Writing Class in Prison

Friday night was our third writing class at Stillwater prison. We are working with offenders at Level 4, one step down from lifers, although we don’t know what they have done and we don’t ask. The group consists of nine men, only two born and raised in Minnesota. Two are Mexican, two are Hmong and one is black. Their ages are hard for me to gauge,  nowadays almost everyone seems younger than I, but some are in their twenties and one has grey hair. Four have previously taken writing classes and come to class with folders full of poems and stories that they have written.

We are locked in a classroom, with a dry erase board, and tables formed into a square, but there is a glass window so the guards can watch and we are given “squealers”, small gadgets that fit into our pockets. If we pull the pin, they will emit a high pitched squeal to bring guards running. The outside world disappears, though, as we read, write, and listen. Even shouting in the halls outside our door is tuned out as we concentrate on the magic of creative writing. Their desire to improve their writing is tangible. The first class amazed us with the honesty, self-awareness, and quality of some of the writing. We continue to be amazed with every class.

We can’t meet the third Friday of the month, so I gave them homework. Their assignment was to read an interview by Michael Meade, author of Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul and write on “How to move from Fate to Destiny”. I asked them to write about their backgrounds: their ancestors, family, community, neighborhood, and cultures.

Xee, a young Hmong man and beginner writer, admitted that he struggled with the assignment. He said he asked about 12 men in his cell block what they thought it meant and some told him that they don’t believe in either. He continued, “I got a lot of help in writing this.” before reading his piece. He started with describing his parents fleeing the Laotian war to become refugees.  Tears came into my eyes as he described their terror as they fled for their lives. Then he described the culture shock of living in the states, the challenges for the Hmong community as gangs were formed, and how he got swept up in it. He described his transformation while in prison to change and to choose peace. It was a hand written story of eight pages, coherent, articulate, and moving. He shyly smiled while we applauded.

The next piece read was also by a beginner, the other Hmong man, and he wrote about the ceremonies and beliefs around death, mourning and burial of one’s ancestors before tackling the cultural shock of being a refugee. He had us laughing at his shock of being hugged by a little blond girl when he was a child. Again, I was astounded.

And the black writer, with writing experience and a deep melodious voice, wrote a piece that had us on the edge of our seats as he described an ordinary outing for ice cream with his family. The word “nigger” was shouted at them from a moving car, the first time he had ever heard that word, and then he heard a loud popping sound. His mother managed to hustle them home before he realized that she had been shot.

Around the circle, we heard things that are beautiful, moving, terrible, and thoughtful. I told them that I knew this was a hard assignment, and I admired them for tackling it, and tackling it well.

The homework assignment for this week is what it means to be a man: what they were told and what they have since realized. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Crying Poem is the prompt. I can’t wait to hear what they write.

The teaching assistant and I walk out of the prison shaking our heads at how such bright, articulate men could have ended up here. We know that for some, it was under the influence and youthful arrogance and we also realize we are working with the men who want to change, who want to grow and find meaning in their experience.

The walls dissolve, around us and between us, as we celebrate the power of words to express what is deepest within us: our fears and desires, our longing for circumstances to be different, our realizations that we have to work with what we have, our awareness that we are on a journey, a journey of self-discovery. I feel privileged to be a small part of their journey, as they are part of mine.

Ann Fisher-Wirth: Ecopoetry to Honor the Earth

After a successful National Poetry Month of interviews and guest blogging to bring poets together via cyberspace, Upper Rubber Boots is hosting Intermittent Visitors. To read more interviews: http://www.upperrubberboot.com/

I interviewed Ann Fisher-Wirth who writes deeply about nature. We live at opposite ends of the Mississippi River, living waters that connect us. Her poetry reminds us all that we are connected and sustained via our beautiful Home, Planet Earth.

Ann Fisher-Wirth's interest in ecopoetry began while living on a 600-acre farm and is rooted in her awareness of the fragile and damaged state of the planet. Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, was published by Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces; also she has published the chapbook Slide Shows. She is coediting Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, forthcoming from Trinity University Press in February 2013. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards. She has had senior Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and has served as President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the minor in Environmental Studies. And she teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS.

Her latest book Dream Cabinet has been described as “poetry of great beauty and searing honesty, poetry responsive to compelling personal, political, and environmental issues of our times, and--aware of the evanescence, the ‘dream cabinet’ quality, of all mortal experience.”

Q: How much is your poetry influenced by the Mississippi River?

Ann: I live sixty miles from the Mississippi River, in the North Mississippi hill country. I can’t say the river affects my writing, but Mississippi itself certainly does. The prose poems I’m working on now are part of a collection called “First, Earth”; many of them are set in Mississippi and are a kind of vexed homage to the beauty and rigors of this place. We live in a wonderful old house with a lot of soul but no central heat or air conditioning. Though we live in the center of Oxford, there’s a little forest behind our house with deer, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, snakes, and all sorts of insects and birds. It’s a tough and teeming climate—especially in the summer, which is hot and humid. Living here has taught me a lot about human embodiment and fleshly vulnerability in an other-than-human world.

Q: How does poetry impact your own life…yours and others that you love: your time, your family, your social networks, your journey spiritually or politically?

Ann: I’ve always read and loved poetry, and I’ve written it seriously for the past twenty years. I teach in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, so poetry is right at the center of my professional life. It’s prominent in my family life, as well. My husband teaches English, including various poetry courses, at the University of Mississippi, and he knows about 1000 poems by heart. One of my daughters is a poet whose second book has just been published, and one of my sons sometimes writes poems too. I’d say that poetry both affects and is affected by my spiritual and political concerns; all three—poetry, politics, spiritual concerns (which, for me, are primarily expressed through my practice and teaching of yoga)—are intertwined modes of awareness. Poetry is so much a part of my life, and has been for so long, that the strands would be impossible to separate and tease out.

