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Happy Solstice

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Greetings & Gratitude would be a good subtitle for this post.

It’s been one of those years — I’m thinking of the news headlines, but also the loss of people dear to me. The last of my mother’s brothers died this summer, and a shocking number of my older cousins slipped away throughout 2023.

In the writing world, we lost several notables, including Linda Pastan and Louise Gluck. Locally, we lost the Edmonds poet John Wright. And, as I learned only last week, my poetry teacher, MFA advisor, and long-time mentor, Colleen McElroy died on December 12, 2023.

Perhaps that’s why I keep bumping into these lines from Wendell Berry:

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

In such times, when one doesn’t naturally dwell on gratitude, there is all the more reason to lean into it.

And, yes, I have had lots to be grateful for in 2023. Husband in good health. Daughters thriving, each in her own merry way. Spring brought a terrific road trip to see Yellowstone National Park (a first for me, westerner though I am), which included (in addition to lots and lots of driving) a stop in Spokane to see Bruce’s family. In August, my husband and daughters accompanied me to my family reunion in Doty, Washington, where I saw all my siblings, my mother’s two remaining sisters, plus many cousins, nieces, and nephews. With the aforementioned daughters I also went to Disneyland (for “Spooky Disney” in October, my girls’ choice for a trip to celebrate turning 30). On every trip I managed to reconnect with old friends, and a couple new ones, too.

And, there’s the writing thing.

Besides numerous writing retreats and junkets with fun-loving poets, I am SO so grateful for my new book The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm, and to Lana Hechtman Ayers, the Albiso Award, and MoonPath Press.

I am grateful to have had a front-row seat to watch my friend Carla Shafer play her part in the 2023 Jack Straw cohort.

I took two classes in 2023, one being a repeat of the Summer Intensive (prose-writing) with Seattle writer and teacher Priscilla Long (I wrote a new story out of my ancestral-stories vein, and ginned out two new essays). The second class (which I audited) was taught at the University of Buffalo by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller on Emily Dickinson’s letters (a new edition of which, edited by Miller and Domnahl Mitchell, will be published by Harvard UP Spring 2024).

I kept up my practice of writing a poem every week this year, and I’m grateful for a whole bunch of 2023 publications. If you can bear with me, here’s the list:

Two of my poems were included in Purr and Yowl, the delightful new anthology of poetry about cats, edited by Rose Alley Press’s David D. Horowitz, and published by World Enough Writers (https://worldenoughwriters.com).

I have a poem in vol. 16 of Delmarva Review, which arrived in the mail only last week.

My poem, “Faith & Doubt,” was a semi-finalist for the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, and will appear in the forthcoming issue of Crab Creek Review. 

The amazing Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim published my poem, “In the Beginning.”

Some of these I’ve mentioned before, poems published earlier this year by the following (journals and on-line venues to put on your send-out list):

Descant; Naugatuck River Review: a Journal of Narrative Poetry that Sings; Braided Way; Escape Into Life; Hare’s Paw; Hole in the Head Review; The Dewdrop; Clackamas Literary Review; The Freshwater Review; Compass Rose Literary Journal; and Catamaran. (See my CV for clickable links to many of these.)

Oh, and I can’t forget my poem in the splendid anthology I Sing the Salmon Home, edited by Rena Priest and published by Empty Bowl.

Other than poems:

In 2023, my short story, “Wheels of the Bus,” was published at The Fictional Cafe, May 15, 2023. (It was a strange, experimental thing for me, not like any other story I’ve written, but there it is.)

And, in addition to another April full of appreciative blog posts about poetry books, I had two reviews published in other venues: Tele Aadsen’s What Water Holds, at Raven Chronicles, and Sati Mookherjee’s Ways of Being at EIL (links are to my blog posts).

And…and…and…in addition to working with individual poets this year, I continued to facilitate a writing group (originally composed of EvCC outlaw writers), and taught a poetry class. I hope to do more of the same in 2024.

What else? In my old family newsletters, I always gave an update on our animals, so, briefly, our Tibetan Terrier, Pabu, is now 15, sleeping a lot, but still with us. This year we lost our last “family” cat, Mr. Richie Stubbz, a beautiful huge tuxedo cat who had been living with our youngest daughter. (She has now adopted two kittens, Esteban and Simon.)

Which prompts me to offer you a poem by my friend, poet Joannie Stangeland. The opening lines are what we’re all waiting for.

The Cat’s Poem

Waiting for snow to write the branches, grass, mud into a poem.

The day stays as gray as the cat who appeared last night.

The cat as gray as a ghost hunched on our front porch.

More fluff and purr than body, waiting to make our house his home.

A place left bare after our cat died.

The night was cold and colder.

Snugged close to the storm door — still, he stayed.

This gray cat with collar, tags, a name and numbers.

Maybe Lenny was lost or missing? The cat’s poem, I am here and I don’t know where.

My son texted the owners, who were out of town.

Could we take him to their house, let him in? and we did.

How strange the cat choosing our house and strange the staying.

This morning, I check the porch, hoping, knowing it’s wrong.

— Joannie Stangeland, Purr and Yowl (p. 186)

To all of you who have graced and lightened (and lit up!) my work and my days in 2023, thank you.

a view of Glen Cove during our November writers’ retreat

 

Tito Titus, I Can Still Smile Like Errol Flynn

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I CAN STILL SMILE LIKE ERROL FLYNN, Tito Titus. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2015, 100 pages, $15 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

I had heard about Tito Titus, had maybe bumped elbows with him at Litfuse in Tieton some years past; sometime, somewhere, someone had given me his book of poems. On Saturday at the launch of I Sing the Salmon Home, he said hello and introduced himself. Today, I rummaged through my bookshelves, found his book, and read it all the way through, even the end notes (which are sort of a poem, themselves).

