Thankful Thursday: Hold the Light

It’s Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation. Remember that?

Ummm, yeah, it’s been awhile. Life is hard, still, again. I’m trudging. Are you, too?

“I’m trying to look on the bright side,” a friend tells me, “but everything is so heavy.”

Another friend feels constantly tired. It’s not about sleep. It’s the mental and emotional energy required to just keep on.

Joy expands and contracts in direct relation to our sense of gratitude — especially in the heavy days. On this Thankful Thursday, I’m reaching for the light, trying to make the small things shine (without feeling like an annoying "life coach”).

I found a gem at the library today. Just when I think I’ve read every William Stafford poem available, I walk into the library, turn to a shelf and find a poem that speaks to the walk I just made from here to there. My head had been full of longing and my steps slow with a vague rootlessness. I scuffed through wet leaves papering the street, thinking how brilliant this last step to decay. But I also thought, with a clarity only autumn’s letting go can bring, that the end is rarely so pretty. This golden brilliance of trees, this crunch beneath my feet, I know death’s slow ugly ebb and this is not it.

But of course it is, in its way.

And then I found a worn slim book, Braided Apart, and turned randomly to this poem. And then, because the poem felt like an ushering in, I wrote it out. Copied by hand, again and again, until I could feel the words, the pace, the core. Until a poem made me feel more clear, more light, more me.

The Saint of Thought by William Stafford, from Braided Apart by Kim & William Stafford.

What are you thankful for today? From the puny to profound, what makes your world, your heart, expand?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

The landscape in you

1.
Where are you?

Not place, but yes, place. I mean: within you, where are you? No need to respond. No obligation to wonder, to wander.

But, please, do try.

2.
I thought the ocean would redeem me. Sprawled flat-back against warm September sand, palms open and lifted, I once declared a new start.

But winter came and came and came and flattened me into something less. Granular. Between wave, wind, and saturating storm, the dull pressure of gray soaked and rearranged. Through rain and tears, I curled into my self.

I traveled for miles, for years, then stumbled back where I began, on dry land where suede hills roll across a landscape scraggled and wide. Canyon, mountain, meadow and swale, in all directions the earth does not erode or ebb, does not shift or sink, does not wear me away.

Here, the horizon is an unbroken line of nothing. This is the long gestation, a slow appreciation for absence. When you think there is nothing, the smallest life blooms. Sage in spring, bunchgrass summers, rabbitbrush in fall, and winters of scrubby strays that tumble through lonely stretches.

A single meadowlark calls, another answers from far away. Everything here is away, and yet this distance draws you near. Just as silence fills a noisy gap, absence is a virtue. The something of nothing. I hunger for it now, these vast saddle soft edges, a place to put my quiet.

3.
If only we could keep going, out of harm's way, writes Robert Vivian in Hereafter in Fields, and take with us only the best parts of ourselves.   

4.
There are hundreds of routes to the same place. Sometimes I imagine how this geography can make me better, or that one kinder. Sometimes gauzy appreciation is truth steeped in love. Mostly, though, it's hope for better around the bend, a few more miles, the very next stop. 

5.
Why do I need these landscapes, Anna Kamienska asks. The roots of my astonishment at the world cling tight to my inner life, in a tangle of memories, experiences.

6.
I have learned this land slowly, mulling as I usually do. Resistant then relenting, hiking through gravel and shale, basalt ridges and sun-bleached plateau, doubting the way, doubling back. This is the shape of my days, which is to say, my life. 

In this terrain, a tether is tendered. It's a filament so slight that trust must fill what the hand can't grip, what the heart is desperate to hold. 

7.
But sometimes, says John Ashberry, standing still is also life.

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Back to School: Writing Books

In this September glow I get that back-to-school feeling that makes me want to grow.

I’m hungry to write and stretch. And I’m reaching for my favorite books, those dog-eared, post-it noted classics that always get me revved up & writing.

Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words
by Susan Wooldridge

Full of joy and encouragement, this lovable book reminds me that good writing is rooted in fun.

“It’s impossible to teach anyone to write a poem. But we can set up circumstances in which poems are likely to happen. We can create a field in and around us that’s fertile territory for poem. Playing with words, we can get to the place where poems come from.”