Q: How can your poetry help us to make better choices in caring for Mother Earth?

Ann: William Carlos Williams writes in Spring and All, “Poetry does not tamper with the world, but moves it.” This is how poetry, including my own, can teach us to care for the earth. It can break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature. With that awareness, we are more likely to take actions that will preserve it. 

Q: What advice can you give about editing poems? How do you know when a poem is finished?
Ann: I don’t always know when a poem is finished, but luckily I am in a terrific online workshop, the members of which give me good—and sometimes repeated—feedback as I write and revise. I also have colleagues and sometimes family members or students who read what I write and respond to it helpfully. I do not, of course, always take any given advice. Sometimes, poems never get finished; sometimes they come easily—but I do know that if I can read one of my poems aloud, repeatedly, in front of an audience, and assent to it intellectually and imaginatively every time, it is probably as good as I can make it.

Here is my advice about editing poems: 1) Learn to love to cut and revise; 2) Don’t confuse yourself with your poem, getting your ego tied up with it; 3) Sometimes the editing process will continue for years; 4) The real joy of writing comes in the act of writing, the process of discovery and rediscovery; 5) Absolutely every element of a poem is important.

Q: Do you write in other genres as well?

Ann: I have been writing prose poems recently, for a manuscript called “First, Earth” that I am working on. Also I’ve been working on some short essays which will be introductory material for The Ecopoetry Anthology, forthcoming early in 2013, on which I’ve been working as a coeditor for the past five years. I used to write academic literary criticism; my first book was a critical book, William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature, and I’ve written numerous essays on other writers. But mostly I focus on poetry.

Q: What are your thoughts about epublishing and on-line journals?

Ann: I have become increasingly fond of online poetry journals during the past few years, as the quality of some of them has vastly improved. My publisher, Bryce Milligan at Wings Press, likes for me to be reviewed in online journals because then the reviews are easily disseminated via the internet. But I am also still in love with print journals and definitely with books. I deplore the fact that they are in danger.

Q: Can you share a favorite poem from your new book Dream Cabinet?

Ann: You asked me about the role that poetry plays in my life. I think this poem from Dream Cabinet will speak to that.

Rain Stick

                                   I have watched you,

first in the sunny room in Charlottesville

as you were learning Yeats’s “Long-Legged Fly,”

and I have lain beside you as you stilled

to remember just how a line turned, the actual adjective.

I’ve touched your hip as you said me “Tintern Abbey”

or Hardy’s “Afterwards,” in the dark I’ve felt that joy,

seen that hedgehog, those white moths.

When I sprained my knee, trying to learn to ski,

I tossed in the bottom bunk of our hut

as your voice at three a.m. floated down above me,

murmuring “Fern Hill,” the horses “walking warm

out of the whinnying green stable,”

because I begged you, “Tell me something beautiful.”

I slept on our wedding night

as you drove for hours through the Blue Ridge Mountains,

waked and slept again, hypnotized by your tenderness

as you said me the whole Rubaiyyat—

one of the thousand poems you know by heart.

For more than twenty years,

I have heard your husky voice reciting poetry.

*

We were talking on the phone, I in California,  

you back home in Mississippi.

You said, “The poems we love are vanishing.”

I had nothing to reply. Then after some moments

you brought the rain stick to the phone,

the gourd we bought at a concert long ago,

when Robin Williamson played thirty-five instruments—

the lute, the rebeck, the psaltery, and the harp—

and sang and recited Bardic tales and mysteries.

You tipped the gourd so I could hear

the hidden seeds running down its length,

still making the sound of rain.

© Ann Fisher-Wirth

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The Lord Have Mercy Show

A Mother's Grief.
A Mother's Love.
The healing power of words. 

After performing poems for 10 years in places as spread apart as Berkeley and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and in venues as varied as Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts in Fridley, Chicago's Green Mill Jazz Club, Borders Bookstores and BarB hiphop club  in Santa Fe,  I felt that it was time to take an artistic risk. I perform my poems by asking myself how the poem wants to be performed. I memorize it while considering the character I am portraying: is she feisty and bold, subdued with grief, bowed or uplifted by fate, moving and transformed, sensual and yearning, questioning, questing, affirming, contemplative, remembering? I accentuate the rhythm of the lines and language with movement, ritual, shawls, long skirts, aprons, and jewelry to bring attention to my hands as they gesture. There are the times when my ideas didn't work: the time the shawl wrapped around me and the mic, incapacitating my movements; the time I totally went blank even though I had performed the same poem to the previous English class; the awkwardness of my steps and my balance after hip surgery that was very different for me after being accustomed to heels, a passion for dance that led to late nights at the disco in my youth, and even rooftop bars in Puerto Vallarta in 2006.

But the nervous sensation of my stomach doing flips with worry that I will get it right, that I will connect with my audience, are no longer noticeable. Of course I still feel nervous, especially in a new venue and I still wonder if I will grab their attention but I know where the poems will take me. To the magic and the joy of communication. I will survive any mistakes, I do know how to create intimacy. I do land in my own skin.

