Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

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Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book?

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but I’m going to try. (With one opening couplet that reads thus: “Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain. / They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.” What on earth will this poem be about?) It was not the sort of book I normally set out to read in one day. These are poems that one needs to mull over, to live with. Ultimately, it’s a book I will keep on my shelf to reread at a slower pace. A book that I already know will reward rereading.

Here is one prose poem from a series of 6 titled “Another Letter to the Soul”:

4.

You are the sound of rain, if it weren’t falling but rising from below, a ground-nester, not a tree one, such as the bobolink or longspur, created below our feet, like the oil is. Rain in the ears and snowmelt rushing through the heart, a distant sound, as of the past retreating. Though loud, continuing its retreating presence. What can the flood teach me about you? I see frothing at the surface and watch myself pulled in, as if identity were an antithesis to gravity. Yet not knowing is part of you, whether I sink or swim, whether I abandon the body or stay and fight for it. When someone says, “you will know when the time comes,” does she mean the soul speaks? What part, then, indecision, net of doubts we might call debris, web of plastic tape roping off the danger? Mudbanks where the deer’s leg sinks in?

I’ve been fascinated by the soul, by the concept of the soul, since I was a kid. I won’t go into that right now, except to say that Kwasny’s book shows me that I am not alone in my obsessions. (And floods! “What can the flood teach me about you?”) Her poems make me want to open my notebook and write my own meditations, to ride them as far as they will take me, even if I end up falling into a mudbank. First, after all, there’s the soaring.

Linda Pastan’s Insomnia

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Just the title alone would be enough to make this book resonate with me. But it’s also by Linda Pastan, who wrote “An Early Afterlife,” and — so far as I’m concerned — could have retired after that and still stayed at the top of my list.

Instead, we have Insomnia (Norton, 2015). As Pastan grows older — she is 83  (“Why are these old, gnarled trees / so beautiful, while I am merely / old and gnarled?”) — her themes turn toward long marriage, illness, sleepness nights. She has always handled domestic subjects — like death — deftly, with grace and accuracy. Her eye is as sharp as ever.

Consider the Space Between Stars

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks

and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space

between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
these vanishing years, filled with light.

-Linda Pastan

Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August

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It is National Poetry Month, and having gone through all of my books in March (and letting go of a great number of them), I thought I would read an entire poetry book each day in April, and then tell you about it.

A few years ago, when AWP was in Seattle, I attended a presentation featuring readers from The Sun, and that is how Danusha Laméris hit my radar. As soon as I got home, I looked her up and ordered her book. The Moons of August, I learned, once it was in my hands, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. When I read the list of acknowledgments in the back (Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar), I knew that I was surely destined to find her.

Laméris writes poems that so delight me, poems I have read over and over again. A few of her poems overlap with my own themes (for instance, “Fictional Characters,” which begins, “Do they ever want to escape? / Climb out of the white pages / and enter our world?”), but more often poems that I simply wish to goodness I had written. I write her poems into my own notebook, and see if I can imitate them, determined to write something that will please me half as much.

The Moons of August is like a series of hallways and stairwells that take you deeper and deeper into a house. You turn a corner and find a picture of her late brother, or her lost infant. Sometimes, you find hieroglyphics or cave drawings on the walls. There’s the funny story about her mother measuring penises, that turns into a reflection about God counting the hairs on our heads. We see people walking ahead of us, catch only a glimpse of Jack Gilbert or Temple Grandin as they disappear into a basement or climb out a window. Humor and heartbreak and a wry, forgiving and encompassing compassion are threaded all the way through.

I was thinking of the difficulty of picking just one poem to share with you, and then, I reread this poem. In it, Laméris displays that wonderful Ted-Kooser-like ability to take an ordinary moment in a woman’s life and turn it into something extraordinary.

Cherries

The woman standing in the Whole Foods aisle
over the pyramid of fruit, neatly arranged
under glossy lights, watched me drop
a handful into a paper bag, said how do you do it?
I always have to check each one.
I looked down at the dark red fruit, each cherry
good in its own, particular way
the way breasts are good or birds or stars.
Doesn’t everything that shines carry its own shadow?
A scar across the surface, a worm buried in the sweet flesh.
Why not reach in, take whatever falls into your hand.

Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August (Autumn House Press 2014)

What’s Your Morning Routine?

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My mother used to say, “I have no secrets.” In other words, if she thought it, she shared it.

So I want to share with you the secret of my morning routine.

As soon as I get up–well, pretty much as soon as I get up–I go out to the kitchen, flip on the Keurig, and then I go to the sink and pour myself 16 oz. of water.

While my coffee is making, I do some kind of exercise, maybe bending to touch my toes ten times.

I take my coffee to whatever spot I’m writing in these days and I pick up my journal. Now that we are almost empty-nesters, I write in a favorite chair inside the house; my dog appreciates it; besides, the cabin is really cold this time of year.

I write 2-3 pages in my big Everyman’s Journal, which I like to think of as my Everywoman’s Journal.

I have a couple of small assignments right now that I’m wrapping into my journal. I’ve written a very short entry every day since my mother has been on Hospice (today is day #52). It’s either a description of a visit with her, or a memory, or a reflection of some sort.

The other assignment began January 1. I came across a One-Bad-Poem notebook from 2007-2008, and it occurred to me that I could spend a few minutes each day revisiting a poem written 10 years ago. Here’s a sample:

Like Chalkboard Erasers

When I clump the old poems together
letters and phrases and whole lines shake loose
and drift over me in a chalky cloud.

Having this particular morning routine works for me, and it usually launches me into a day of getting writing done. Even if I have a day of driving ahead of me, appointments, or whatever, I move into my day knowing that I’ve accomplished something that matters to me, something that makes me feel alive. Writing.

So here’s my secret, that is not a secret at all if you’ve followed my blog for very long.

I don’t have to drink 16 oz. of water. I don’t have to write 3 pages in my journal. I don’t have to be brilliant in my mom diary. I don’t have to revise the poem, and it (still) doesn’t have to be good.

All I have to do is offer myself the opportunity. I pour the water. I pick up my pen. I think about my mom. I recopy the poem. Sometimes it’s a bit lame. But I’m not here to be wildly successful. It’s more like an experiment. I see what happens.