The Writer’s Portable Mentor
by Priscilla Long

I’ve had this book for 10 years and still haven’t reached the end. It’s a dense manual for advanced writers dedicated to improving their craft. While geared primarily to fiction writers, I’m a firm believer that exercising the writing muscle is a good workout for writers of all forms. This book’s guidance is valuable across genres, and I enjoy dipping in and out.

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
by Mary Ruefle

Wise and wry, Mary Ruefle is poet, guide, and smart-sharp professor in the din of a cocktail party lobbing sly observations:

“There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everyone else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.”

and this:

“The greatest lesson in writing I ever had was given to me in an art class. The drawing instructor took a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. She very lightly put the pencil on the piece of paper and applied a little pressure; by bringing her hand a little in one direction, she left a mark upon the paper. ‘That’s all there is to it,’ she said, ‘but it’s a miracle. Once there was nothing, and now there’s a mark.’ ”

Tell me: What gets you revved up to write?

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The world turns on words, please read, write & share.

Dear,

1.
It took just one letter to hook me on a lifelong appreciation of correspondence.

At six years old, I wrote my first letter. My grandparents had given a gift and my mother insisted I write a thank you note. Her method was simple: I told her what I wanted to write, she wrote the words, then I copied her words to compose my own letter.

With each letter received, I eagerly wrote back. Back and forth. Soon, I was writing on my own. For over 30 years, my grandma and I exchanged letters.

Do other mothers do this? It seems a brilliant way to bring personal expression to life, while also instilling a love of writing. Decades letter, writing and receiving letters is among my favorite things (thanks Mom).

2.
Letter

Today I did almost nothing.
Read a little, tried to write a sentence
to make another sentence seem necessary.

I wasn't unhappy. Everything
I could will myself to do I'd done,
so I said I'd done enough.

Now I'm looking out my window:
white pine, ash, a single birch,
the leanings and crossings

of branches. And then the sky:
pale, undecided. Years ago
you wrote to me about a matter

that worried you, and you said
at the end, "That's probably the best,
and most true, way to think about it."

I kept your sentence in my notebook.
I liked its shape. I admired the way,
young as you were, you could feel

one kind of thinking
adjusting into another, one truth
becoming a better truth.

Now you're far off, and alone, and I
have no advice you haven't already
given yourself. What can I tell you?

That I'm here? That today, when I saw
how tenderly the light was moving
among those trees, I thought of you?

—Lawrence Raab

3.
Does anyone write letters anymore?

I get a few, on occasion. I savor the delivery. How a letter arrives unexpectedly, with a messy scrawl or loopy letters. How a hand on paper can make a mark on the heart, even before the envelope is broken. How the greeting sets a tone, ushers me in or holds me back.

“To say what letters contain is impossible,” writes Anne Carson in The Beauty of the Husband. “In a letter both reader and writer discover an ideal image of themselves, short blinding passages are all it takes.”

I have written letters laying bare all I am or am not, all I wish to be. And I have felt an exhilarated exhaustion.

4.
In a letter we are hungry for connection, for compassion. Are you, too, restless, reaching for a clarity, seeking to both know another and understand yourself? And really, is it not the same quest?

5.
“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for,” said David Foster Wallace in This Is Water, a commencement speech. “How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”

Yes, yes, more than just a form of communication, a letter is bridge.

A letter is a call across miles, a plea for presence.

6.
Elegy for the Personal Letter

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages—
can't much write now—thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at—
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far—
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.

— Allison Joseph

7.
Today a six-year old writes me a letter, full of loops and curves, butterflies and hearts. Did her mother help her form the words, sound out each spelling? Did she labor and love? In the receiving, I am both excited child and calm adult, both writer and reader. I am hopeful and heartened.

A few words on paper, that’s all it takes.

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The world turns on words, please read & write.

Thankful Thursday (on Tuesday): You

Sometimes you have to hear it.

The way words soar with sound. The way a poem calls you in, holds you close, moves and shapes before letting you go.

Hearing this poem changed my day (and maybe me).

Listen here.
(No, really, it’s worth the effort).

