Ten Years Later

On September 11, 2011, I woke up in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was visiting friends on my way back from a visit to Chicago. You couldn't escape the day, the anniversary, if for no other reason the media had turned over an entire week to commemoration, follow-up, analysis, revisiting, and basically any story they could come up with related to 9/11.

After Mass at Holy Wisdom Monastery, just three miles from where my friends lived, I headed home to central Minnesota. At noon, I turned off the radio and observed a couple minutes of silence, the landscape rushing by, my mind of course still fully engaged with driving. I couldn't stop-- and this feeling of hurrying forward seemed to me somehow related to the country's response to 9/11. Ten years of hurrying forward.

When I got home, I jotted down a draft of this poem, which I've returned to a few times since. I have a sense that it is already not timely, that events keep moving forward almost too quickly, without enough reflection or, more importantly, connectivity between them. I think that's what I like about the poem-- that it captures the sense of rushing on, and in this particular historical moment ten years later, of our fragmentation as Americans, our inability to come together and make sense of our country and our world situation.


Ten Years Later

by Susan Sink

I’m driving through Wisconsin
as fast as I can, watching for troopers,
annoyed by those too close behind, those
too close in front, when I shoot
under an overpass and standing there
is a woman with a blond pony tail
holding a large American flag,
alone, her head down, looking at nothing.

In Minnesota, passing under another bridge,
a more exuberant group—adult chaperones
and ten or twelve children with flags waving,
children who weren’t even born then—
make this a day of victory more than mourning.

In the rush of traffic, I think about the quiet skies
in the days after that day, the two wars,
the children growing up in a curious wartime,
the young widows, alone, with flags,
and like the many stranded years ago,
I want only to get home.

Tracks

It is difficult to get up during a blizzard at the end of March and go to work. This is true. My workplace, where most of the people (nuns) live right where they work, does not have snow days. So on Wednesday morning, Steve drove me the mile to work in the 4WD Subaru, and it was fine.

We all feel quite put upon, and the people in Chicago and Pennsylvania who woke up to an inch of slushy snow have nothing on us. We got about seven inches, and with the temperatures staying below freezing (well below at night, in the single digits), it's not going to suddenly disappear. The broadcasters, who were in full "flood watch" mode, are still putting out reports, but the crests are delayed now, and in a way, this might slow down the flooding or make it less severe--or more, depending on who you listen to.

One thing I like about a late snow like this is that the birds have returned. I feel for them, but figure they must have enough resources to get through a slight setback like this. I mean, spring IS coming. It's a geological certainty. 

In the meantime, we get to listen to the birds in this still-white, silent world. We can see the sand hill cranes, which returned last week, in stark contrast to the frozen wetlands. And in the morning when I look out the window, I see all the tracks of little creatures making their way down our prairie paths.

There will be no more cross-country skiing for us, so the birds and small animals and deer get the landscape, and they seem to follow the trails we made. It gets the imagination working.

Here is a poem I wrote about 5 years ago, when my apartment looked out on a small lake. It is about cross-country skiing, and it's true that when I'm skiing I still am always looking for signs of animals or hidden animals.  It was written earlier in winter, but the tracks made me think of it today.

Why I Cross-Country Ski

I am out here for the two deer

who hide behind the smallest scrap of yellow:

the mother stands and watches me,

from this distance so like a dog
until she prances, and even then--
until her child bounds toward her,
hooves to haunches with his quick heart.

Last week on an inch of powder
I saw their sweet tracks circling
objects poking through the lake,
their tiny regular footfalls meandering.

I know somewhere they lie down

and the snow hollows a bed beneath them.

I think they are not bothered by cold.

It may be they like this season best of all.

Does Poetry Matter? (2)

What I think I've established so far is to frame the question in a larger context. Beyond the individual reader or writer, beyond the community of poets themselves, does poetry matter?

There have, of course, been times that poetry, even a single poem, mattered to our nation. Walt Whitman wrote the great poem, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d” to commemorate the funeral train that carried the body of slain President Abraham Lincoln from Washington, D.C., to his burial place in Springfield, Ill. At the time of its publication, this poem mattered greatly, and ever since then it has conveyed to schoolchildren who read and learn the story what it meant to lose a great leader, what it meant to mourn as a country.