I want to try something I have never done before and I want to finally transmute my deepest grief, my long journey to the underworld of despair and back. The Lord Have Mercy Show arose from a simple litany I find on my lips often: "Lord, have mercy!" This simple phrase had been a mantra as I moved four times in the past 6 years, from Santa Fe to Puerto Vallarta, from PV to Fridley, from Fridley to North Minneapolis to live with a dear friend, then when her job ended and she moved to Madeline Island, to Saint Louis Park with a housemate whom I didn't know. From the healing after my partner's death through the shattering of my son's, then the deaths of my Mexican husband and my sister, grown children of friends, my son's fiancee, dear friends and poetry peers. "Lord, have mercy" is simply a natural cry of anguish and a cry for help, while at the same time, a cry of fatalism mixed with irony. Life and death are part of the cycles of life and we can't avoid them. I want to allude to the contradictions, the mosaic, the understanding coupled with emotional incomprehensibility. I believe that Death comes to all of us and the anguish of losing someone is a measure of our love and their meaning in our life, that life is eternal and love never ends, yet healing is sometimes only "scotch-taped" over the "fissures of the heart" and the heart is permanently scarred. We never emerge unscathed. We can't stop the desire to keep our loved ones alive and near. We have to let them go and we have to face our own mortality.

There is also the irony or the black humor: What, again? Another time you are calling out to the Lord?
And what is His answer this time?

The Lord Have Mercy Show is a multi-media monologue, with poetry, story telling, dance, music, visuals, video, shadow play and audience interaction which I hope to develop as time goes on with grant funding. (I am thinking of several grants and will also post a kickstarter or USAprojects campaign later this year.) But why wait, why not begin with an excerpt? This is a work in progress and I will present an excerpt as a way to judge audience interest and get moving. 

I am not trained as an actress but I have acted as I performed poetry. I am not a playwright but I have interconnecting poems and a story to tell. Soloist Rachealann Haasken and dancer Linda Lundquist will accompany me at Patricks' Cabaret next month to present a 15 minute excerpt of poetry with music and dance. If you live in the Twin Cities, I hope you will come and ask questions after the show. Let me know what you think and if you believe in the power of words to heal and transform our stories of painful memories into stories of courage, hope, resiliency and love.

The Lord Have Mercy Show upcoming in July

I will be performing an excerpt from 
The Lord Have Mercy Show

with soloist Rachaelann Haasken and 
dancer Linda Lunquist
We will guide you through the valley of grief 
to the healing of transformation

Friday July 20 & Saturday July 21 
@ 7:30 pm

Patricks’ Cabaret 3010 Minnehaha

(Lake & Minnehaha) 55406

Tickets $8 – 10 www.patrickscabaret.org

For more info: www.wendybrownbaez.com

from the poem: Solstice Child

bright light the winter night you came into my life, the times 
we went tumbling down

tumbling down, baby in the basket 
and love on the wing

magical snow globe, miniature world, babes in the woods, 
glow in the dark, you came to us during solstice night

and the blood I paid for your birth an honest payment, not what I 
chose but what I survived. so cold we could not venture outside, 
it was mountains and moose

and down coats and tucked into blankets before the fire 
drowsy and sweet. I did

not know about darkness then, how it could burn 
my heart into ash.

A Poet Without Place: Exile or Adventure

Poets, we are told, write from a sense of place. Their surroundings, their home, where they feel nourished, rooted, nurtured, where they flourish, where they are from or are going to. Poems deepen with the sensuous details of where they live, whether sweet or bitter. A sense of place gives us the ability to ramble and wander with them, appreciate the wild wind or sounds of the city, be filled with sunflowers turning to the light or lilac bushes bending with softness, rugged mountains that soar or lake waters churning under a storm. Poets in New Mexico will write about sunsets, poets from New England about boats, and poets from the south the scent of magnolia.

I am a poet without roots. The ones I have planted have been torn up for transplanting into a new garden, over and over again. Home was the place where I belonged and so it was once: a group of people to whom I gave my heart and my allegiance. When the group dispersed while living in Israel, the natural rhythms of sea, moonlit nights, Shabbat candles, bougainvillea and dreams of justice became my landscape, along with burnings cars, soldiers running through the street and bomb scares.

There was the day spent meandering the streets of Cordova when I fell in love and wanted to stay or the Mercado in Mexico with smells and colors that made me ache for the kitchen fire and good company around a table. And New Mexico served me best this way. I remember dinner parties where we laughed around a table set with matching tablecloth and cloth napkins, blue wine glasses and tiny plates of olives and brie.

I am really a poet without a country, now, although I feel inhabited by the plaintive passion of flamenco, the taste of olives from a bag, and bodega wine served with the gracious reserve of the Spanish; the warm humble grace of Mexican people; the complex spiky softness of Israelis. And the sea spattering on the rocks while in Puerto Vallarta, the icy taste of gelato from Italy. These all live within me.

But perhaps what inhabits me most of all are the people I met that I was changed by. The women in the village above Hezekiah’s tunnel who brought us tea while we trembled after almost being stoned by a group of young Arab boys who in their rage didn’t realize that we weren’t Israelis, or  even Jews. The woman who thrilled us by breaking into song at a café below the Alhambra. The children with their soft dark eyes who called to us, “Hola Coca cola” and fled, embarrassed if we answered. The couple who took us into their hotel on the beach because we knew her sister, wouldn’t let us pay for anything, asking what we would like them to cook for us, treating us as special guests. The boys along the river throwing out their nets and laughing as they gossiped and teased each other. The taxi drivers with flash of gold teeth and the bus drivers who kissed their Virgins on their dashboards, the boys on the beach eagerly bringing us more drinks, then disappearing when it was time to return our change after we paid the bill. The human spirit, unquenchable, resilient, creative, passionate, embracing life in its terrible tragedy and mystery, weeping and praying, dancing to celebrate, drinking to forget. The village women who envied me my freedom and blue jeans, the city women who clatter by with pride but stop to give directions or a shekel when asked. Their stories thrive in me, in my blood, my brain, and I must voice them. This is home: the tender place within my heart that is so easily cracked into pieces by cruelty, unfairness, injustice, so easily healed by a smile, a song, a hug, an act of kindness. We are not strangers, then, but family. Home for the moment. Home carried like a lantern lit from within.