You Are Who I Love
by Aracelis Girmay

You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe

You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet

You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June

Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts

You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal

You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question

You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes

You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping

You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream

You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies
Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens

You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.

You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children

You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,

getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds

You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail

You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations

You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick

You are who I love, sighing in your sleep

You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut

You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still

You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses

You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand

You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to

You studying stars, you are who I love
braiding your child’s hair

You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert

You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,

bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late

You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home

You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often

You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love

your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there

How “Fuck you” becomes a love song

You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face

You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who

* This poem appeared on The Slow Down, offering audio poems read by Tracy K. Smith, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate, 2017 - 2019. Sadly, this thoughtful poetry podcast no longer runs.

It’s Thankful Thursday (on Tuesday, because gratitude holds no schedule), a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more.

On this Thankful Thursday, I am grateful for this poem, this poet, and the podcast that lifted the words off the page and into my heart.

What are you thankful for today?

On Sunday: In pain, rage and ravages

The angel lives in pain, an erasure collage by Drew Myron

The angel lives in

pain, rage

and ravages

and by choosing

hope and humanity

we emerge from

crisis.

The world turns on creative expression. Please read, write & make.

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The bad do not win

Dear You,

Everything now takes extra effort.

The hits keep coming: pandemic, heat wave, fires, drought, and so many people struggling to survive illness and death. A pressing fatigue makes it difficult to muster energy for the next chore, the next day, the next crisis.

I wish for languor, to unwind the mind and heart with thought and pause. Praise is what I first typed, on accident — or maybe purpose — because isn't pause a slow sort of praise?

We are sticking close to home. Each step I take is small and cautious. The pandemic, combined with a general increase in vitriol, has turned me inward even more. Maybe what I'm feeling is age and defeat. While I haven't given up, I do at times feel resigned, and, really, that is an awful sort of sadness.

I left my job at the nursing home. It's a good decision, but one I struggled for months to make. I loved the work and the residents but I have spent nearly my entire career as a self-employed self-starter and it was difficult to change a system that is, in essence, an institution. It’s a tough time to work in healthcare. Yes, I'm sad and heavy hearted. But it was an excellent part of life that stretched and filled me beyond expectation, and I'm grateful for the good long run.  

These challenges have offered a new view. All these years, was I hopeful or just naive? I see now that one person may make a difference, but that difference may be small, or short-lived, or too little among the bigger machine of life.

I do wonder if heavyheartedness – surely this is a technical term — is my default setting. I have periods of lifting and short moments of ease, but maybe this is the core of me. I know this street, these turns, I know the route to keep me moving. Even if  I never get home, I'll keep driving. And is that such a bad thing — to know your limits, your self? 

But enough about me.

What I really want to know is, how is your heart? Is it small and clenched, or full and hopeful? Please, tell me where your mind wanders, how your heart stretches. Like a plant reaching for sun, I want to know what light you find. 

With love,
Drew

The Artist in Novels

I love this passage (and the entire novel):

“What I feel is the sense of futility that emerges when the past is laid side by side with the present, like two photographs taken many years apart, when it become clear that there is no more time. . .

I feel something beginning to shift in me, and I am not sure I want it to; it is a reevaluation, a tiny release of the grip I have held on anger and am struggling to maintain against the frail specters I saw tonight.”

 — The Strays, a novel by Emily Bitto

For years I’ve gravitated to novels with art themes. You too? A few favorites come to mind, and I’m always on the hunt for more:

The Great Man by Kate Christensen

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar

The Hare by Melanie Finn

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart

I need more art fiction in my life. Tell me, what art-themed novels have you loved?

I Am Not Weeping

Dear You,*

I am not weeping alone wishing more from above.

I am making a list of compelling words: frowsy, fortitude, dogged, pluck, cheeky . . .

I am absorbing the latest addition to my ‘best horoscopes’ collection:

Ask yourself: "What more can I accept here?" A power surge comes from letting go of that energy drain known as resistance.

I am re-appreciating the crystalline quality of Bluets by Maggie Nelson:

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

I am discarding old journals written by younger me. Life is very much write & repeat. Then, again and still, I worried about my writing, my body, my purpose and place. I was then, and often now, both fevered and frail.