When is the last time a poem mattered to the United States? I remember on September 11, 2001, on National Public Radio, they interviewed the poet laureate, Billy Collins. When I heard that it was Billy Collins, my heart sank. Although I’m a great admirer of his poetry, which is witty and intelligent, I did not think he would be up to this solemn occasion. In some ways, he wasn’t. When asked what poem we should read, for solace, strength or understanding, he said something like: “Read any poem. All poems speak to life and death. All poems speak to our humanity and human experience.” Then he was more specific: “Read the 23rd psalm.” It was interesting to me that a news reporter would think to ask for a poem on a day like that day. It said a lot about what we want and expect from poetry, and how we want and expect it to matter.

The famous issue of the New Yorker after September 11, with its cover showing blacked out columns representing the Twin Towers against a black background, devoted its back page to a long poem by Adam Zagajewski, a Polish poet who has lived in Paris and the United States since the mid-‘80s. The poem is titled, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” Written more than a year before 9/11, it struck me and many others as offering a way to move forward in the face of such tragedy. This, in its message and placement in a publication at a specific moment of history, was poetry that mattered. It was very moving at the time, and remains more moving, I think, than the anthology-worth of poetry written about 9/11 since then, much of them "where I was when..." poems that put more focus on the poet than on the event.

Another poem that I've always believed matters to us nationally is Yusuf Komunyakaa's great poem about visiting the Vietnam Memorial, "Facing It." Many of us have experienced a visit to the Vietnam memorial, and many have written about the power of that memorial, the black granite "scar" in the earth with the names of 58,022 names engraved on it in the order that they were killed. But it is only poetry that can give us the experience in this way, both drawing us into a single veteran's experience and seeming to wrap up all the suffering -- both during the war and after -- in simple lines and images. Here is a poem that truly uses the tools of poetry to bring us into an experience that we long to share, offering as well a deeper understanding of our national identity and history. Just read these closing lines of the poem, as the black poet/veteran looks at the reflections on the black granite memorial and tries to capture what he sees:

"A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair."

It is for lines like these that we need poetry to help us tell our story.

Dream of Life

I highly recommend that anyone who reads and likes Patti Smith's book Just Kids also rent the (auto-)documentary Dream of Life. Thanks to Giana for sending the recommendation my way!

This movie, a collaboration with filmmaker Steven Siebring, took ten years to make, and is in some ways about Patti Smith's reflections on the loss of friends, family and lovers: most poignantly her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, who died in 1995, but also Mapplethorpe and her brother Todd, other musician collaborators, poets from her beloved Rimbaud to Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and finally, her parents, to whom the film is dedicated.

It's worth seeing even if you haven't read the book, if for nothing else than the amount of footage available, and for the music. If you've read the book, you'll appreciate even more how young she was when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel-- there is some amazing footage of her back then, and I must admit, even with the photos scattered throughout the book, it was very difficult to imagine Patti Smith quite so young. But it is also evident in the film that she is truly an artist of her time and weaves the Beat legacy, the Dylan folk legacy, the Vietnam War protest legacy and the punk rock world in which she lived and found her voice. Is it rock and roll? Is it folk? Is it punk? Is it poetry? Her performances have all these things, and her person has all these things.

She is also a Detroit mom who clearly adored motherhood and marriage and her house. Over the ten years of filming, we see her two children grow into young adults, and footage of her thirteen-year-old son in a hotel room is precious, as is the later footage of him playing guitar like his dad. He seems to be well-adjusted and as unassuming as she is.

Patti is a fan of childhood, and her visit to her parents' house in South Jersey is entertaining, real and precious. What would it be like to have Patti Smith for a daughter? Well, it would be wonderful, because she's a loving person who appreciates them. I have to admit that it also hadn't quite registered what it meant that she was from South Jersey, where almost all my relatives are from, until I heard her say the word "water" ("wudder") on screen. Her accent remains, not to be confused with a Long Island, Brooklyn or Bronx accent, and it comes out most purely in interactions with her parents. South Jersey is a fascinating place, where one can be more rooted (or stuck) than is imaginable in the 21st century when one is only two hours from New York City.

Patti Smith has no contempt, except for George Bush. Which seems well-placed enough to me! So although onstage anger contorts her face, and her words seem as charged with rage as with any other emotion, off-stage she has a smile as wide as the sea.

And in the scene with Flea on a California beach literally exchanging stories of pissing into bottles to see who is more extreme, Patti wins. Especially because what she did, she did with female anatomy. She is one impressive woman. Godmother of punk indeed.

