A Letter for Emily Dickinson

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Poet Annie Finch

Nothing like waiting until the last minute. But here I am, finally spending a little time with my laptop and ready to introduce you to my NaPoWriMo Day Two poem.

This poem is from Visiting Emily, poems inspired by Emily Dickinson, and published by the University of Iowa Press in 2000. I love the simple first line, how Annie Finch just steps and begins talking to us, talking to Emily, and, at the same time, explaining some rather essential things about her own life. Bread. Sewing. Poetry.

If you want to use this poem as a kind of model for your poem today (or tomorrow), here are some of things you might notice about it (quickly, as it really is late-ish, and I already wrote my attempt for today): In addition to being an homage to Emily Dickinson, notice the cascade of rhymes, not only in the end of lines, but along the lines. Notice the repeated coda. If you’re looking for inspiration, think about the voice, utterly accessible, intimate, familiar. You could imitate the form, or you could just write a poem to Emily, or to another figure whose biography you’ve ingested.

A Letter for Emily Dickinson

Like me, you used to write while baking bread,
propping a sheet of paper by the bins
of salt and flour, so if your kneading led
to words, you’d take them, looping their thin shins
in your black writing, as they sang to be free.
You captured those quick birds relentlessly,
yet kept a slow, sure mercy in your deeds,
leaving them room to peck and hunt their seeds
in the white cages your vast iron art
had made by moving books, and lives, and creeds.
I take from you as you take me apart.

When I cut words you might never have said
into fresh patterns, pierced in place with pins,
ready to hold them down with my own thread,
they change and twist sometimes, their color spins
loose, and your spider generosity
lends them from language that will never be
free of you after all. My sampler reads,
“called back.” It says “she scribbled out these screeds.”
It calls, “she left this trace, and now we start,”
in stitched directions following the leads
I take from you, as you take me apart.

Can you write a poem-a-day for 30 days?

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If you want to participate in the April poetry writing challenge, there are lots of good ways to go about it. You can start by learning more about the process at napowrimo.net, which I found via Chris Jarmick’s blog, Poetry Is Everything. Our Washington State Poet Laureate, Elizabeth Austen, is also blogging a writing prompt per day this month.

Last year I wrote my one-bad-poem per day on the blog (just click on April 2014 in my index, if you want to see the results), but this year I thought rather than sharing my badness with you, I’d share a favorite, short poem each day. My goal is 30 poets in 30 days.

This gem is by Philip Larkin (1922-1985), a poet I always thought was a little too thoroughly modern (read, “pessimistic”) for me. Then, reading Structure & Surprise, I came across “The Mower,” which I fell immediately in love with. “The Mower” reminds me of all the small, beautiful things we should be responsible for, and neglect. It reminds me of things I’ve done–big and small–that can’t be undone. I love how utterly, utterly simple this poem is, just recounting a small chore, a small loss, but then how it lifts out of that loss to make a statement about all loss.

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

-Philip Larkin

Sailing by Ravens

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A month or so ago I was fortunate to be able to have lunch with an old friend, poet Holly J. Hughes. I have mentioned her on this blog before, as she is one of the authors of The Pen and Bell (with Brenda Miller). And, as if catching Holly between a thousand other calls for her attention wasn’t accomplishment enough, she gave me a copy of her new poetry book, Sailing by Ravens, published by University of Alaska Press (2014).

“Read the poems in order,” Holly told me as we parted. But I always read poetry books in order, gobbling them up (in fact) like novels–not short stories or novellas, by the way, novels, because the best books of poetry have just as much emotional content. Not easy, not on the surface like a more conventional narrative, but there nonetheless.

Sailing by Ravens did not disappoint. I knew from reading her earlier chapbook, Boxing the Compass (Floating Bridge, 2007), that learning to navigate rough seas would be interwoven here with the trickier navigation of a marriage and its end. But in Sailing, the metaphor of navigation is extended. Holly spent 30 summers working in (on?) the waters of Alaska (I’m quoting a review by Tim McNulty), “fishing, skippering a sailing schooner, and working as a ship’s naturalist. Her poems shimmer with authenticity.”  The poems about human relationships shimmer with authenticity, too. And all of the poems benefit from Holly’s willingness to carefully observe her world (and read about it), no matter how painful, or how beautiful. The prose poem, “Navigating the Body,” had an epigraph that sent me scurrying for a pen (“No land in human topography is less explored than love” -Jose Ortega y Gasset) and then took me into unexpected territory:

Navigating the Body

Our bodies an accumulation of coordinates, paths not taken, streets pulled up short, lonely alleys, dead ends. In the dark I reach out, find crows’ crooked feet, scrim of scars–proud flesh–read each scar, remember its time and place, its bright spurt of blood. These are the landscapes we think we know. These are the landscapes we’ll never know. In the dark, we make our way, mapping and remapping the continents each night. Like Scheherazade we keep doing this; like Scheherazade, this is how we stay alive. 

Confession: I’ve read this book three times. The first time through, the forms (sestina, villanelle, ghazal and others) as well as some of the subjects (Mercator, Flavia Gioia, John Harrison are only three) were lost on me. But as I read and absorbed the notes, and reread the poems, the book seemed to have a trapdoor in its floor that dropped me down into another level (into water? over my head?). It was only then that I began to appreciate the encyclopedic knowledge that I was being offered, in addition to the poetics, “Isinglass darkened, but not enough to shield our Eyes, / rays of Sun Fractal, spatterpaint retinas, Shutter stutters.” (Just two lines from “The Forestaff 1587.” Such sounds!) So, not just argot, then, but shovel-loads of sound and sense detail, “scooped, shovel by shimmering shovel, into the fish hold” (“What She Can’t Say”).

True, it takes a while to process such a treasure. But the trip is well worth it–and I’m pleased to heartily recommend this book.

Go to http://hollyjhughes.com/  to find more information about Holly J. Hughes (and links to reviews), and to Verse Daily to find another of her poems.

Color OUTSIDE the lines

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color outside the linesFor my artist date a few weeks ago, I signed up for a 2-hour art class at ArtSpot in Edmonds. I had no idea what to expect, but it was advertised as an Artist’s Way function, and it seemed to fit the bill.

There were only a few students, and I was there early. The teacher swept me into the back room and asked what brought me. I told her about The Artist’s Way and about my on-going love of art and art-making, all the aborted projects at home, my drawing classes in college (from which I withdrew, every time). “What’s up with that?” she asked, not really paying attention (or so it seemed), and busily laying out her materials.

I told her my mother’s story about me as a little girl, watching my older brother color in a coloring book and refusing to take part until I was able to color perfectly, inside the lines. “Oh!” My teacher’s face lit up. “You must color OUTSIDE the lines!”

We worked with gelli plates to create our art, something entirely new for me, by the way. It was a little like finger-painting, just playing with several layers of acrylic paints and patterns, applying each one in a more or less systematic way to a block or a small piece of canvas (I did both). When we were finished with the gelli’s, our instructor wanted us to write I AM ENOUGH on the finished product. On my first project, I instead wrote COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES. On my blue one, I wrote (in paint, very sloppy) “I am enough,” but I later covered it up and tried to turn the projeangelct into an angel, like one I’d seen in the studio. (Copying was encouraged.)

I wasn’t entirely pleased with how these turned out (that darned perfectionism!), but my teacher said it didn’t matter. “This is about process, not product. Do it again! Have fun!”

And I did have fun.