I am struck by a passage in This Is Not For You: An Activist's Journey of Resistance and Resilience by Portland, Oregon black activist Richard Brown:

Every day someone would ask how I kept doing the work without burning out. And I'd tell them it was easy: I only did the things for as long as I wanted to. As long as I was feeling useful and hopeful, I'd keep going, but as soon as something started to feel like a battle I know I wasn't going to win? I'd stop, and I'd move on. 

I am thinking that resistance and resilience is the theme of our time. Not the grit of gripping tight, but the daily dull of keeping on.

But sometimes standing still is also life.

                                                   —  John Ashbery

Dear You and You and You,
I am not weeping, or wishing, or alone.
I am standing still, holding on.

* Read: Dear Mr You by Mary-Louise Parker.

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The world turns on words, please read & write.

Three Small Starts

Thank you, readers, writers, friends.

I was stuck, and a few small nudges have moved me.

1.
Don’t start with the big idea, says Naomi Shihab Nye. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.

2.
Let’s consider this visual gem from poet-artist Mark Thalman:

Painters paint over what they don't like on the canvas. Sometimes the paint builds up so much, it has to be sanded down for the next revision. An artist chipping away has a block of stone to work with. Give yourself a block of words, and chip away what you don't need.

3.
Every morning for 14 years, Dave Bonta writes a 140-character observation.

I love this practice because observing leads to gratitude. And gratitude leads to appreciation. And appreciation creates joy. I want more joy in my days — and more writing — and a simple observation is the bite-size approach I need right now (and write now).

Instead of a character count, I’m writing three lines a day. If I write more, good. If not, that’s okay, too. This is a no-pressure assignment.

This week:

Morning winds force the day into

a rush of hurry, worry, wait.

*

Walking past trees laden with fruit,

you pluck a small plum and shine

with summer’s sweetness and ease.

*

I was in love with distance, with what wasn't there,

like wanting to know the exact book that would open 

to the telling page.

*

Through meadow, brook and bear grass fields.

Over talus and scrabble and scree. Oh, this beautiful burn

of legs stretching, lungs pumping, joy bubbling.

Is this happiness?

* * *

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Thudding Through

I’m stuck. Dried up, dulled down, depleted. Thudding through creativity’s long drought.

Do you know this state, and how do you get through?

A Note on What Not To Do: A few years ago, during an especially deep well of sadness, a “friend” offered (unsolicited) advice: Find your joy!

I gave a tight smile, snarled inside, and scratched her off my list. Because when you’re deep in the well, pushing a peppy platitude is just another punch to the gut. But I digress. Or do I? A deep sadness, after all, creeps into the mind in the same way a creative block bars the doors of expression. And because they share so many traits, perhaps the remedy is the same: Be gentle, be patient, move your body, and kick the inner critic to the curb.

I like this advice: keep trying.

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.

When I’m feeling down and stuck and creativity feels in a rut, I need encouragement and tricks. What gets you going, hand moving, words flowing?

Here’s a favorite writing prompt that I’ve been leaning on lately:

Lift A Line

Getting into the music and pace of a poem you like can help stir your own ideas and leaps of possibility. This exercise is borrowing a line, but also borrowing a rhythm and confidence that nudges you forward in a reminder of your own creative power.

1. Read a poem.
2. Borrow a passage or line as a launch to your own poem.
3. Write. Don’t think, just keep writing.
4. Give attribution to the line.

My poem above borrows the line — it has saved my life — from Mary Oliver’s poem, Loneliness, from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.

Your turn: Pick a poem, lift a line, write on!

More Writing Prompts:
Try This: Word Catching
Try This: Where I’m From
Try This: Make A Scramble
Try This: You Know the Gnaw

•••

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Days Vanished

There’s not a lot of “good” to come from the pandemic but I can offer one bright spot: art.

Biennial of the Americas has curated the Covid-19 Memorial Virtual Exhibition and I’m happy to share that Days Vanished, an animated poem created with Tracy Weil, is among the Top 200 featured works.

It’s a beautiful show featuring artwork from all over the globe — and you can take part, too!