For readers of the book, you'll get a glimpse of many fine objects, including the tambourine Mapplethorpe made for her 21st birthday, and the Depression-era guitar Sam Shepard gave her (played here by the man himself). Just as in the book, there is a visual landscape she inhabits, and it is not a natural landscape but a room full of important art objects made and invested with all sorts of meaning, concrete and pulsing with the life of those who made and gave them. There is no question she carries her whole life with her and translates it in the lyrics of her art, embodies it and gives it life with her voice. Her whole life seems as real and accessible to her as the ashes of Mapplethorpe she pours into her hand, the tape that carries the voice of her husband singing a song about a cancer-ridden Jackie O walking through Central Park that she wrote and cannot sing again because he so owned it.

Does Poetry Matter? (1)



Marianne Moore, poet and lover of baseball



The above is the question for the 2011 "Great American Think-Off" sponsored by the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center in New York Mills, Minnesota, a town of 1,100 people just outside Wadena. This place seems like kind of an Upper Midwestern Chatauqua, promoting dialogue on philosophical issues and supporting the arts.

My brother-in-law passed the question along to me, and it's been fun to think and write about it. My first thoughts went to an essay by Dana Gioia, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1992, called "Can Poetry Matter?" It was the usual diatribe against the way poetry has been relegated to academia. His claims were that poetry has marginalized itself because it only speaks within a very small subculture of people, and rarely, if ever, transcends individual experience at all. He lamented the MFA system that creates thousands of poets who then become the only people who read poetry. It is not hard to see his point. 

What is more, I've found many poets over the years to be incredibly mean-spirited, clinging to whatever little fistful of power they've carved out for themselves. Many are interested only in who is reading them, and not so much in reading or praising the work of others. I canceled my subscription to Poetry after reading an essay by Kay Ryan about the Associated Writing Programs conference in Vancouver in 2004-05. I attended that conference, where so many of us trying to write and teach flocked to hear the latest poetry stars read from their work and basically just keep up-- as well as, perhaps, connect with a few in our community to talk about our work. I have no idea why Kay Ryan would want to rip apart the people who attended that conference, but the whole thing just furthered my already developing cynicism about "the poetry world."

There is a great deal of poetry, especially the poetry of the time, that I think does not matter at all. Or matters no more than any other text. Much of the poetry written today is inaccessible, or precious, or sensational, or witty and clever. Books of poetry published these days are more like novels-- they have a theme or a through-line. I think this is a result of the poetry contest, where 50 pages on a single theme or telling a single story are more likely to make an impression than a collection of poems on a variety of subjects. When reading hundreds or even just dozens of manuscripts as a judge of a contest, it takes something to capture the attention and hold it long enough to register. But what this also means is that poems have lost much of their lyric power, and depend or lean on the context provided by other poems in the collection. And books of poems can be read once and then put aside. In most cases, we can get all they offer from one sitting.

Of course, the poetry slam and performance poetry scene have opened poetry up to a large number of people who are not "trained" in academia as poets and for whom poetry matters. It builds community and gives people an outlet for an astonishing amount of creativity and storytelling. At its best, it pushes the language and musicality and keeps things fresh. Poetry doesn't seem like one small, elite world so much as a collection of texts and writers that feed multiple subcultures in America today.

So the first thing we need to consider is, what is the nature of the question? Does poetry matter-- not just to individuals, but to society? To civilization? Does it matter more than regular speech or letters or at least as much as "business documents and school-books"? Here we are in Marianne Moore territory. Her poem, "Poetry," (from which that quoted phrase comes from) reads, in its final form:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

She doesn't get to this final form, however, before constructing a much longer poem, and tinkering with it as she must have all her poems to get the number of syllables she required for each line and the diction just right. Her quirky system of organizing arguments into lines that followed an arbitrarily assigned number of syllables each, even when our language is more attuned to accented verse than syllabic (think haiku verses Shakespeare) demonstrates her love of the word game that is poetry as much as the "truth" game or what she calls "the genuine."

In her longer version of the poem "Poetry," she has wonderful claims, such as: "when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be 'literalists of the imagination'-- above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them,' shall we have it."

This says a lot about her vision of what can make poetry matter, but also suggests she didn't think that much good poetry was being written in the 1930s.

I'm going to write several more entries on this topic, as I think it through. I've already assembled several examples of how and where I see that poetry does indeed matter (much more than I can include in the 750 words of the final essay for the Think-Off). You can let me know if I am able to make my case.

Patti Smith / Just Kids

Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids is not an advice book, and should not be read as one. If you want to know her program for becoming a famous rock star in the 1970s, here it is:  move to New York City, even if you don't have any money and have to live on the streets for awhile (a good place to meet artists); attach yourself to a truly talented, driven artist; get a job that puts you in contact with people that might help you become an artist of some-- any -- type and allows you enough time to work on art of all kinds; move into the Chelsea Hotel, and work those contacts for all you're worth.

