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Two Books by Susan Landgraf

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JOURNEY OF TREES, Susan Landgraf, The Poetry Box Publishing, 2024. Finalist for the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

THE INSPIRED POET: WRITING EXERCISES TO SPARK NEW WORK, Susan Landgraf, Two Sylvias Press, 2019.

In the words of Jane Wong, the poems in Journey of Trees are “fed by the kindling of myth and lyrical curiosity.” Sati Mookherjee tells us the poems “show how we story-tell our way into truth-telling.” More proof that poetry is a good path for us to find ourselves on.

I purchased both of these books in June of 2024, right before my life began unraveling. They have waited patiently on my shelf for me to rediscover them, and National Poetry Month provides a perfect time to have done so.

The 37 exercises in The Inspired Poet include “Writing into Our Fears,” “Leaping Poetry,” “It’s a Piece of Cake,” acrostics, list poems, and “Thinking in Similes.” Each exercise offers example poems, for instance the simile-rich “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It,” from Traci Brimhall; the final poem in the book is Samuel Green’s brilliant “Some Reasons Why I Became a Poet.”

Landgraf is a long-time teacher of poetry and workshop leader herself, and, in short, this book is well worth your attention.

One poem from Journey of Trees— 

The Ten Stations of Worship

This is the hand held for safety’s sake,
palms raised to show the most traveled paths.

This is the foot, bunioned and mud-stained—Russian
steppes, ice caves, olive groves.

This is the leg, striding or curved, lotus-like
in the California poppies.

This is the eye of curled ferns and symbols.
This is the eye of permission. Amen.

This is the lap, a nest of goose down.
We’ve learned to fold and to wait.

This is the breast we come to and come to—
our need for suckle and beauty and grace.

This is the seed pod moist
with rain.

This is the other mouth
we depend on—the telling and retelling

in this temple of trees.

—Susan Landgraf

 I recently came across (again) the words of Wislawa Szymborska:  “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems” (from her poem, “Possibilities”). I’ve been questioning why I wanted to do so many reviews in April (when I have plenty else to keep me busy), and why I over-indulged on Independent Bookstore Day and bought a bunch more poetry books. Szymborska helps me understand myself, and this quote, from the great Grace Paley, shared by Landgraf (p. 177), helps, too:

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, [but] buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

(Interview from The Paris Review, 1992)

It’s not your obsession, Bethany, it’s your passion. (And such good company on the journey.) 

Susan Landgraf, Crossings

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TRIPLE NO. 17: “Crossings,” Susan Landgraf. Ravenna Press, 2022, pp. 49-82, $12.95, paper, www.ravennapress.com.

Ah, the Triples! This is an amazing series from our local Ravenna Press, and well worth your time. Triple No. 17 offers not only a chapbook by Susan Landgraf, but also Philip Quinn’s “Home Movies (from The Afterlife),” and Suzanne Bottelli’s “American Grubble.”

“Crossings” (with a subtitle: “Past to Present to Future and Between”) includes 22 poems, divided into 3 short sections. There are multiple threads, but a dominant one is wings. From the first poem, “Crowkeeper,” to the last, wings and winged creatures are both literal and symbolic. Birds cut the air with slick wings, painters molt like birds, a newborn gets his wings “stuck // like the moth / in a jar” (“Crossing Over”), an old woman’s head bobs like a pigeon’s, feathers poke out of pockets and men yearn to turn into birds: “he raised his arms again and again / and the sky turned a rainbow / of green, black-tipped, blue and white” (“Birdman”). Even Pegasus makes an appearance.

In “Fear of Birds,” which is ostensibly about carpentry, a bird’s mouth fits along the rafters, “joints flush, compounds smoothed / and feathered,” and in the closing lines the carpenter’s daughter becomes “the sound of birds /their cacophonous scattering.”

Besides wings, we get beetles and silvered fishes, footprints in concrete, sand-scrubbed sheets. Landgraf invites us to notice all of it, color, texture, sound.

But, about those wings. This poem, all one sexy sentence, evokes flight:

Midnight

Loving him was like dancing on a drum,
grapes ripe near to bursting, fields turned
burgundy, scarlet, golden loving him
like dancing on a drum, she said, his fingers
circling her skin, tracing her curves until
her heart was a bird flying out of her body
like dancing on a drum, she said, in a metal-
roofed room with a tuba and bass, Satchmo
on his sax and Vaughn in her summertime
and loving him was dancing out of their skins
and back, a week’s worth of Saturday nights
in a slow opening of loving him in a cave
of firecrackers, stars falling out of the sky,
a full moon, its white, white eye pressed
to the frosted window and loving him
was dancing on a drum, she said, so when
he left, she didn’t know how to walk.

—Susan Landgraf

Only one line, “her heart was a bird flying out of her body,” comes right out and shouts “flying,” but it seems (to me) a precis of the whole poem and the poem’s subject.

I attended Landgraf’s recent reading at Soul Food Café in Redmond, and was able to spend some time talking with her about her poems, and her 2019 writing exercise book, The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press). You can learn more about her at the Triples page (such a wonderful series) at http://ravennapress.com/books/series/triple-series/, and at The Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/susan-landgraf.