1.
Go here to view our video poem.

2.
Memorize this art tile image:

3.
View the exhibition here, find our tile, and vote for us.

You can vote once daily through July 18, 2021. The artist with the most votes receives a small cash prize and the happiness of creative affirmation.

_____

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Thankful Thursday: Type & Ties

It’s Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more.

Like a confession, I’ll admit it’s been nearly a year since my last appreciation. My gratitude has been a bit spotty and consists mostly of pleading whispers to get me through this. But because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, I keep trying.

On this Thankful Thursday, I am grateful for this card (above) from a friend, sent by old-fashioned mail, which is a gratitude itself.

Enclosed, this explanation:

The cards are made by Cartiera Amatruda from Almafi, Italy. They have been making papers since 1380 and still today use many traditional methods developed in the Middle Ages. Quotes are typed by hand on a 1939 Underwood Typewriter. Cards are then stitched on a Sears Roebuck sewing machine that doesn’t love paper as much as I do, but it cooperates! All stitched notes are made by hand by me in my studio in Denver and will have variations. — Julie

I appreciate this hand-stitched effort, but even more I’m thankful for the friend who knows me enough to know I would appreciate these words and this handmade-from-the-heart beauty. (I don’t know Julie but I can picture a word lover bent over a vintage workhorse).

On the heels of this gift, the day opened with this poem:

Safety Net

This morning I woke
thinking of all the people I love
and all the people they love
and how big the net
of lovers. It felt so clear,
all those invisible ties
interwoven like silken threads
strong enough to make a mesh
that for thousands of years
has been woven and rewoven
to catch us all.
Sometimes we go on
as if we forget
about it. Believing only
in the fall. But the net
is just as real. Every day,
with every small kindness,
with every generous act,
we strengthen it. Notice,
even now, how
as the whole world
seems to be falling, it
is there for us as we
walk the day’s tightrope,
how every tie matters.

— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer*

Your turn: What are you thankful for today?

* Isn’t it time to name Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer the next Colorado Poet Laureate?

** Nancy Spain was an English reporter and writer.

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Worth the Swim

How did I get so lucky? I’m on a roll of great books — one solid novel after another. This never happens. If you’ve ever experienced a long slog of tepid reading you understand my rapture.

But, really, it almost didn’t happen. Because age, time, and irritability have made me impatient, I nearly tossed these good books aside. They were moving too slow, too fast, too complicated, too cute. Or, more likely, I was restless and dissatisfied with something beyond the book.

My usual rule is to stop reading and move on; life is too short for less than stellar books, right?

Not so fast, Frances. I’m learning the best books — like people — sometimes take time to unfurl. Let this be a lesson to me, and maybe you, snap reactions are often misleading: the chatty neighbor may become your best friend and that cranky co-worker could be the sarcastic sidekick your life needs.

BOOKS

Anxious People by Fredrick Backman

I rarely hate a book but this one turned me grumbly. I threw it down, then remembered my friend loved this book and because I appreciate my friend’s (more refined) literary sense, I tried again — and loved it. It’s equal parts comedy, relationship drama, and locked-room mystery. On the first page, Backman writes, “This is a book about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.”

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

This was a very slow start with, what seemed to me, excruciating detailed descriptions of nature. Uggh. But that overly observant beginning turned into a brilliant novel of beautiful ache.

The Fortunate Ones by Ed Tarkington

Does the world need another coming-of-age novel? I hesitated to dive in, but this one is really worth the swim. It’s a page-turner with vivid characters and wry observations on wealth and its divide, with lines like this: “The sisters were striking, in the way people with breeding can be.”

MOVIES
Just as I tend to too-swiftly ditch a good book, I’ve been quick to pass on movies that linger in my Watchlist but never get watched. Don’t be me, view these gems now!

Driving While Black
A documentary exploring how the advent of the automobile brought new mobility and freedom for African Americans but also exposure to discrimination and deadly violence, and how that history resonates today. This is powerful & essential viewing. On Amazon and PBS.

Pride 
This sat in the Watchlist for six months before I watched it, and loved it, and wondered why I didn't watch it sooner. Based on a true story, this 2014 film is an inspirational and feel-good movie about an unusual but extraordinary slice of history involving the solidarity of two unlikely groups: gays and lesbians in London lending their support to striking coal miners during the Margaret Thatcher reign in 1984. On Amazon Prime.