Really, it seems attaching herself to Robert Mapplethorpe and moving into the Chelsea Hotel pretty much paved the way for her success. In her memoir, and to her credit, she doesn't claim any great talent or really very much direction at all. If it weren't for meeting Mapplethorpe, getting hired by a bookseller, and hooking up with Sam Shepard, it's hard to tell what she might have done. At the Chelsea, she met rock stars, including Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Also Gregory Corso and some others who helped get her up on her first stage, St. Mark's Church, for an accompanied, high-octane poetry reading.

She was surprisingly, almost shockingly, nearly drug free. (The drugs make a very late appearance, which might say more about the '70s and rock and roll than anything else.) Her rough living was founded on poverty: homelessness and hunger. No health insurance. She comes across as eager and kind and enthusiastic, engaged and caring. Surely she was a little more raw and tough than the voice of this memoir would have one believe-- you almost have to remind yourself by looking at the pictures or focusing on the imagery in the artwork-- to remember what their "scene" was like. What it was they were creating was more punk than folk, even if she claims to have modeled herself on Bob Dylan.

Mapplethorpe, too, comes across as sweet. What I loved most in the book were the times Robert would be listening to her tell a story, or come in and find her doing something, and say, "Patti, no!" The first instance is when she's telling him the story of stealing from the jewelry box of a sick friend. Every time she got to the theft in the oft-repeated story, he's say, "Patti, no!" as if to get her to move away from the jewelry box. This playful outrage is repeated, and wonderful, especially near the end when he comes into her apartment and finds her awkwardly trying to roll a joint. "Patti, no, you're smoking pot!" It's what I will remember most from the book (and no doubt imitate in interactions with my friends).

Patti Smith was a poet, a singer, a painter/assemblage artist, a playwright (with Shepard), who got some very lucky breaks. She comes across as serious about life, but not serious about art, except for her desire to be an artist, in the way many people her age in the time the book takes place (18-24) are. If she were older, you could call her a dilettante. But she was actually just someone awake to her time, engaged with the people who came into her life, who found her way onto a much larger stage through the power of her personality and stick-to-it-ness.

Death of Sisera

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day with the book of Judges as part of my book project for The Saint John's Bible. Judges chronicles a time for the Israelites between the death of their leader Joshua, who brought them into the Promised Land, and the time of the kings. The goal is for the people to be led directly by Yahweh, but they aren't up to it. The Lord "raises up" judges. They do more than keep the peace among the people; judge are deliverers, leading, directing and offering guidance in battle.

One of the judges is Deborah, and although I'd heard of her, I didn't really know her story. Deborah is a judge who leads the people with her military leader Barak (who insists that she go with him into battle) against the forces of the great military man Sisera. The Lord throws Sisera's troops into panic, and they are routed by the Israelites. All of Sisera's men are killed, but he escapes and flees to the tent of Jael, the wife of one of his allies. However, Jael, after luring Sisera into her tent, drives a tent stake through his head and into the ground while he is sleeping. This is a double humiliation for Sisera, whose forces are routed by a woman (Deborah) and who then is killed by a woman (Jael). To see the illumination on the SJB web page, click here.

What drew me to the passage, though, was the fact that it is told first as a narrative in Judges 4 and then, in chapter 5, as a poem/song.

The Song of Deborah is a classic ballad telling the story of triumph in battle. The opening suggests the purpose of the song is to retell the story: "When locks are long in Israel, when the people offer themselves willingly-- bless the Lord." In the times of prosperity to come, when your hair has grown long, remember how the Lord delivered you from your enemy Sisera. Later it will directly instruct people to retell the tale to all people and throughout time. Then the poem tells the story of three women.

It first recounts the sorry state of the Israelites in the time before Deborah arose, when "caravans ceased, and travelers kept to the byways," a time of "new gods," "plunder" and "war in the gates." After much praise of  Deborah, the narrative turns on the short verse: "then down to the gates/marched the people of the Lord," followed by a list of the peoples.

"Then loud beat the horses' hoofs/ with the galloping, galloping of his steeds." After the poetic telling of that "most blessed of women" Jael, and her dreaded tent spike, the poem makes its most interesting move.

It moves to a distant scene and introduces a third woman. "Out of the window she peered, / the mother of Sisera gazed through the lattice. 'Why is his chariot so long in coming? / Why tarry the hoofbeats of the chariots?'"