Weaving Words, an interview with Ned Haggard

My last spring blossom as part of Couplets: to read other interview and guest blogs during National Poetry Month go to http://www.upperrubberboot.com

I met Ned Haggard at an amazing event held to celebrate National Poetry Month in Chicago where 150 poets read in two and a half hours at the Harold Washington Library. Our friendship has enabled us to tap into the inspiration of our poetry communities  (Chicago for me and Minneapolis for him), proving that poets are a tribe, one to which we belong no matter our location, philosophy or style.

 

Ned Haggard is a prizewinning poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals; among them, Potomac Review, Santa Barbara Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Bohemian Chronicle, Kaleidoscope, Maryland Review, Ebbing Tide, Small Pond, and Grasslands Review. His most recent published work, an excerpt from a mystery-in-progress, The Slaughterhouse of Lambs, appeared in a scars.tv publication. His work has been included in the anthologies: Off the Cuffs! (Soft Skull Press: New York City) and The Best of Chicago Poetry 2006 (chicagopoetry.com).  He has a collection of poems in print The Weave of the Sea (EbonyEnergy Publishing: Chicago) with another forthcoming, Soft-Shoe Shuffle and a novel The Companion in Dreams. He is developing a memoir that celebrates the people and events that have informed his life rather than emphasizing personal autobiography. He makes his home in the metropolitan Chicago area and has previously been a resident of New York City.

Q: Do you have a warm-up writing practice?
Not formally, I sometimes write off of paintings at galleries and art museums having initially considered that my practice exercise. However, I liked some of the work realized that way so much that I no longer consider the exercise a practice so much as simply another vehicle for inspiration.

Q: What feeds you as a poet?
It sounds trite and glib but, "Life," in a "L'Chaim" sort of way. Being interested in politics, I am drawn toward political poetry, which is often time dated but done well, can have a transcendent quality. Politics or more precisely political sensitivity, awareness and currently, deep concern, feeds my poetry often.

Q: What other arts do you enjoy?
Music and the visual arts, painting and photography. Music is an extension of literature for me in that I generally gain images from the listening to pure music although I have never tried writing from it the way I sometimes do paintings.

Q: What is the importance of poetry for you personally, and for the world?
Personally, pleasure and release, emotionally but also as a way of sorting matters, whatever those matters happen to be. I find dimension and breath in letters and words and the life within, behind, in front of and around them. Writing is a joy even when the subject at hand is heartbreaking. For the world, different strokes for different cultures, I suspect. I consider poetry the music of the soul, in particular and generally. I believe that is a universally viable statement. If so, that certainly says volumes for the essential place of poetry whether recognized or not.

Q: Have you always written poetry and what inspired you to begin?
Always? No. What inspired me to begin? I don't know, I just liked the intrigue of poetry and wanted to try my hand at it. I surely was not inspired by the classroom experience of poetry. Poetry in the classroom always seemed like a butcher attempting delicate brain surgery; the teacher being the butcher and the students encouraged to mime the practice making a bloody, fatal mess. Although, I completed the then only program in the writing of poetry at Harvard some years back and that was a worthwhile exception but then, it was a writing program, not a poetry survey course. By the way, I understand that program has since been expanded. But returning to your question of inspiration to begin, I think the Beats, especially Allen Ginsberg opened the door more for me than anything else; there was a young person's sense of curiosity; an "oh wow, nitty gritty more 'real' than what I've experienced" attraction that was inspired by, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." and it took off from there and ultimately, it drew me back into earlier modern poets. I was ultimately most inspired by Charles Reznikoff. Before poetry, I wrote fiction and Reznikoff showed me ways of combining poetry and narrative. I am not a lyric poet and I am not a formalist poet. I am an objectivist-imagist poet. I actually consider myself a painter with words.

Q: How do you envision the role of e-books?

I believe there will always be both physical and electronic books but I think electronic books will become more prevalent and cheaper. There is a legal case coming up about publishers rigging the prices of electronic books. I just read an article, as I recall it said the ramification will likely be far less cost for e-books. In fact, I believe the case revolves around publishers insisting on, i.e., fixing higher prices for e-books so the market for physical books would not be dynamically eroded. It may well be that eventually physical books will be a novelty. In short, I think physical books will continue but e-books will gain far greater prevalence.

INSULAR REFLECTIONS

After, "Woman before an aquarium, 1921-23" Henri Matisse

Contemplating, eyes wide,

settled on the water globe

world of gold fish, the

woman's arms folded

beneath

her propped chin

sees? Sees what? The swim

of foreign life, the

soothing of fin

fanned water gently

swirling, all but

motionless? Wondering;

their lives and hers?

