Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

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I have to admit that this morning I felt utterly exhausted. I seemed to be suffering from a complete lack of forward momentum and was just about to commit to taking a day off from my #nationalpoetrymonth blog marathon, when I opened my email and found this:

I was thinking about how I think of my life as stories, which tripped me to think about short stories, which caused me to wonder about how a poem is like a short story….I went to your blog and right off the bat, found two great examples of poems that are short stories. Gary Copeland Lilley and Jeanne Lohmann gave me a knock on the side of the head.

It made me want to join the conversation again.

I have been reading—sometimes memorizing—Ruth Stone’s poems ever since I came across her early poem, “Orchard” in a small Modern Library anthology with a blue cover: Twentieth Century American Poetry. Published by Random House in 1944, and again in 1963, that “Twentieth-Century” seems poorly chosen, or at least arbitrary. I mean, why did the editors decide to include Emily Dickinson? Perhaps because she was published in the 20th century? But in 1944, we still had half a century to survive and write about!

Since that time I have picked up numerous copies of Ruth Stone’s books (she had 12, during her life). And now, thanks to Copper Canyon Press, we have a new, Essential Ruth Stone. I paid for a ticket so I could attend their Zoom book launch last fall, and bought a copy of the book.

Please, please follow the link (in paragraph above) to Copper Canyon and listen to Ruth’s granddaughter, Bianca, read aloud “Pokeberries.” Worth the price of admission. (And is it too much to hope that one day I’ll have a granddaughter who writes poems?)

Speaking of reading poetry aloud, I once heard Dorianne Laux recite this poem aloud—this was during her keynote talk at Litfuse, in maybe 2015. I had read the poem before, probably more than once. Frankly, it had never really come alive for me. But when Dorianne Laux recited it! Years later, I can still hear Dorianne’s voice—and Ruth Stone’s words. It also strikes me as being a perfectly condensed short story. Addressed to her late husband (who committed suicide when their daughters were young), the poem pours a whole life into its lines:

Curtains

Putting up new curtains
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, “No pets! No pets!”
I become my aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it’s like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

—Ruth Stone

Forgive my pronunciation of Anna Magnani. I practiced it, and still didn’t get it right.

Gary Copeland Lilley

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As I read Gary Copeland Lilley’s debut collection, The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004), this morning, I could swear my daughters’ high school choir teacher was in the room, raising her arms in a hallelujah and exclaiming, “Take me to church!”

These poems are chock-full of lines begging to be read aloud, or sung in a church choir—or make that a blues bar: “stashed steel gods….stolen still” (“Rudeboy in the Light”); “Blue jeans and boots and sometimes a black / leather jacket” (“Ritual of the Bush”); “Dude was gone like the single gunshot, / his life bouncing like a basketball / off alley bricks” (“Hitting It at the Paradise Apartments”). I could open the book to any page and find more lines for you. The syllables bounce, vocal riffs, as this poet plays the page like an instrument. Or, in Eleanor Wilner’s praise on the back cover: “Master bluesman of letters, heir apparent to Etheridge Knight, Gary Copeland Lilley is the versatile troubadour for people doing hard time on the planet.”

The Subsequent Blues is only 48 poems in 3 sections, but there is so much packed in. It’s a book where dead people walk, where the mortuary and bar and dance club and Pentecostal church all tip onto the same dark streets, where “every song’s got a bag of blue notes,” and the poet smokes with ghosts.

