Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

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I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.”

The long poem “How did I love him — ” with lines like “West African highlife beat,” and “his baritone psalms, his siren pleas” — I just don’t know where to begin. I think of my young adult daughters, and my heart breaks.

But here’s one poem, from the section, “The Decision”:

Your Still Life Builds a Home Inside My Head

In the late afternoon we lose an f-stop
as light bleeds out of the bandaged sky

and like phantom detectives with wide-brimmed hats

we reexamine the compass, the passport,
the magnetized color of four o’clock air.

In this woman-made harbor, we rearrange

pipe stands and glass slides. We multitask wicker stands
where objects could topple at any time —

let them topple! 

Here in the land of deferred decisions,
a hand-painted garden ball reflects on a floating scroll.

In this alchemical mirror, in this ark of a studio —

built on instinct and breath, through windows
clouded and smeared,

under the sign of the light meter

I’ll meet you here. A bright space to hold inside my head,
an open country — another life still new.

— Susan Rich

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

You can learn more about the book at Red Hen Press: https://redhen.org/book/blue-atlas/.

Click THIS LINK to find Rich’s Substack (and information about Poets on the Coast), and here’s a “real” review of Blue Atlas from Tinderbox:

Review of Blue Atlas by Susan Rich

NPM #2: Oubliettes of Light

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OUBLIETTES OF LIGHT, Lisa Ashley. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2025, 73 pages, $17.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

What a pleasure for me to begin National Poetry Month with a blog-review of Lisa Ashley’s debut book of poetry, Oubliettes of Light.

An oubliette is a secret dungeon, accessible only through a trapdoor at the top. In these poems, we encounter multiple trapdoors, and we drop through them into dark, painful histories: the Armenian genocide, fragmented stories of violence handed down through the generations (along with family recipes, and a thirst for survival). A father provides for his family, and bullies and abuses his wife and children. A mother escapes into her flower garden, and into a bottle of Scotch. Lisa Ashley, the middle child of seven, escapes the family home in rural New York State, makes her way West, finds love and motherhood, becomes a chaplain working with incarcerated youth.

And, lucky for us, she eventually finds her way to poetry.

In my attempt to capture Ashley’s book in a quick paragraph, I had to ask myself, what makes me love this book? Why would I call it a pleasure? Why will anyone else love these poems? Let me walk you through my thought process. Consider these lines opening the first poem, “Grandmother’s Story Stone”:

I know no Armenian, she no English.
Like a pupil at attention, she sits
in her straight chair by the cookstove,
shuffles pages back to front
in her Armenian Bible. She mutters,
gnarled fingers rowing.

Several lines later we get our first glimpse of the poet: “I whisper behind my hand / scubbity, scubbity, scubbity.” How else to translate an incomprehensible past? What do you hear: scubbity. What do you see: “cotton stockings [as they] sloop / into ankle bracelets.” What do you smell: “garlic, olive oil, mint, her perfume.”

Above all, these are poems of witness. Necessary to the times we live in.

But, importantly, the poems in Oubliettes of Light are not trapdoors one falls through into darkness, they are not about trauma. These poems are about healing from trauma. They are about the solace one finds in a well-lived maturity. Not dungeons, but the unexpected doors opening above us into light. A child and a young adult taking in all that happens around her and processing it; a woman on a spiritual path of awareness and reclamation.

I Went Out to Hear

after Leila Chatti

I went out to hear
birdsong. Layered
in springtime air like icing
on cake sweet
clamor of joy,
praise song to life.
I hear the undertow of bees,
find one dancing
on the poppy’s green ball
in the arms of ivory pistils,
lavender petals ten times the bee’s size
wave a Victorian fan flirtation.
Standing stock still, eyes locked,
knees heavy with pollen, I’m lost,
beat fevered wings
willing to work
this singular moment forever.