Mystery swims in her

face, quietly

fascinated

                       -----Ned Haggard © 2012

Couplets: Crossing Genres with Iris Dunkle

Iris Dunkle is the only poet during this series of interviews and blogs hosted by www.upperrubberboot.com that I have never met, either in person or through cyberspace, but I discovered that we both had chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press. Iris Jamahl Dunkle teaches writing at University of California, Santa Cruz and Napa Valley College. Her manuscript Alphabet of Bones was a finalist for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in 2011. Her chapbook Inheritance was published by Finishing Line in 2010. Her poetry, creative nonfiction and scholarly articles have appeared in numerous publications including: Fence, VOLT, The New Guard, LinQ, Boxcar Poetry Review, Weave, Verse Wisconsin, Talking Writing, Yalobusha Review and The Mom Egg. Her blog is here: http://momma-phd.blogspot.com/

On Being a Hybrid Writer  by Iris Jamahl Dunkle 

Up until 2003 when I started my dissertation, I never expected to write anything besides poetry. But developing a 200+ page document helped open up my writing process to include longer texts. These days, ideas come to me as poems, creative nonfiction, articles and novels. Writing a poem has always been how I have thought through ideas. Poems would come frequently, but usually one at a time. For me, writing poetry has always been a way to enter a subject and think through the emotional residue that surrounds it, a way to immerse myself associatively in the images and rhythms a particular thought or idea opens up to me.

But, after I completed my dissertation something in me had shifted. The researcher that had been lying dormant inside me came to life and I discovered that I was inspired to take on larger subjects: topics that inspired me to write series of poems. I began researching local history and writing poems about the forgotten voices and events that had been brushed under the rug of history. As I discovered more and more stories, these projects became bigger and bigger. I just didn’t feel like I had completed the project even once I written 30 – 40 poems. This is when I began to write lyric essays and eventually even fiction. It was a liberating moment in my writing life the day I became a hybrid writer. Prose, which was once the genre I wrote essays and articles for school or work in, became a place where I could remain my poetic self. Prose became a place where I could linger longer in the exploration of a topic. Writing prose requires more research, more adherence to sentence structure and grammar, but it can still remain lyric and imagistically and emotionally driven. It provides a longer period of time to dwell and try to understand the stories, ideas or even characters you’ve found.

An example of a project that began as a poem, then became a series of poems, a lyric essay and finally a novel was my project on an oil boom town in Oil City, PA. Last winter my family and I moved to Western Pennsylvania for a job I took teaching at Clarion University in Oil City. The town was filled with dilapidated Victorian houses and our school’s library had an interesting special collections on the oil history of the area. Turns out, Oil City and its environs was where oil was first found in the United States. During the 1860s a huge oil boom took place in this area. As I was desperately trying to find inspiration in this new place I stumbled upon a book in the library’s special collection all about a local boom town named Pit Hole. I mean really, who wouldn’t be intrigued by a name like that? So, as I taught that semester, I read my way through the special collections and wrote poems about the characters I encountered who had once lived in Pithole. I wrote lyric essays about visiting the historic site where the town once was and I wrote poem after poem about the place.

As it turns out, my family and I decided to return to California just six months later, but though I’d written over 40 poems and two lyric essay about it, I couldn’t shake Pithole and its history. The characters I’d found out about: a girl who was imprisoned in sexual slavery who escaped by slipping a letter through the cracks in the whorehouse where she was being held (the letter was found, and sent to her mother in New York who rescued her shortly thereafter) and a laundry woman who ran her well dry helping to put out a fire at a nearby hotel only to find that the next morning her well had filled back up with oil instead of water. How could I let these characters go after just writing a short poem about each of them? Well, I couldn’t. And when National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) rolled around, I rolled up my sleeves and wrote my first novel. The project, which had one been a single poem had become so much more.

Nowadays, whenever I come across a subject I always write a poem first, but my experiences have taught me to keep my options open because, as I’ve experienced, you never know what form your work will expand into.

Poetry Temptations, an interview with Diane Lockward

As part of the Couplets National Poetry Month  blogtour hosted by www.upperrubberboot.com
Check their website for other interviews and guest blogs. 

I met Diane Lockward via the internet, a list serve of women poets called WOM-PO. Her voice as a poet is intimate as she captures our daily world in gestures that are passionate, humorous, and courageous.  “Something like grief washes through me, something like joy.” from Eve’s Red Dress echoes my life’s journey exactly. It’s a small world after all!

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Temptation by Water. In 2006 What Feeds Us received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Eve's Red Dress and two chapbooks, Against Perfection and Greatest Hits: 1997-2010. Her poems have been included in such anthologies as Poetry Daily: 360 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, and have been published in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac.  Diane has entered the ereader age: Twelve for the Record is now available as an ebook and can be downloaded.

Diane sends out a monthly newsletter with reviews and tips, prompts and suggestions which you can sign up for via her website. The website is packed with reviews, videos and other places to read her work.  She lives in northern New Jersey. www.dianelockward.com

1. Do you have a warm-up writing practice?

I make myself a cup of ginger tea. Then I show up at the kitchen table and read poems from a book or journal. That gets me in the mood and thinking like a poet. Often while I’m reading someone else’s work, I’ll be struck by a line, a word, an image—something that speaks to me and asks for a response. When that something presents itself, I begin freewriting. I just try to keep writing without worrying about whether it’s good or bad. Later I go back and pull out the weeds.

2. I admire the use of humor in poetry and find it hard to achieve. How do you write with humor? Any tricks you can share?

I know what doesn’t work—trying to be humorous. There’s something spontaneous about humor. If I’m writing a line and it makes me laugh, that makes me happy. But is it really funny?

If I go back repeatedly to that poem and the line continues to make me laugh, I can be pretty sure it will get a laugh from readers. On the other hand, I have several times had the experience of getting a laugh from something I hadn’t realized was funny—there’s the not trying principle at work. But I don’t consider myself a particularly humorous poet. It’s not what I aim for though I’m happy to hit it occasionally.

3. What feeds you as a poet? What other arts do you enjoy doing?

I read a lot of novels and memoirs. When I was teaching full-time, I watched almost no TV. Now I do have shows I like and sometimes they prompt a poem or provide a line or image. Daydreaming is good. Walking is good. Cooking is good.