Click on his name above to find a video of him reading a poem. Here’s one from The Subsequent Blues:

Oracle at the End of the Bar

I’m drinking Jim Beam doing small sips
in the sentences no one interrupts.
You talk to yourself nobody’s got a damn
word to waste on whatever you have to say.
Stools lined with government workers.
This fast crowd of mortgages drinks
and it turns a moon of consequences.
Leon who beats his wife will get jacked
leaving this bar about 3AM he will wear
her bruises tonight. Johnny Cole
a nostalgic pimp in shades walks in
just so people know he’s not dead.
The cash and carry boys roll through
‘cause money gets off the street
to watch a piece of the game.
Lil’ Nate will get shot in the foot
for his jacket and will get a job
when he gets off crutches.
Dorothy rides bottles in the mirror
knowing she’s the prettiest
crackhead in the room her man John
is hustling just so she doesn’t
have to sell some ass. She will
hit the bricks John is going down tonight
on possession with intent. Herm’s holding on
to a quarter and a dime. Lynne’s going home
and will arrive in time for the booty-call.
The cop’s daughter Elizabeth will leave
with the cash and carry crew
and for a few hours more she’s free.
Outside in the light that comes
from the bar there’s a man
begging cigarettes and he looks right
into your eyes. You can believe
that Leon’s early morning stagger
will be just the chance he needs.

Jeanne Lohmann

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This morning, feeling busy and harassed (and distracted by the poetry reading at 4 p.m.), I thought I’d phone it in with a favorite poem by Jeanne Lohmann (1923-2016). Instead I found myself rereading all of her 2001 book, Flying Horses (Fithian Press).

She Who Travels Alone

No, not in Bristol or in Galway will I find him,
not Minneapolis or Sioux City. Though I am brave
and go as far as Antarctica, he does not
ride the ice floes or swim under frozen water.
He does not live with sheep in the Midlands
or walk the abandoned cloister. He
is not to be found on the benches in pubs
or the next seat at the theater. His shadow
does not hang on a thornbush or darken
the lost emerald lake in British Columbia.
The greenest of fields in Africa will not revive him,
or castanets in cantinas south of the border. He
does not rake stones in the Japanese garden,
sit silent and patient with open eyes in the zendo.
He does not lift luggage into the car or insist
on the open window. Though I am a tireless traveler
I cannot search out his face or bring him to bed.
The last kiss was goodbye, God be with you
most trusting and hopeful of prayers
for each restless departure,
each solitary coming home.

—Jeanne Lohmann

This is a book that I reread every so often. I love her praise poems and have several copied out in my commonplace book. But each time I read Flying Horses I’m caught by a different theme, or one poem I’ve overlooked leaps out at me. Today I’ve noticed how Lohmann plays with language, and draws other poets and writers into her poems–Dickinson and Whitman, John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sea Song Out of Beowulf

Dree me to nim the swan-road, breast-hoard, suffer me
to hole the sea’s storehouse, thole and take hold
of the bone-house, body-box, dree the skeleton store,
all the way suffer and endure the body walking light on the sea,
the body walking and the swan-road a-sheen, the body’s trunk
walking on the sea shining. Thole the breast-hoard,
nim the bone-house, seize the body-box, suffer
the store of thoughts and feelings home to the sea,
dree the skeleton all the way to the sea, the swan-road a-sheen
in the morning, the sea shining and singing in the morning.

—Jeanne Lohmann

I have been struggling with creating a new manuscript of poems, daunted at the task of choosing a smaller number of poems out of the cacaphonous 120 or so in my notebook and calling it “whole.” But Flying Horses takes numerous motifs—horses, the death of her parents and friends and especially of her husband, births of children, travels, all she is reading—and weaves them into a tapestry. (One poem, “Across the Warp,” seems to speak deliberately to this: “This rough underside, this is where we work / against the threads’ resistance, the tangled / colors.”)

Lohmann is often identified as a Quaker poet, and in many of these poems the spirit is present, shimmering. In a late poem, “Wasp in the House,” she writes about the trick of catching the wasp in a drinking-glass. She concludes: “As when tired of words / and the world, I am able to befriend / some small humming complexity / and let it go.”

 

 

 

 

Our Deepest Calling

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To register for the book launch of Our Deepest Calling, Saturday, April 17, at 4 p.m. , follow this link: https://www.villagebooks.com/event/litlive-chuckanut-sandstone-0401721. (And if you are wondering where the images are in this post, for some reason today I’m not able to upload new ones.)

