say goodbye, say hello
Seattle’s poetry bookstore, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, invites you to stop by after hours on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, August 26, 27, and 28, 2016, to say goodbye and thank you to longtim…
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Crazy Brave
This past week a friend of mine invited me to go to Portland and write poetry. My mother was stable, my kiddo was home from camp and getting caught up on her on-line classes. My husband would have to do without me for only three days and two nights. We were staying at my friend’s daughter’s apartment (she was in Iceland!), so there was no cost other than a couple of meals out (and a trip to Powell’s Books, of course). How could I say no?
image borrowed from bryanpattersonfaithworks.wordpress.com
Because it was 90-95 degrees in Portland, and I don’t do well in heat, I woke one morning with a migraine. Once I’d recovered, I decided to take a short walk, got lost, and walked two miles. But I proved surprisingly resilient. Even without the right meds in my bag, I recovered. I went to movies (ah, air conditioning!), and enjoyed wonderful meals. I drank lots of water. I took naps. I wrote and wrote and wrote. My friend and I took breaks to read to each other, our own work, and poems by favorite poets. I bought Joy Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, and read the first 50 pages in no time flat.
My life has been about 1000 times easier than Joy Harjo’s, but I’d 
like to claim that it was a little brave of me to drop everything and go to Portland. I know for certain that writing is brave, if it’s any good, if it’s true. (Joy Harjo’s poetry is crazy brave.)
One theme of my new poetry manuscript is loss, and life keeps very happily offering me examples to draw from. A good friend has gone through so much loss this year that it looks as though she’s cutting loose from everything familiar — from God, from me, from all that she can’t seem to help feeling betrayed by. I tried this week to write about her, about my complex feelings, my huge longing to do something about this situation. My inept attempts to do anything effective.
Another book I was reading — not coincidentally to everything else I’ve been thinking about — is Rita Dove’s Mother Love, a retelling of the story of Demeter and Persephone. I thought a lot about my friend, but also about my mother and me, and my daughters. For my postcards, I wrote some very short poems in a Demeter voice. I’m not sure they were very good, but I mailed them anyway (which was sort of brave). In my journal I wrote questions.
- What is it exactly that I’m afraid to do?
- What is feeding my fears and how do I stop feeding them?
- What small acts would move in the opposite direction of fear?
- What might I do now that would feel just a little brave?
- What would be crazy brave?
To Be Kind
A friend was confiding in me about a situation in her life that deeply upsets her. She is a poet — a genius of a poet — so, while I tried to be a good listener and not jump in with personal advice, I asked her if she’s tried writing about it. “Not yet,” she said, “but maybe I should.”
I’ve been avoiding writing about something that deeply upsets me. So here it is.
I know I’m not alone in feeling dismayed — horrified, traumatized, gutted — by the gun violence we’ve witnessed this summer. Two weeks ago, the violence reached into our suburban community, when four teenagers at a Mukilteo party were shot, and three of them instantly killed. Like the other kids, the shooter was a graduate of our local high school, where my daughters attended, and attend. The girl, a nursing student, the former girlfriend of the shooter, had been a choir student, like my daughters. I’m not sure I know how to write about this…what the parents of these children are going through is a nightmare too great to even attempt to imagine.
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The novelist Henry James said that there are three things that are important in life. “The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
When I hear of someone responding to a shooting by joining the NRA, when I hear about the makers of the AR-15 used in this crime donating money to NRA lobbyists, I worry about us and our future. I worry myself sick about my daughters and their friends. I try to imagine what I can do.
I can be kind. And I can write.
Titles
image borrowed from www.borealforest.org
This morning I picked up Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems and read for a long time before settling on this one:
NOT WRITING
A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs
at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.
The title makes this poem what it is. (Imagine it as “Not Making Love,” or “Jilted.”)
After writing out the poem in my journal, and contemplating today’s postcard, titled “Yawning River Otter,” I struggled with how to write what I wanted to write. If otters yawn, my thoughts ran, why don’t they laugh? And if that’s simply my rampant anthropomorphism, it was followed by wondering why an otter might laugh. Maybe he laughs at the silly man staring from nearby reeds and making the weird clicking noises with that box, or because the world is joyous, or because laughing keeps him from crying.
The idea of how we (humans, not river otters) so often laugh to keep from crying, kept resurfacing in my draft of today’s poem, but I couldn’t make it fit. Then, I remembered that I had the title, too, to write.