The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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Be Dazzled

Dazzled, by Drew Myron

It’s June. Summer opens and I walk in, triumphant & dazzled.

It’s a wonder, isn’t it? That the world is wide, the heart opens and expands, the sun still shines? Forgive me the Walt Whitman moment; I feel a door of darkness has closed and beyond the threshold life is bright and alive.

It’s the summer season. Bare feet and watermelon heat. Bicycle rides and river swims, my limbs moving and lungs working. Poppies, petunias, tiny wild daisies. No thing unnoticed, or unthanked.

It’s a long dark year and now, suddenly, bright sun and hot days. Excuse the exalt; like weather, my mood won’t last — even now the wind is picking up, fires will start, the virus still boils — I know this, I do. But oh, what a relief, for just a day or two or god-grant-me-a-week, to know delight, to slip into ease.

Picture a sky, a star, a universe of time

I remember how
we would listen
for the almost dark

Night always
soft and vast
a velvet voice
of lingering

By morning
eternity is broken
You wake dazzled

— Drew Myron

The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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Good Books Find You

Lately, I'm interested not just in good books but the finding.

Libraries are closed, friends are far, and buying books can be an expensive habit. Often the best books are by chance, not the ones languishing on my long books-to-read list but the novel abandoned at the airport bar, the poetry tossed aside in the hospital lobby, or the memoir discovered down the block in the little free library with the squeaky hinges and odd assortment.

Like love, good books arrive when you've given up. Across a crowded world, a good book finds you.  

Here are some of my recent keepers:

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabbie Rivera

How found: Mailed to me by a friend with a note that said, I wish I could send you a library.  

This is my favorite book of the year (so far). In fact, I liked it so much I had to force myself to stop racing through and instead slow down and savor. Smart writing, strong characters, and a fantastic "voice" of growing, yearning, and learning. Set in Portland, the Rose City is a character itself. Love this passage, referring to Powell's Books: 

 “It looked like the Salvation Army of bookstores, and who doesn’t

love a little dig through salvation?”

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

How found: From the Little Free Library down the street, during a week without internet service when I had run out of books, both digital and print. (Thank you, neighbor!).

This is a beautifully spare memoir written with a powerful level of poetic detachment that provides space to breathe and hold.

"What're we doing? 

"We're arguing?" 

"We're paying attention," Joe said. 

Whenever he spoke, his words were sets of clothes that we tried on for ourselves. Sometimes they fit, and other times they were old and baggy." 

Things I Do At Pennsylvania Rest Stops by Ashly Kim 

How found: Ordered from Rinky Dink Press, a micro-press offering palm-sized books, after watching their zoom poetry readings that felt more like backyard barbecues than stiff online lectures. 

ask strangers where i am and consider

how i got there in the first place.

auto-pilot down the weekend turnpike.

eighty-miles-per-hour-almost-ghost

with the navigation turned off.

— Ashly Kim 

See Also: 

The Golden Age of Diners by Tara Roeder

Roto: A Mex-Tape by Oscar Mancinas

Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon

How found: Purchased at my local bookstore, a place in which I had not lingered (because of pandemic) for over a year.  

Agodon's fourth book is my new favorite. Always a strong writer, this poetry collection sounds the alarm, piercing daily life and gathering us together in the ache.   

Magpies Recognize Themselves In The Mirror

The evening sounds like a murder
of magpies and we're replacing our cabinet knobs
because we can't change the world but we can 
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days and some days it breaks itself in two. 
I watched a women having a breakdown 
in the mall today, and when the security guard
tried to help her, what I felt was all of us 
peeking from her purse as she threw it 
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes, 
the walls felt like another way to hold us
and when she finally stopped crying
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting
Some days the sky is too bright. And like that
we were her flock in our black coats
and white sweaters, some of us reaching 
our wings to her and some of us flying away. 

— Kelli Russell Agodon

Your Turn: What are your favorites lately? How do books find you?

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The world turns on words, please read & write.

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Oh, the mother load!