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”

—Parker Palmer

Thanks to Village Books in Fairhaven—and Zoom—tomorrow at 4 p.m. my writing group will be celebrating the publication of a collection of poetry and prose written during our first ten years together. Our Deepest Calling is also available for purchase through Village Books ($16 and $1 shipping).

I’m taking a day off from writing something new for the blog, and reproducing here my introduction to Our Deepest Calling (fleshing it out a bit for people not familiar with the context given in my co-editor’s intro), followed by a sampling of poems. The book also includes short essays and an excerpt from a novel in progress.

“I learned how to write in the interstices of daily life.”

—Maxine Kumin

In 2010, when my dear friend Paul Marshall asked me if I would lead a Teaching Lab under the auspices of the Teaching and Learning Cooperative at Everett Community College, my first response was “oh, no.” That evening after supper and homework, one of my teenaged daughters had a meltdown over a boyfriend; another was fighting with her best friend; the ten-year-old didn’t want to go to bed; and my sister called to tell me that I really really needed to help out more with our aging parents. The next morning, instead of retreating into the pages of my journal, I graded a set of student papers. Then I thought, What if we called it a Teaching Lab, but wrote instead?

Our first meeting attracted a couple dozen people from across campus—staff, faculty, and even administrators. It was wild. In my recollection, we were before too long half that number, and soon we were only eight or so souls. No matter, we were committed. Our first year we worked through Susan M. Tiberghien’s One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft. By the second year, we all had our own projects underway and settled into a routine of just writing. Some of our colleagues were skeptical, to put it mildly: What are you doing in there, and what does it have to do with teaching?

To my mind, the Writing Lab had everything to do with…everything. Our sessions were only ninety minutes once a week—but that bit of time and each other’s encouragement were all we needed to keep the flame of our writing, questing and questioning lives burning.

Ten years ago, I was immersed in the daily catastrophe of full-time teaching and raising a family. Now that I’m retired from the college and my daughters are grown and out of the house, now that my parents have passed on, I have more time, or so I tell myself. Other group members have gone through similar transitions, all of which are reflected in our writings, no matter if we write of fortune cookies, jump ropes, or imaginary trysts with former U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Then along comes 2020 with new challenges, and its catastrophes on a global scale. Our writing group is now even more important to me, as we have over the years become a group of friends who listen deeply to one another and among whom we know we will be heard.

“Oh friends, where can one find a partner for the long dance over the fields?”

—William Stafford, from A Walk in the Country

I should add that, since moving ourselves off-campus to Rosehill Community Center near the Mukilteo Ferry Dock (and, this past year, to Zoom), we have morphed into an eclectic bunch of former EvCC people and community members. One of these is the award-winning artist Janet Hamilton, whose painting, “Madrona Concerto,” graces our cover.

Here is a poem from co-editor (and Zoom-master) Carla Shafer:

Ancestors

Because my family has lived on stolen tribal
lands in the northwest since I was born, I listen
to the bending of the trees, follow the paths
of salmon and walk days short in winter and
long in summer. This is not the place of my
ancestors. This is not Bohemia or Baden-Baden.
It is not the Nebraska plains or Kansas prairies.
I am not at the source of my great-grandparents’
imaginings, but their touch is in my hand, their
hopes carried in my heart, their steps are known
just as the salmon wiggles a fin,
and in the sway of a cedar bough.

My grandsons, living near, speak Japanese, the language
of their mother’s family, celebrate Children’s Day
and imagine beyond boundaries and borders. My
daughter’s child will speak Hindi and Urdu,
celebrate Eid al Fitr. Their paths of succession will move
through hazards in shadow and light. They will view
stars across generations who have danced
on the same side of the moon. Their ancestors
traced in their steps, in the twinkle of their eyes,
in the embrace of what comes next, beneath the flight
of peregrine falcons, above waters where Orcas swim.

—Carla Shafer