Guest Poet: Paul Marshall

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I am pleased to share with you a poem by my friend and fellow Writing Labster, Paul Marshall. Paul’s words have graced this blog before (check out his book, too, Building a Boat: Lessons of a 30-Year Project). Last August, he joined me and a bunch of other mostly-northwest poets in the poetry postcard challenge. His process differed from mine in his usual Marshallian way, and was an inspiration.

One of Paul’s postcard poems will appear in the anthology, 56 Days of August.  In the postcard poem below, Paul writes about a local beach and bears witness to the generations of other visitors who came before him.  It has been many years since I went clam-digging, but I don’t think I’ll ever eat a clam again without feeling his presence.

Elders

Native spirits of the Salish Sea
whisper to me as I walk the Double Bluff beach.
The bluff rises like a sentinel
cast in sand and rock.  Standing guard for 15,000 years,
lone soldier left for us by the retreating army of ice.

Butter clams have brought humans to this spot
since the ice left.  Digging into the barnacle
encrusted cobble I feel the cold hands
of the old ones digging alongside mine.
We search for the grey and tan shelled creature that will feed us
this summer night.

 

Jeanne Lohmann, 1923-2016

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I went searching this morning for a list of books by the Quaker poet Jeanne Lohmann to recommend to a friend, and learned that she recently died. I don’t know whether to be sad or to rejoice that the world got to share this woman’s light for such a long time.

Some years ago a poem of mine, “Such Good Work,” was a co-winner of the Jeanne Lohmann prize, and as a consequence I was invited to read my work for Olympia Poetry Network. I met Jeanne, who was then 80+, and I bought several of her books. OPN has invited me back twice as their feature — and both times it was a head-first plunge into the poetry mosh pit — such a wild and great group of people to read for and with. They very obviously revered Lohmann. And for good reason.

Here’s a poem reprinted in the Oly-Arts obituary; it is also reprinted on Cordella.org, where Lohmann’s voice reads aloud two other poems:

Questions Before Dark

Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, consider
your altered state: has this day
changed you? Are the corners
sharper or rounded off? Did you
live with death? Make decisions
that quieted? Find one clear word
that fit? At the sun’s midpoint
did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites
the possible? What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again? Did you set a straw
parallel to the river, let the flow
carry you downstream?

–Jeanne Lohmann

The List Poem

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Further thoughts on messiness.

Last week, at Writing Lab, my friend Kathryn shared a poem about the inauguration. It did not include any political leanings or intent. It was a string of images that she had collected throughout the day. It was profound.

This morning I spent an hour working with the poems of another friend, and I began thinking about how my poems often begin with a kind of announcement of what the poem will include. In a way, though, the poem IS that announcement. The poem can be a kind of machine for thinking through a memory or an incident or a desire.

I googled “list poem” and came up with a number of prompts: a list of what bugs you, a list of what you find around you in the thisherenow, a list of I-am details or reflections.

What impressed me about Kathryn’s poem — the beauty of this form — was how it did not editorialize, didn’t need to editorialize. What Kathryn paid attention to could be interpreted, of course, but the poem became that machine for not only her thinking, but for the reader’s thinking, too. It made us complicit. Looking around the room, you could see her audience time-tripping back to their own inaugural day images. (Click on the link to see another of her poems.)

A friend at church yesterday did something very similar when she stood up and shared her experience of going to the women’s march in Washington D. C. She had her pink hat for show-and-tell, and the details she shared were images — a kind of poem, in themselves. She concluded beautifully with her strongest image, one sign that she encountered that day (an echo of pastor Martin Niemoller‘s famous lines): “First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY.”

It is never tidy, of course. After my friend spoke, a more conservative man from our congregation stood up and offered his list. (Well, as we say, “The body of Christ is very large.”)

 

I have friends who are conservative, progressive, and in between. They know where I stand because of what I pay attention to. A list poem can do that, too.

Poetic Medicine

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“Writing and reading poems is a way of seeing and naming where we have been, where we are and where we are going with our lives.” -John Fox

I saw this book, POETIC MEDICINE: THE HEALING ART OF POEM-MAKING, by John Fox, at a friend’s house. She hadn’t read it yet, but promised to forward her recommendation. I remember that day, that writing session, especially, because, as we were finishing, her front yard suddenly filled with all sorts of birds. I think it was a precursor of the weather that was sweeping in, but it had that feeling of an omen. When I spied Poetic Medicine on the shelf at Half-Price Books, I remembered those birds, and I bought it.

While visiting my mom over the last couple of days, I packed the book with me, and read in all the interstices. Some gems include the preface by Rachel Naomi Remen, and an abundance of poems from every where, including this one by Wendell Berry, which spoke directly to the emotions I’ve been dealing with these last few weeks. I started in September to work on a series of poems about my dad’s death, and wings seem to push their way into every poem. I’ve been trying to read between the lines of my drafts, and see what this is saying to me, what it’s saying that hasn’t already been said by so many others. And this book is helping. So, the poem:

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

-Wendell Berry