Never Enough Poems

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I came home from my Litfuse weekend, in Tieton, Washington, with a stack of new poetry books, not to mention my head abuzz with good conversations, workshops, and poems, poems, poems. The featured poet was Ellen Bass, who I have to admit swooning for, but another connection made was with Terry Martin.

Terry’s book, The Light You Find, published by Blue Begonia Press, is luminous. She captures her childhood, her geographical region, and an ever-widening circle of objects, vistas, and loves, only to set them free on these pages, a gift for a lucky reader.

My Blue Schwinn Hollywood
leans against Ponderosa Pine,
sister’s hula hoop circles a sprinkler.
A green rubber hose coils
like a serpent on wet grass.
(from “Backyard”)

Snakes repeat throughout the poems (“Dry grasses rattle like a snake’s warning”), also barncats and canyons and hawks and tin cups, sage and quail and ditches. But reading and rereading I feel that it isn’t a lost Eden that is being evoked here, but something right on the edge of awareness, waiting to be seen and experienced again. There’s a kind of insomniac’s call throughout the book, an edginess, not dread exactly, despite a “howling loneliness,” but maybe a sense that if you wake, if you walk out onto the front porch, the moon will meet you there.

These poems please me so much, and startle me, too, shaking me out of my reverie. They make me want to move to Yakima and knock on Terry’s door (In “The Dog and I Listen,” a three-line poem: “I chop garlic, dice onions. / Ears lift when wheels crunch gravel. / Your arrival, still my favorite sound.”)

Like the best poems, they make me want to get out my notebook and write. It’s impossible to share a favorite poem from the collection, but here is one of the many that resonated with me, like one of those good, Litfuse conversations:

Reading / Writing Notebook

Like any good teacher,
it both leads and follows.

It softens hard edges,
springs hinges loose.

Unfastens bolts rusted tight.
Sheds light down long corridors.

Announces deafening omissions.
Unfurls rolled flags.

Provides fingerprints,
offers up evidence.

Soothing as sweetgrass,
it tips toward fullness.

Kisses Enough

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Beverly as a babyToday is my mother’s 83rd birthday. I will be visiting, and eating cake. (3:00 at The Haven — you’re invited!) The last time I visited, she looked around the room, then back at me, a smug expression on her face, and said, “All the boys here like me.”

Here is an old poem.

Kisses Enough

Pictures of her are always pictures of sisters,
little girls in a row, bangs
cut straight over eyes dark as plums. My mother

with one sister eleven months older, another
in only two years, was never a lone darling
posed on a mother’s knee. Even an infant,

dandled in arms, she’s not with her mother,
but her two oldest sisters,
sisters who named her “Beverly Ann,”

then married out before she found her first word.
Daughters of sisters came back, tossing
more brown ponytails into the jumble

of girls in that house. Giggles slipped
like a magician’s scarves under the bathroom door.
Boys tapped fingers on restless knees. One by one,

sisters married, while my mother waited, for three years
the oldest at home, even her younger sisters
chosen away. Days fell from schoolwork

to housework. She listened nights
for the crunch of his boot on the graveled drive.
When would he come? That Prince

charming enough to climb forsythia vines
to find her, press his knuckle to her window?
She dreamed his touch better than any mother’s.

She dreamed kisses enough.

mom 2015

Where Do You Write?

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Poet Paul Muldoon, with Christmas Tree

A friend sent me a link to this article, “The Writer’s Room,” from The New York Times.

Where do you write?

Writing as a Way of Healing

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I have been rereading Louise DeSalvo‘s Writing as a Way of Healing. The first time I read this book, I bought extra copies and handed it out to friends. No interesting conversations resulted, which I think means that no one read it…so I’m here again, this time virtually handing out copies.

I’ve underlined a gazillion passages, like this one:

This book is an invitation for you to use the simple act of writing as a way of reimagining who you are or remembering who you were. To use writing to discover and fulfill your deepest desire. To accept pain, fear, uncertainty, strife. But to find, too, a place of safety, security, serenity, and joyfulness, to claim your voice. To tell your story. And to share the gift of your work with others and, so, enrich and deepen our understanding of the human condition. (9)

Or this:

I didn’t know that if you want to write, you must follow your desire to write. And that your writing will help you unravel the knots in your heart. I didn’t know that you could write simply to take care of yourself, even if you have no desire to publish your work. I didn’t know that if you want to become a writer, eventually you’ll learn through writing — and only through writing — all you need to know about your craft. And that while you’re learning, you’re engaging in soul-satisfying, deeply nurturing labor. I didn’t know that if you want to write and don’t, because you don’t feel worthy enough or able enough, not writing will eventually begin to erase who you are. (31)

Or this:

For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us. (93)

There is so much more here. DeSalvo has read widely in the lives of various writers (she is a biographer) and in psychological studies in order to explain her discoveries and insights into how we must write in order to heal. A key idea for me is that keeping a journal isn’t helpful if it is only complaint. One must link memories to feeling in order to get the full benefit.

Well, one must read the book.

DeSalvo has a blog, too — Writing a Life — which I am also happy to recommend.