When Artists Go to Work

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I meant to show up today to do a blog-review/appreciation of Ada Limón’s 2011 collection of poems, Sharks in the River. It felt like appropriate reading for this week. (And, indeed, it is.) A woman of color, our national poet laureate.

The problem being, I can’t seem to pull a review together.

Time is not the issue. I am at a 4-day writing retreat on Hood Canal, staying in a cottage at the lip of a cove. Each day I wake early and watch the sun come up. I take at least two long walks during the day and see mergansers, grebes, buffleheads, harbor seals. We have a resident great blue heron, and a resident kingfisher. (When I walk, I think of it as going out to see my kingfisher, and he almost always is there, briefly holding still for me to admire him, then chittering across the water.) I feel awash in gratitude for the consolations of nature. I mess around with my writing, too (not really getting much done), and in the evenings I eat wonderful food and talk with like-minded friends — poets, all. For the most part, we are trying to take a break from politics. But sometimes a fragment slips in, like those intrusive thoughts one gets while meditating, and we gently push it away. Later.

(To take a look at the belted kingfisher, visit All About Birds at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)

Meanwhile, this arrived via email from The Nation, the closing paragraph of a bid to subscribe. Which I may do when I’m feeling a little better. Anyway, it’s a paragraph I have shared with a number of friends, and I think you may need to hear it too.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

What an excellent and timely reminder.

both photos by Bethany Reid

Election Day

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I know I have been strangely silent about the U. S. election — in this venue at least. My family of origin used to be decent, working-class Republicans. Something I didn’t even know until I discovered how much my father admired Ronald Reagan. Now they are die-hard MAGA Republicans. It hurts my heart. If I say anything, they think I’m crazy. So I silence myself. In truth, I silenced my little bleeding liberal heart a lot as a child. I’m good at it. Not that they don’t love me, or that I don’t love them.

I remember my brother-in-law once telling me, “If you would only listen to Rush Limbaugh, then you would understand.” Well, if you would read The New Yorker, or The Nation, or freaking Time Magazine, YOU would get it. No, I don’t say that (not out loud). Instead I hang out with my tribe (poets), and watch Kamala’s Tik-Tok channel (or whatever it is) with my daughters.

And I feel really, really anxious. To make matters worse, two weeks ago my old dog died. I really wish he were here.

Pabu in his Halloween costume, a couple years back

How do I deal with election-anxiety? I get up early and sit at my desk, scribbling in a notebook (although he always lay at my feet and I miss having him there), and that makes me feel better. I read poetry, and that makes me feel better. (Though I used to read poems aloud to him.) I go for long, long walks with Pabu’s collar in my pocket, and that makes me feel a little better

I didn’t mean to say all of that. But, for once, I won’t erase what I’m thinking. I’ll just leave it out there.

In the Substack world, several people have today posted this poem by Alison Luterman. I found myself wanting to read it to my friends, and then — aha! — I thought of you. I copied this from Robert Reich, by the way.

I used to tell my students, if we all thought alike, we’d be robots or under some kind of mind control — in movies and novels, that’s always a dystopia. So, read widely, expose yourself to diverse cultures and ideas and voices. Make up your own mind. Be human.

And don’t forget to read poems.

HOLDING VIGIL

My cousin asks if I can describe this moment,
the heaviness of it, like sitting outside
the operating room while someone you love
is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs
eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine
which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise,
waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out
in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down
to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels
as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about
is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat
asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are.
I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity,
the fact that we are all waiting in the same
hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support,
and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up?
Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil,
as families do, and bringing each other coffee
from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it
while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral,
which is also what happens at times like these,
and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment,
heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand,
in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep
of human history, a soap bubble, because empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization,
your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator,
and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about
when she wakes at three in the morning,
cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing,
it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day
and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food,
cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies,
and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls
and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer,
the icebergs for the love of God—every single
blessed being on the face of this earth
is holding its breath in this moment,
and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin,
then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it
we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.