The Mom Spot, we all have one.

It’s a gape, a wound, a wanting. It’s tender or torn, full or faltering, powerful or perilous. The place where a mother is, or was, or should be.

As we approach the occasion that seems to stir sentiment and sadness in equal measure — Mother’s Day — the maternal role is a touchy issue, especially if you’re a daughter. The mother-daughter dynamic is fraught. Something about ties that bind, choke, reflect and reframe.

But, wait, you don’t have mother issues? You live among sunshine and rainbows? Good for you (but I don’t believe it). I love my mother, of course, but motherly love is rarely uncomplicated.

Years ago, in a writing workshop we were assigned a routine writing prompt. I don’t recall the assignment but I remember the results; in a room full of 10 women of various ages and backgrounds every one of us had written about our mother! The instructor rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, “Oh, the mother load.”

Pity the mothers, their wishes and wounds. Pity the daughters, the deep love and festering frustration. We are born and formed by our mothers — the presence of, the absence of. Even three years after my mother’s death, I’m still weighing who she was and who I am as a result. Every passing year, I see her with fresh eyes (and sometimes with a more generous heart).

The mother-daughter tangle can last a moment, a day, a lifetime. And yet, we love, deeply and fiercely. Still, again, and anyway.

A Few of My Favorite Mom Poems:

When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller

Mothers by Nikki Giovanni

The Persistence of Scent by Cindy Williams Gutierrez

This Is Not A Small Voice by Sonia Sanchez

Just Before Death Comes by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Back to Basics: An Updated List

Yes, good books make me jump with joy. You too?

As we wind down to the final days of National Poetry Month, I’m still shouting from the rooftops and blasting your mailbox and screen with poem confetti. You know, of course, that April, not Christmas, is the most wonderful time of the year (less shopping, more reading).

Years ago when a local librarian was celebrating National Poetry Month she asked what books had shaped my writing life (isn’t that great, celebrating poetry as a job? I’m both grateful and jealous). The other day I found my list and was happy to see the choices still hold. Like a good black dress and thank you notes, the classics keep their value.

Today, in encouragement of poem reading, writing & appreciating, let’s revisit (with a few updates):

Books That Shaped My Poetry Life

1.
Complete Poems by e.e. cummings

This lower-case poet showed me what language could do, what a poem could be.

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail 

2.
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

With a close command of language and line, Rich masterfully unspools story, feeling, fact.

A conversation begins
with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

3.
Live or Die by Anne Sexton
Through Sexton I realized sadness can be full of velocity and ferocity.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools. 
The never ask why build.

4.
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
This book made me realize that a poem could be funny, witty, sarcastic, sad, tell a story, and all at once!

The sparrows are a kind of people
Who lost a war a thousand years ago;
As punishment all their color was taken away. 

5.
The Way It Is by William Stafford
A poet of the everyday and a model of productivity, Stafford wrote over 50 books — and his first was not published until age 46!

What can anyone give you greater than now, 
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

6.
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Carson lifts lines from Keats and blends them with her own poem-prose mix. Is it a very long poem, or a short story? She calls it “a fictional essay.” I call it brilliant. 

A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.

7.
The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda
Yes, poems can be silly, surreal, and stirring.

And what is the name of the month
that falls between December and January?

Why didn’t they give us longer
months that last all year?

Books That Are Not Poetry But Are Poetic:

8.
Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska
A delicate story of art and unrequited love, told through letters.

9.
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
An intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman

And it occurs to me that there is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. It may be that I set my sights too high and so repeatedly end the day in depression. Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

10.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Tight, lyrical prose turns this intimate story about sexual awakening into a poetic, searing novel. 

Very early in my life it was too late.

11.
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Humor, heart, wit — Lamott has all the essentials. 

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

12.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
The novel is both long poem and full sigh. Beautiful and unusual, line after beautiful line.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.

My Favorite Writing Resource Books:

13.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
It’s 30 years since I first read this gem and it is the foundation of everything I write.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

14.
poemcrazy by Susan Wooldridge
Beyond prompts, this book offers enthusiasm that moves me to write.

Poems arrive. They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring us to notice and give them form with our words. They take us to an invisible world where light and dark, inside and outside meet.