4. What was different between the first, second and third books in the process of getting them published, out to the public and reading from them?

The first book took about six years of submitting before it found a home. Then oddly, the publisher found me instead of the other way around. My publisher, Charlie Hughes, used to be the editor of Wind Magazine where I’d once had two poems as finalists in the journal’s yearly contest. Apparently, Charlie continued to look for my work elsewhere. Then when he went into book publishing and wanted to branch out beyond Kentucky where his press is located, he contacted me and asked if I had a manuscript for a first book. I was just about to revise the manuscript one more time. Once I did, I sent it to him and he accepted it. The next two books he also accepted. I feel very fortunate to have a publisher who takes subsequent books. Not all publishers do. I’ve done the same kind of work getting all three out to the public. I keep a mailing list and an email list. I have a website and a blog and I send out a monthly poetry newsletter. I work hard to line up readings and am willing to travel for them.

5. The trailers: They look like fun but also a lot of work. What tips or advice can you give about how to use your time wisely in creating trailers?

They are fun. You’re right, though—they are a lot of work. But it’s the fun kind of work. I begin with an idea of what I want the finished product to look like—that’s quite different from my approach when writing a poem. Then I gather photos from Photoxpress. I have a folder on my computer for video clips. I get these from sites that offer them for free. I won’t pay for them.

Considering what a poet earns, I just don’t think it makes sense to pay $75 or more for a 5-second clip. But my folder is pretty big now. I put the photos into iMovie, do the timing and transitions. Then I look for a music track—again, it has to be a freebie. My one big tip is don’t let your trailer go much over two minutes in length. Most viewers will bail out if you go longer than that. Another tip is to make sure that any text you use is shown long enough and big enough for the viewer to read it.

6. The reviews: I am amazed at the number of reviews you have been able to get. What is your secret?

I don’t have a secret, but I think that part of it has to do with being visible and doing readings, keeping the website and a blog, responding to emails, and doing some service for other poets. That last actually might be the secret. I don’t think poets have a right to expect to get reviews if they’re not willing to do some themselves. I do write some reviews for journals and at my blog.

So perhaps the universe is paying me back.

7. Have you ever felt that someone misinterpreted a poem in their review?

A few times the reviewer has talked about me when he or she should have been talking about the speaker. It makes me uncomfortable when a reviewer talks about my work as if it’s autobiographical. There is some autobiographical detail in my poetry, but there’s also some invention. For example, a few reviewers have talked about my poem, “My Husband Discovers Poetry,” by saying something like “Lockward experienced the breakdown of her marriage.” I did?? In fact, I’m still married to my first and only husband.

8. I am impressed by your generosity in promoting other poets and sharing information about writing tips through your newsletter. What has been the best part of doing the newsletter?

It keeps me on my toes throughout the month as I’m now always on the lookout for material to include. Beginning the Craft Tip feature has been the most exciting part of the newsletter. Each month I invite a different poet to contribute a tip. This has put me in touch with a number of different poets from far and wide. Almost all of the poets I’ve invited have accepted. The poem with prompt is also fun and that too has put me in touch with most of the poets whose poems I’ve used. Then it’s nice to hear from my subscribers that the prompt resulted in a poem they didn’t know they had inside them.

9. The discussion continues about the future of poetry, the debate about ebooks, language being influenced by texting and sound bites, and page poetry and/or stage poetry (slams etc). Where do you think poetry is headed, what do you envision in say, 10 years?

I’m not interested in poetry that’s been influenced by texting and sound bites. But I do think that we are headed towards more and more ebooks whether we like it or not. The invention of the ereader has made a new way of buying and reading poetry viable. I still want my own books in print and I still prefer to read from print books, but I can see lots of benefits to the ereaders. They are a boon to someone who travels a lot or someone who has limited storage space in the home. While we poets seem to be resisting ebooks, they may very likely help us to reach more readers and new readers. I imagine that someone will soon compile some statistics on this. Many publishers of print poetry books now also make those books available in ebook format. My publisher recently did that for my third book, Temptation by Water. I am sure, too, that we’ll be seeing more publishers who do ebooks exclusively.

10. What is your next project?

I’m working on individual poems, hoping to get a fourth book together in a year or so. I’m also working on a craft book.

11. On a personal note, when you write about your family, what is their reaction? Do they come to your readings?

My family generally doesn’t read my poetry so their reaction is not much of a problem. I would never knowingly write a poem that hurt any of them. But I also don’t ask for permission about what I can write. My husband and kids have come to a few readings and much to my surprise and delight have enjoyed them. I think they are very proud that I’m a poet., but they don’t feel compelled to read everything I write.

Pastiche for a Daughter’s Absence

It all comes down to what’s physical,

this missing her – her face, voice, and skin.

I imagine my daughter dancing in Madrid, Barcelona,

and Seville, climbing the mountains of Andulasia.

I had not imagined how far away faraway would be.

Happiness, unhappiness – the same,

my sweet Zen master says,

and I wonder if the top of my head

supports heaven, or is this a migraine

coming on?

I circle back to the place where precision

and ecstasy meet, remember how I carried the tadpole

of her body, long before the first flutter, holding her

like a secret inside me.

I wake in the night missing

a body part, my arm stretched across the ocean,

hooked to the past, and I wonder,

as Achilles’ mother must have,

which part of you did I not dip in the water?

Heavy with absence, I hang curtains in her windows,

yards and yards of delicate Irish lace.

I hide behind the door, ear pressed to the wood,

and watching my daughters life – her evening paseo,

late dinners in Saragossa’s village square.

The room fills with the smell of gazpacho, paella, sangria.

Something like grief washes through me, something like joy.