—Lisa Ashley

Years of work—personal work on herself, and work on the poetry—went into the making of this book. It shows on every page. Because I know how late she came to poetry, and how seriously she has taken it, I asked Lisa to describe her writing journey. This is what she wrote back (with her permission, I have lightly edited and shortened it) — it’s a blueprint for the later-in-life poet:

I was 60 years old when I crossed the threshold from prose writing (journalism, marketing, academic papers, sermons) to poetry writing. I was an absolute neophyte. My fundamental love of learning was my ally. It was like finding a secret, enormous treasure trove. I had never studied poetry in college. I had never read poetry in any serious way. I was familiar with Mary Oliver’s work because her poems were used so often in Unitarian Universalist services that folks in the congregations referred to themselves as the “Church of Mary Oliver.” I liked her work and the few poets I had come across in the past: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare. I had no grounding in how to read and appreciate poetry, although I felt drawn to it. In 2014, after a sermon, a congregant invited me to come to her writing group. I knew her to be a kind person so I went. From there I began to take online classes and workshops, taught by excellent poets including Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, James Crews and Danusha Laméris. I joined a newly formed workshop group on Bainbridge and subscribed to on-line poetry venues that delivered a poem daily to my inbox. I was eager to learn as much as I could. I wrote many poems and began to submit to journals. I published my first poem in 2019. In May 2024 I submitted my manuscript to MoonPath Press, to the Sally Albiso Award contest. I was a finalist and was chosen for publication. I continue to read poetry every day, listen to poetry podcasts, and have committed to writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month. You could say I approach poetry as an immersive experience, and write poems to explore who I am, and to heal.

In closing, this is an inspiring book, open-hearted and encouraging.

You can find Oubliettes of Light at MoonPath, or through Bookshop.org. To see Lisa’s brand new (and lovely) web site, follow this link: https://www.lisaashleypoet.com.

Last Call of the Dark

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My review of Mary Crane’s Last Call of the Dark just went up today, on-line at Raven Chronicles. Follow the link to read the full review!

As a bonus for reading my blog, here’s a poem – about spring, which cannot get here fast enough for me.

Hazel Catkin

I greeted the first spring-like day
with exhaustion, no appreciation
of a small portion of sun
in gray mosaic, and a stiff wind.
I was tired. The retreating season
offered no space for my small needs,
as the world iced over in suspicion
and decent people passed away.

I once fell in love with a hazel catkin –
heads drawn together, breath quickened,
we gazed into its bright red styles
instead of one another’s animated faces.
I don’t need to recreate the love
but the fall – the descent into desire
as the buds swell up, the body warms,
and a blush reawakens into life.

—Mary Eliza Crane

Crane is a western Washington poet who has resided in the hills above the Snoqualmie Valley for nearly four decades. Our paths have crossed at poetry open mics in Kirkland’s Book Tree and at Easy Speak in Wedgewood (Seattle); she is a co-host of her local poetry night in Duvall. To learn more about Last Call of the Dark, see my review (of course), or visit Cirque Press.

And if you are looking for an open mic, you can find it here: Western Washington Poets Network.

Books for Writers

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Before I forget, earlier this month I reviewed Martha Silano’s award-winning new book, This One We Call Ours, for Raven Chronicles. You can read the review here.

 

The holidays are upon us, and if you have a writer-friend, perhaps you’re wondering what book you should buy for them. Along these lines of thought, someone asked me to recommend my top 20 writing books, and I felt flummoxed. Only 20?!

What seemed more doable was to tell you about a few of the books, specifically about writing, that I’ve read this year, the ones that left the deepest footprints, the books I am most likely to reread, or to gift to my close friends.

 

THE WAY OF THE FEARLESS WRITER (St. Martin’s, 2022)

I stumbled across The Way of the Fearless Writer: Mindful Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life, by Beth Kempton, maybe in March. I picked it up, to begin with, at my local library. After a couple chapters, I ordered my own copy and returned the library’s (with a hearty recommendation to the volunteer at the desk).

In other words, I knew almost immediately that Fearless Writer was a book I had to mark up.