These words, from Titus’s website, capture the experience:

In I can still smile like Errol Flynn Tito Titus interrogates life, aging, and death with a delicate blow torch. These poems adore the beauty of youth and memory, fluently articulate the melancholy and nostalgia delivered by loss; and, with irreverence and awe, dicker with Death. It’s wry, wistful, fierce, searing, erotic, humorous, regretful, brave, and lonely.

“A delicate blowtorch.” Exactly. The poems are also, at least part of time, quite charming.

Someone’s darling daughter

approached me today
with a bag of weed
at a good price,
even for Hilo,
and I said yes
because the plumeria
tattoo peeking above
her low slung sarong
told me pleasure
lasts only a while.

—Tito Titus

In these poems the body gets all the attention it craves. Nose hairs, penises, “the old bastard’s feet,” bellies. And so much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands.

As Joannie Stangeland remarks in her cover blurb, the book also “reaches further back to childhood, facing the past’s violence and the silence after, its bruises and scars.” In the last section, we’re introduced to a cast of characters just as they’re leaving life’s stage. You’d think it would be too heartbreaking to read, but Titus uses a conversational tone that drew me in.

Here’s a poem, so you can make up your own mind. I love the long title.

The evening of the day after things changed like they’d never changed before

He wanted to sit on the front porch
watching no one pass on the empty street,
but it was cold, wet, and windy,
so he sat in the darkened room
watching the telephone. It rang once
earlier in the day. A wrong number.
He thought to engage the caller
in conversation but let it pass. Perhaps
someone else would call. Or maybe not.
Or probably not. Or not at all.
The radio played songs he didn’t know
by performers he didn’t know.
The newspaper still lay by the front door.
He cleaned the refrigerator. It contained so little.
He forgot to turn on the furnace,
put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
At last he reached for the bookshelf.
Sometimes he felt a little bit Leonard Cohen,
but he felt like Bukowski tonight.

—Tito Titus

The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski. If you, too, would like to know more about Tito Titus, visit his website, particularly the scrapbook page: https://www.poetfire.com/scrapbook.

Joannie Stangeland

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THE SCENE YOU SEE, Joannie Stangeland. Ravenna Press, PO Box 1166, Edmonds, WA 98020, 2018, 60 pages, $14.95 paper, http://ravennapress.com/.

The Scene You See is Stangeland’s fourth poetry collection. It is luminous. Stangeland draws from the world of painting, capturing color and line (and texture and scent and…) and paying homage to numerous artists. (“Cast an eye for shadows” she writes in “Self-Portrait, if I Were Lebasque.”) But the poems here also pay homage to the gifts of marriage and shared meals and glasses of wine. It made me feel strangely grateful for the ordinary, for the chance to stay at home all afternoon and read. Which I seem to be doing a lot of. (Like you.)

Be sure to check our Stangeland’s blog and her Saturday poetry picks.

Our Bodies Given up for Light

An inch no longer measured by a thumb,
a foot for walking only–
old artifacts abandoned.

Particle and wave, what is the shape
of essential undulations
to which distance now is tethered, and time?

Its lambent body pummels me from the sun,
glistening minutes
shattered on the sand.

What is the shape of love?
Like a turtle pressing
slowly toward the lettuce,

a smooth river stone–or is it the river,
so often standing in for time
rushing over the rocks

like the horse galloping across a field–
or is it riding the horse, the wind in her mane,
in your hair, almost like flying?

Is love a peach, the fuzz a soft burr
in your hand? Or can you not hold love,
the fog that runs through your fingers?

 

Joannie Stangeland’s In Both Hands

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Should you wonder, I can’t italicize words in the post title, which is why the titles of books are not. Furthermore, Joannie Stangeland’s book has “both” italicized, so, In Both Hands.

And this is a book you’ll want to hold onto with both hands — it has flying horses, furious skies, lakes that rise into the air — all in all, a volatile place to lose yourself for an hour or two.

I chose this poem (below) for you to read out loud and savor, because of the final tercet. As the poem begins with “Words tonight fly out as black as crows,” I can guess that the home the poet refers to is language (perhaps more complex than that). But having spent an hour with my mother today, at her care home, attempting to have a conversation with this dearly beloved woman who can no longer carry the thread of a conversation, the poem rings true for me on an even deeper level.  Let me add to that comment, that many of the poems in this book are about mothers and daughters. I have read most of the poems before; and I suspect I will read them many times again. I hadn’t sat and read them all at once, and it was a lovely and resonant choice, particularly today.

Roost

Words tonight fly out as black as crows,
oily and stubborn, ruffled and sharp.
Feathers may litter the floor.

The air holds a fever, a taut pitch,
a howl we hitch to, each unsure
of our turf. Bristling, a hiss—

and it isn’t the kettle or the cat.
But we swallow the rest, stinging
until the barbs wing into the night.

We settle our worries like eggs.
Tomorrow, we draw the same breath
when we see the mountains rising

into morning, as white as clouds.
A crow’s nest is a sloppy mess,
a loose muddle of twigs in a tree.

Love is like that—on a hard day, held
with spit and bits of string—
on a good day, home.

—Joannie Stangeland