I slip into the waves, feel the ebb and flow of her,

my water sprite, my sea nymph, remember the way

she glides through a room, the low-tide

of her voice, how she leaves us,

breathless, all fish at her feet.

                                    —from Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003)

Ojibway Poet Heid Erdrich and the Craft of Writing

Couplets: part of the National Poetry Month celebration at www.upperrubberboot.com

The first time I heard Heid Erdrich read, I felt her quiet centeredness contained a powerhouse of energy and emotion. Her poems speak of the natural landscapes of the earth and our own bodies to widen our awareness of the intricate ways we are connected and that that connection has been severed by lack of reverence. Poetry, I believe, is one way to reweave that connection again. 

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She earned degrees from Dartmouth College and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. A recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships, awards from The Loft Literary Center, the Archibald Bush Foundation and elsewhere, Heid E. Erdrich is author of four poetry collections, most recently Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems from University of Arizona Press. National Monuments from Michigan State University Press won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award. Heid directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher. Heid teaches writing workshops and has one coming up in May on Madeline Island

(www.madelineartschool.com )

that will focus on the similarities between fine craft, such as beadwork, embroidery, quillwork, sewing, and the craft of writing.

To read more about Heid, including her reading her poems: www.heiderdrich.com

How does your heritage influence your poetry? Did you grow up with poetry?

My parents were both teachers so they valued writing, and both encouraged art of all kinds.  Dad would memorize poems and encourage us to do so as well.  I loved acting things out and putting on plays with my younger sister.  I think my poetry came from those early childhood experiences and from being a reader for Catholic Mass for many, many years. My Ojibwe grandfather was a great storyteller, so I had some of that influence as well.

Can you talk about the intersection between art and poetry?

It is all intersection these days--visual art, dance, poetry, music.  But I am not a painter, musician, dancer or other type of artist other than a writer, so I can only script these things. Collaboration is where I live now and I am so thrilled to be working on a large project with lots of artists who have influenced me.  Yes, there will be films.

Can you share how you will interweave crafting and the craft of writing?

Confession of a failed crafter: I am lousy with a needle.  My interest in handwork is in the way picking up a design is like poetry or good prose.  At some point the artist forgets the plan and goes the direction the materials take her.  I think this happens with writing, too. 

What makes your style of teaching unique?

Well, I do not take anything too seriously and I ask the participants to lead.  I'm open to change of plans and I make sure we move around, eat, do goofy exercises and otherwise appreciate one another as humans who do something other than write most days.

What is your greatest joy in mentoring other writers and are there any surprises?

There are always surprises, yes! Working with writers in an intense week-long setting is like mother love.  I am intensely drawn to each person, curious, motivated, determined to see where each one's work is headed. But then it is over.  A few folks stay in my life, but the vividness of each encounter fades quickly. Only the meaningfulness remains.

What is your next project?

Right now I am working on Artifact Traffic, a multi-disciplinary show that arises from collaboration with visual artists, film makers, poets, dancers, the whole shebang.  And I am writing a cook book from indigenous foods activists.  And I am starting a new book of poems on technology.  Happy times!

Last Snow

Dumped wet and momentary on a dull ground

that’s been clear but clearly sleeping, for days.

Last snow melts as it falls, piles up slush, runs in first light

making a music in the streets we wish we could keep.

Last snow. That’s what we’ll think for weeks to come.

Close sun sets up a glare that smarts like a good cry.

We could head north and north and never let this season go.

Stubborn beast, the body reads the past in the change of light,

knows the blow of grief in the time of trees’ tight-fisted leaves.

Stubborn calendar of bone. Last snow. Now it must always be so.
                             ---from The Mother's Tongue (c) 2005 Heid Erdrich 

Upper Rubber Poet: Couplets preview

Tomorrow's Poetry Blossom as part of Couplets: Heid Erdrich

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She earned degrees from Dartmouth College and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. A recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships, awards from The Loft Literary Center, the Archibald Bush Foundation and elsewhere, Heid E. Erdrich is author of four poetry collections, most recently Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems from University of Arizona Press, National Monuments from Michigan State University Press won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award. Heid directs Wiigwaas Press an Ojibwe language publisher. Wiigwaas published its first mono-lingual Ojibwe language book, Awesiinyensag, written by a team of Ojibwe speakers, scholars and students in 2010. In 2011, Wiigwaas published Daga Anishinaabemodaa by Dennis Jones, illustrations by Aza Erdrich.

Heid teaches writing workshops and has one coming up in May on Madeline Island that will focus on the similarities between fine craft, such as beadwork, embroidery, quillwork, sewing, and the craft of writing.

MISA.com The Fine Line: Poetics as a String of Beads. This workshop is described as a way to create new poems inspired by the similarities between fine craft and the craft of writing! But you need to sign up for this class ASAP. 

Introducing Community Activist/Poet/Playwright Bryan Thao Worra

Part of the www.upperrubberboot.com series for National Poetry Month:
First let me introduce Bryan Thao Worra by telling you that the first time we met, his book On the Other Side of the Eye was about to be released and we were reading for the Open Book Gallery Café  poetry series. I was impressed by Bryan’s style and ability to be flexible when I asked if he minded interweaving our voices. His book release party was a full-blown fiesta, with guest poets, a book cover cake, and door prizes. He is known in the Twin Cities for his engagement with poetry on all levels: not only a prolific writer himself but mentor, networker, promoter, and gatherer of like-minded spirits. His reflections on contemporary issues of identity and finding a voice are profound and throught-provoking.