— Alison Luterman

Jed Myers, LEARNING TO HOLD

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LEARNING TO HOLD, Jed Myers. Wandering Aengus Press, Eastsound, WA, 100 pages, paper, $18.60, https://wanderingaenguspress.com.

I have a soft spot for any book published by Wandering Aengus Press—their publications include the anthology, For Love of Orcas, a gorgeous tribute book published in 2019. Jed Myers’s Learning to Hold won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award, and is another beautifully written, and beautifully wrought book.

This was one of my August Sealey-Challenge books. I read it on Amtrak, Portland to Seattle, on August 26. (I know because I used a print-out of my ticket as a bookmark). So, I read it on a journey, and the book is a journey, placing a personal and familial history of war and trauma and healing into a larger context. Yes, the world is a bloody mess, but this book tells us, with the tenderness of a father reassuring a child: “Don’t let go now.”

When I opened Learning to Hold this morning, this poem leapt out at me. It’s a wonderful antidote for election anxiety.

A Prayer

A cormorant crosses a harbor low,
wings’ pulse keeping an air pillow
on the bird’s shadow, that black
belly a steady few inches aloft.

I know a soft blaze glows
in that dark fuselage. Fine fire courses
a delicate wire web to maintain
the arcane mechanics of constant

lift. A nameless attunement
in that sleek breast resets the ratio
heartbeat to wingbeat, pump’s clap
matching the instant’s requirement.

The fire’s quiet, discrete. We spread
our flame out in whatever gods’ name.
Our heat breaches containment.
We spark the wind with bright sticks.

I watch from an edge of the land
we’ve lit. I see the cormorant
reach a buoy and stand, wings held
wide to the air, a trusting, a prayer.

—Jed Myers

Jed Myers is the editor of Bracken, and a major player in the (marvelous) Seattle music and poetry open-mic, Easy Speak. Learning to Hold is his third full-length book of poems. You can learn more about Myers at his book page at Wandering Aengus  or at his personal website. You can find my blog review of his first book, Watching the Perseids, here.

 

Paulann Petersen’s MY KINDRED

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MY KINDRED, Paulann Petersen. Salmon Poetry Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2023, 108 pages, paper, $14.95, salmonpoetry.com.

I read My Kindred in August. I was sprawled on the guest bed in my friend’s daughter’s house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Everyone else was napping (baby, grandma, mama). I was basking in the light of Paulann Petersen’s poems claiming kinship with bees, plums, big-leaf maples, totems. Oh, and family.

I’m indebted to Petersen for such epigraphs as these:

—Surely our parents give birth to us twice, the second time when they die. —Anaïs Nin

and this:

—One pound of honey contains the essence of two million flowers. 

The poems, too, are packed with honey, and surprise. A sister, “so full of yourself / when you’re rain” (“Her Sister Tells Water What’s What”). A poem titled, “Had the Matriarch Been Born a Bat.” A poem titled, “Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things.” Everything is related: a poem titled, “Whitman, Me, Hermes.” Petersen (like the bat with its umbrella-spine fingers) encompasses worlds. “Mythic, voluptuous” worlds, in the words of Kathleen Flenniken.

Here’s one poem to give you a sample:

Kinship

A few of our world’s people still speak
a tongue so old its closest analog
is birdsong. And a bird carved
some thirty thousand years ago
may well be our first work of art.

Why mimic the palaver of a thrush?
From wood or stone, why shape
a tern’s body, its wings pressed
tight against its sides? Or remember
the dream-moments our beating arms
took hold in air, lifting us away
from earth trod smooth by our feet?

We each possess a bird-soul.
On the highest branch of every family tree,
a winged spirit preens in the sun,
gleaming with iridescence—
that sheen of our common blood.

—Paulann Petersen

Petersen has an impressive biography, including being the Oregon poet laureate. I am indebted to Olympia Poetry Network’s Last Tuesday’s with Sandy for introducing me to her work. (And you, too, can check out OPN.)

To read more about Paulann Petersen, visit her website, or Poetry Foundation.