To write in service of the writing, not the ego, is a radical act. (p. 24)

Kempton is a Japanologist, who has also sojourned to China, and somewhere along the way met herself on the path. She invites us to do the same—not to study Japanese or the Tao Te Ching, but to embrace writing as a way of being. The passage quoted above continues:

What if we gathered up all the energy we usually spend worrying about what other people think and poured it into our writing? What if we really lived our lives, moment to moment, and wrote about that? What if we wrote to release what is burning inside us, allowing that to be enough for now? (pp. 24-25)

Kempton arranges her book around three gates (a symbol that has, for some time, spoken to me). When I reached her chapter on the gate of emptiness, my mind flew open. I was sitting in my writing cabin, my old dog snoring beside the door, but I felt, literally, as though I were poised on a threshold, about to embark on an entirely new way of being with my work. What if we wrote in service of the writing, not the ego?

It matters that I began reading this book around the time I was finishing Red Pine’s translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems, and, before I finished Fearless, I saw the Capitol Hill premier of the documentary film about Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to see this film, produced by Ward Serrill, and available now on-line; I have watched it three times.) Taken together these texts—these transcendent works of art—were transforming.

(Follow this link to learn more about Beth Kempton.)

 

OUT OF SILENCE, SOUND. OUT OF NOTHING, SOMETHING (Counterpoint, 2023)

What can I say about this wonderful book of writing advice from Susan Griffin, one of the leading eco-feminist writers of our time? Most of the chapters are quite short. Quoted passages from other writers punctuate the author’s chapters (some of my favorites, Grace Paley, Robert Caro, Le Guin). For instance:

Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want. (Ursula K. Le Guin, qtd. on p. 153)

Out of Silence is full of pithy advice about a writer’s work habits, words, sentences, metaphor, pauses, white space. But it’s never only pithy advice:

Creativity is more like a cat than a dog. You can’t order it to come to you. You just have to make yourself available until all of a sudden you find it leaping into your lap. (p. 55)

This sounds overly folksy, but I assure you I’ve underlined and highlighted passages on almost page. I first read this book last year, and I picked it up again in September when election anxiety was trying to do me in. Griffin is a wise, older guide, taking you by the hand, whispering, See, it doesn’t have to be fancy—it’s better if it’s not fancy!

I’ll leave you with this passage, from a chapter titled “Paragraphs”:

At times writers make [craft] choices logically but more often they come to us after immersing ourselves in the subject matter, after breathing the subject in, walking with it, sleeping on it, letting it fit into our dreams, coaxing it phrase by phrase into language. Sometimes, if we have pondered what approach to take for several hours or days or even weeks, the work starts to speak to us. (p. 106)

Let me emphasize one thread between these books. Kempton is concerned about attention: where our attention lies, how to command it, how to follow its lead. So is Griffin: “you will need to learn to pay attention to your own attention” (p. 7).

(To learn more about Susan Griffin, visit her website.)

 

TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW (Zando, 2024)

This book, by Steven Almond, was pressed on me by a friend. At first I found it … a little too … something. Casual? Comic? I liked it, well enough, but I let it get pushed aside by other books. Recently I picked it up again, and I’m so glad I did. I have called other writers and read passages aloud to them. (His stories about his children—Josie and the dread Babrika!—and about reading children’s books aloud, in particular.)

But there is so much more to this book than Almond’s entertaining and no-bullshit voice (unafraid to write about how to write about sex, unafraid to chronicle his own most humiliating moments as a parent, as a teacher, as a writer). The job of the writer, he tells us, “is to love and mourn” (p. 204). This passage, which is placed at the end of the book, echoes insights threaded throughout, and says it all for me:

We are living in an era of screen addiction and capitalist pornography. As a species, we are squandering the exalted gifts of consciousness, losing our capacity to pay attention, to imagine the suffering of others. You are a part of all of this. It involves you. This is the hard labor we are trying to perform: convincing strangers to translate our specks of ink into stories capable of generating rescue. (p. 230)

What more can I add? “You are all part of this.” Writing is not a retreat or an escape from the world and your responsibility for it. What you write matters. It’s crucial.

(All three books are available at Bookshop.org, your local independent book store, and elsewhere. To learn more about Steve Almond and his books, visit his website.)