Bryan Thao Worra was born in 1973 in Laos during the Laotian civil war. He came to the US at the age of six months old, adopted by a civilian pilot flying in Laos. In 2003, Thao Worra reunited with his biological family during his first return to Laos. Today, Bryan Thao Worra works actively on issues of community development, refugee resettlement and the arts.

A poet, short story writer, playwright and essayist, his prolific work appears internationally in anthologies, magazines and newspapers, including Bamboo Among the Oaks, Contemporary Voices of the East, Tales of the Unanticipated, Illumen, Astropoetica, Outsiders Within, Dark Wisdom, Hyphen, Journal of the Asian American Renaissance, Bakka, Whistling Shade, Tripmaster Monkey, Asian American Press and Mad Poets of Terra.

He has a unique impact on contemporary art and literature within the Lao, Hmong, Asian American and transcultural adoptee communities. Thao Worra curated numerous readings and exhibits of Lao and Hmong American art including Emerging Voices (2002), The 5 Senses Show (2002), Lao’d and Clear (2003), Giant Lizard Theater (2005), Re:Generations (2005), and The Un-Named Series (2007). He speaks nationally at colleges, schools and community institutions. You can visit him online at http://thaoworra.blogspot.com

Q: How has your family story influenced your poetry?

I grew up as a transcultural adopted child of a pilot from a country few had heard of. Few knew our convoluted history as the most heavily bombed nation of the 20th century. This taught me how words shape identities. Some call Laos a quiet, peaceful Shangri-La, a tiny landlocked Eden, but Laos is also the size of Great Britain and bigger than Minnesota, whose conflicts left more Lao living outside of Laos than within it. So make of that what you will.

I’ve said an adoptee’s life must always be written in pencil, never ink, because at any moment, everything you know about yourself could be changed. Yet, as Hermann Hesse said, a person’s true profession is finding their way to the center of themselves.

This affects my poetry because there were so many barriers in finding out who I was, who my families were, what intersected, what was alien, certain and merely possibility of ‘truth’.  I often tell students to experiment writing a summary of their lives with a word processor. Gazing at the finished results, how much is underlined in red? How much do you have to train your own computer to stop seeing the names of your cities, your family and friends, your food, your greetings, your word for ‘love’ as a mistake?

Much of my poetry can’t employ the narrative approach and subjects that others use easily. If I wrote a poem about my father’s death during the war, what happened to the truth of that poem when I discovered him very much alive, living nothing close to the life I was told for thirty years he’d led? If I wrote about the man I met in Laos who claimed he was my father, what happens to that poem when my mother reveals, no, he’s just a monk who was once her best childhood friend? This doesn’t mean I don’t still make efforts to write such things, but I approach it with a particular consciousness of uncertainty.

Q; Do you have a warm-up writing practice?

I approach it with a zen consciousness: A waking, writing meditation where I examine the object before me, and in a single burst attempt creating a condensed verbal snapshot in ink. A sense of mind, body, spirit, ink, breath, paper, subject and time as one. After a few of these, I begin working towards creating more layered, deliberate works. To be fair, though, this does not always work. But art is one of the only callings where even 'failures' can still be interesting.

 Q: What has been your greatest joy in mentoring Asian-American poets?

Understanding that we’re creating something that has not been there before. Watching something unfold, particularly among Southeast Asian-American voices, that would previously only have been created by and for ruling elites of many of their societies. But now, the people themselves are speaking, connecting themselves to one another because they choose to. They found something they want to express to others. After nearly a century of wars that stole generations of voices, the brutal erasure of dreams and memory, I think the journey of Asian-American poets to recover and rebuild is a joy to behold. I’ve been privileged to mentor many of them as they discover art’s potential to transform lives.

Q: The discussion continues about the future of poetry, the debate about ebooks, language being influenced by texting and sound bites, and page poetry and/or stage poetry (slams etc). Where do you think poetry is headed, what do you envision in say, 10 years?

 We’re going to see more experimentation and diversity being reflected within collections and classrooms. There will be new technologies and experiences, but I suspect we’ll also see a greater emphasis on a return to a tactile, physical participation with poetry and the world. This will emerge from burnout regarding constantly plugged-in lives, a surfeit of reality media and social networking, a constant barrage of images that’s inducing synesthetic disconnect.

We’ll also see more literary voices from veterans as they come to terms with their experience. Shorter forms will reflect the influences of twitter, texting, and the ongoing compression of available time for artists and their audiences to share with each other.  Spambots will start putting together even better poems that will give flarf, fluxus and found poems a run for their money.

All assuming we’re not in the middle of a war with the newts and salamanders or something like that. Then all bets are off.

 Q: What do you think is the poet’s responsibility in turbulent political times?

 What a poet’s responsibility has always been, to serve as a mechanic of language and the soul, exploring the uncertainties and chaos of the world, but not be paralyzed by it.  To be more than an unflinching eye.

 I’d remember Brecht, who said, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” Or note the example of Otto Rene Castillo, who, in his poem “Apolitcal Intellectuals,” believed poets will be asked “What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burned out of them?” One should write prepared for such a question.

 

Q: What is your next project?

I have few books of poetry I’m putting together. One is set in haiku format, reviewing classic movies while also serving as a memoir of my experience as a transcultural adoptee, while another examines intersections between the Japanese and Lao American experience.

I’m interviewing Minnesota poets in verse for the Twin Cities Daily Planet centered on the premise that when poets interview other poets, it’s done journalistically, rather than in the form poets work in most, which struck me as peculiar.

I’m also finishing edits on an anthology of Lao American speculative art with another Lao American writer, Saymoukda Vongsay, to examine how imagination, memory and technology intersect with diaspora and reconstruction in the Laotian antebellum.