15.
The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker
Great ideas packed in this gem, reminding us that every day offers writing inspiration.

Only 15? Yes, okay, my private list is longer but I don’t want to test your patience. I want you to read — and write!

What’s on your list?

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It's Not Over (and other sorrows)

Erased, by Drew Myron

It’s not over. The pandemic rages on. Science, news, first-person accounts . . . it’s so clear the virus is still full of speed. So why do I feel I’m alone in living bad news?

Because it is spring, and we stretch long and healthy beneath a healing sun.

Because we are head-back laughing, drinking in normal, trying to make our mouths move with ease.

Because most of us are healthy and cannot imagine frail bodies, faulty lungs, breathlessness. But I do. Don’t you?

In the meantime, I’m trying for happy. I plant flowers and picnic on the patio. I’m writing but every line is sad and beyond my control. Is this truth or habit? Yes, this song is old, the refrain tired.

Yet, and still  — we’re in National Poetry Month! Much to my surprise, I’m finding pleasure in poetry readings by Zoom. (Shout out to RinkyDink Press and Oregon Poetry Association). And I’m reading and listening to new-to-me poets, and savoring this poem by Lee Herrick, and this poem by Tina Cane.

As always, and again, I’m reading and writing through. How about you?

Erased

Days vanished
without wonder.
Hope seemed a
very long desert.

The worst of it
is mourning for
cheerful decency.

- Drew Myron

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Fast Five with January Gill O'Neil

"Nothing fulfills me more than putting pen to paper.”

— January Gill O’Neil

Welcome to Fast Five, in which I ask my favorite writers five questions as a way to open the door to know more.

January Gill O’Neil is the author of three poetry books and is an associate professor of English at Salem State University. She was the 2019-2020 Grisham Writer in Residence at University of Mississippi and has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She serves on the boards of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and Montserrat College of Art. January lives in Massachusetts with her two children.

1. 
Why write?

I can’t imagine not writing. Recently, I was asked what are my hobbies, and while I think of writing and, specifically, poetry as a vocation, I couldn’t come up with any. Not really. I’ve tried baking and walking and birding. And while I like all of those activities, nothing fulfills me more than sitting down and putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). 

[ Read In The Company Of Women here]

2.
What do you enjoy about writing and teaching?

Long ago, I decided that writing and family (in that order) would be at the center of my life. So the work I do is an extension of that. To talk about poetry for a living to students, to volunteer my time in the arts community, to mentor other writers — all of that fuels my writing. I may be one of the few who enjoys the business of poetry. 

The last few years have been about navigating my kids through their teenage years, which has been a joy and a pain. More joy than pain, however! It’s bittersweet to think that I am raising my kids to not need me. But I’m very proud of son Alex, 17, and daughter Ella, 15. They are finding their way in this world and I look forward to whatever their futures bring. 

As with many families, we’ve spent a lot of time together during the pandemic. In 2019-2020, we lived in Mississippi while I was on fellowship at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. It was an eye-opening experience, one that still influences our lives in Massachusetts today. 

[ Read On Being Told I Look Like FLOTUS here ]

3. 
Which non-literary piece of culture — film, tv show, painting, song — has influenced you?

Since my time in Mississippi, I have spent a great deal of time learning about the landscape, culture, legacy of slavery in the Deep South. Much of my most recent work has been about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was brutally beaten, lynched, and killed in 1955. His story grows with relevancy with each year. Till’s story is more relevant than ever before, and I believe the work of advancing racial equity through poetry and the arts is urgent and necessary.

I want to create environments of inclusion and equity on the page, in the arts, and in my local community. 

[Musically] David Byrne’s American Utopia got me through the uncertainty of 2020. Now I’m listening to Love & Hate by Michael Kiwanuka, and Cypress Grove by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes.   

4. 
Is there a book you wish you had written?

I don’t really think of books like that. I’m happy those great works are in the world. That being said, we need to decolonize the Canon.

[Note: What does this mean? Start here.]

5.
I'm a word collector — what are your favorite words? 

Let’s see . . . dark, circle, serendipity, pleasure. 

Also, Yo! and OK.  

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