergency Brake
Jenny Holzer, artist
Today, surveying the splendors of spring, I discovered a chair lodged high in our tree.
It's been a wet, windy, gray winter. And now, according to the calendar, we're in spring. But the sky is hanging fierce to its damp mood, shaking out rain and gloom.
Wearing my tired sweaters and scuffed boots, I shake my fist at the sky. "Please," I plead, "let me wear something other than high necks, thick sleeves, wool and fleece."
I won't even ask for an open-toe shoe. Even a shoe without socks would suffice.
But because rain and bitterness threaten to rust my heart, I'm challenged to set aside my gripes. And so, I look past the neighbor's deck chair wedged in my spruce.
Setting aside the furniture, I see camellias in a burst of hot pink, a clutch of hyacinths, and a shag carpet of grass. Daffodils, my favorite announcement of spring, pop up in unexpected places. As if wild, they dot remote roads in a random pattern, and patchwork through vacant lots and scraps of land.
In the gray of a record gloom* spring flowers are the happy-to-know-you welcome wagon. They arrive to the party early, and with too much enthusiasm. But, oh, how I'm drawn to the tender promise. Hand me a loopy bouquet of these spring charmers. I'll never turn from the innocence of those not yet battered by weather and wear.
* not just my disposition, but real data showing Oregon's wettest winter on record.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. And today It's Thankful Thursday on Tuesday because the best way to minimize a sour mood is to move toward gratitude. What are you thankful for today?
So, this is our ongoing challenge: Not to turn everything into us. In truth, the deepest function of humility is that it helps us take experience in on its own terms, not violating its own nature — all in an effort to be nourished by life that is different from us. Through this effort, we find the corresponding seeds of such life in us. They are the common seeds of grace that can sustain us.
- Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening
We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?"
— David Foster Wallace
I've spent my life swinging between alone and lonely.
Alone, as in solitude, as in quietude. Alone is where my real life happens.
Lonely is sad, wanting, an aching yearn, an enforced aloneness. Lonely hurts.
And yet lonely carries a certain sort of necessity. To truly feel fullness, you must know emptiness.
Song
You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
— Adrienne Rich
I'm trying not to wear my loneliness, and yet it fits. It's become convincing and comfortable. Initially, the fit is snug, but with time there is loosening, acceptance. It's not flattering, but loneliness makes the body invisible, the mind numb. I turn inside myself.
I'm trying to believe that loneliness is not a character defect, not a resignation, but I'm wondering, now, if it is a default setting and I haven't the energy, or trust, to turn the channel. Decades since it's aired, and I'm still watching reruns of M.A.S.H. I'm mixing my metaphors. Loneliness makes you blurry. You lose definition. You mistake edge for action, feeling for thought. Loneliness is so far from alone that though you're lost, you no longer ask for directions home.
It’s not that
I’m lonely but that
I went to bed too
late and alone
and miss the promise
of you.
It’s not that I’m sleepy
but in the morning
I wake slow and
wide, do not stir,
do not want
this quiet time
in solitude.
It’s not that I
don’t like solitude
but that my
mind travels
and confuses
not here with
gone, slow with
sad, alone with
lonely.
It’s not that I
am alone but
that my body
is a planet
in the
dark
without
its star.
— Drew Myron
Are you still with me?
Loneliness is both penetrating and true, mean and cruel. Who are you now? and now? and now? When loneliness pushes for answers, you want aloneness to rise, to take charge, answering: I am here. Full, feeling, alive.
We've got rough patches and easy streets. Weeks that move like months and days that last a year. This past week, I've known each stretch. In the spirit of William Stafford's Things I Learned Last Week, I offer my own (puny and profound) nuggets:
Things I Learned Last Week
1.
Athleisure is mostly leisure.
Is everyone exercising, or just wearing lycra and driving to the store for more Cheetos?
2.
Baby bangs favor no one.
I know because in 1999 I tried blunt, super-short bangs and my already-full face took on funhouse mirror proportions. It was the longest growout in history, rivaling that of my current bad hair situation: short-in-the-back, long-in-the-front, otherwise known as the reverse mullet or the midlife mom cut.
3.
It's not cars or coal destroying the planet — it's cows!
No really. My sources are legit: a former cattle rancher, National Geographic, and the documentary Cowspiracy.
4.
I'm not alone, and poems prove it.
Ada Limon shares my love of quiet (and my disdain for phone calls):
The Quiet Machine
I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the
floor in the kichen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silence when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's
how this machine works.
- Ada Limon
from Bright Dead Things
5.
The answer is gin.
On those gravel-in-the-shoe sort of days (or weeks), gin and a friend provide solace and grins (emphasis on friend, because drinking martinis by yourself is just sad).
Your turn: What have you learned?
Franny Choi - poet and teaching artist
Do you know Franny Choi?
She's a poet and teaching artist, and I like her style:
I am most drawn to work that places me in my body,
work that awakens me to the heartbeat, to breath,
to muscle and bone . . . " she says. "By 'body language'
I mean not only speaking about the body, but asking how
our (strange, ruined, rotting) bodies would speak if we let them."
On 3 Good Books, Choi explains why the topic of body language resonates through her work, and offers book suggestions too.
Because each time I write, each time
the authentic words break through,
I am changed. The older order that
I was collapses and dies. I lose control.
I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language.
I follow the sound of words, and I am surprised and transformed by what
I record.
— Susan Griffin
from Thoughts on Writing: A Diary
an essay in The Writer on Her Work