Isn't that great? This mother and "her wisest ladies" imagine the soldiers of Israel "deviding  the spoil" and taking "a girl or two for every man." It's a really unusual and striking move, from an unabashed celebration of victory in battle to the women left behind, now at the mercy of the victors.

In this writing project, I find it tricky to figure out how to present what I'm reading. I do not read the Historical Books as actual, literal history. These books are more akin to the Greek histories and tragedies, or perhaps the "histories" (and often the tragedies) of Shakespeare. They are literary and, although as a Christian I believe in their ability to tell me about God's relationship to humanity, I do not of course find the battle scenes or violence instructive of how "the people of God" should behave. Let us concentrate more on the opening of this and so many stories in Judges: "The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord... So the Lord sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan." This opening phrase will be repeated again at the opening of chapter 6, after we are told "And the land had rest for forty years."  Ultimately, the story of violence is the story of disobedience, the people's inability to follow God.

In the end, what I'm really enjoying is the stories. After my first weekend of writing, I really kept my amazement that the story of the movement into Canaan begins with two Israelites hidden and protected by the prostitute Rahab, who is later spared when Jericho is destroyed. What a strange and wonderful opening to this "history." And this week, I have the great Song of Deborah to take with me into the week, a wonderful poem that seems to speak across the centuries, of a warrior woman, a treacherous queen and the mother of a warrior on top of Mt. Tabor, realizing her son will not return from battle.

Image: Death of Sisera, Donald Jackson, ©2010, The Saint John’s Bible, Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.  Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Catholilc Edition, ©1993, 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

Found Poem

This weekend I found a poem. I did not write it; I only recognized it. That is what a "found poem" is. It's part of early deconstructionism, a sort of Marcel Duchamp approach to poetry, that involves taking language from one context and putting it in another. In a word, appropriation. In our college poetry writing class, we were shown examples by Mark Strand, and we went out and read signs and cereal boxes and other texts, looking for poems. I've been looking for them ever since-- but this is the best one I've found. It's so good, I put my name on it and sent it off to the New Yorker (you can send them poems online now, and the automated message said that they'll respond in three months).  I can't wait three months to share it with the world...

The poem I found was this:


Synopsis

          1

Interior of John Gordon’s mansion.
Bob and Dick— Gordon’s two shiftless sons.
Gordon’s fruitless efforts to make men of them.
His socially ambitious wife.
Their daughter Margaret.
The mysterious Countess Du Prey.
The visit of Betty Green.


          2

The curse of wealth.
A father’s love for his children.
The love of Betty Green.
Betty makes a proposition.
Bob and Dick accept.
Bob accepts Gordon’s offer.
A villain’s treachery.
The ruin of Gordon.


          3

Gordon’s illness.
The downfall of Dick.
A secret in John Gordon’s life.
Bob learns the truth.
Gordon’s trust in Bob.
Bob makes a solemn promise.
The death of Gordon.


          4

Dick’s mistake.
Bob’s loyalty.
Van Darcy threatens.
Countess Du Prey turns the tables.
Betty’s decision.
Dick acknowledges his guilt.
Bob’s secret becomes known.
A happy ending.

 
 
Don't you love it? I want to find an open mic right away, because it's even better when read aloud.  I put it in my manuscript, the first poem in the second section, the one called "Art, like life." Because really what the manuscript is about (I think, anyway) is the way language can comprehend life or not, make life seem more real, shape life, and where it falls short. The role of artifice in our understanding of the "meaning" of life, and the meaning of the spiritual life. I put a note to the poem at the end of the manuscript, which tells where I got it:  Note: This is a found poem. The original text can be found in the script of the play Gilded Youth by Martin Heymans, published by the Catholic Dramatic Movement, Briggsville, Wisconsin, 1926. It's in the frontmatter of a play Steve's grandfather wrote, among many popular plays he wrote, known for their high moral message and for being "clean entertainment." The scripts were purchased for 50 cents each (12 for $5.40) by dramatic societies throughout the Midwest. There's a scene about such a dramatic society in Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, and the arguments that ensue are over the "cleanness" of the play.
 
If the New Yorker decides to take it, what do I do? There is no note. I found it. Steve says Grandpa Martin would be happy if it found new life in the 21st century. I think it would just be fabulous.

Joshua Tree poem

Of my previous visits to Joshua Tree National Park, it is clear that I have one singular story that will forever dominate in my memory.

It is of the Thanksgiving Day I spent there with my ex-husband, as our marriage was ending but about a month before I really knew it, lost for four hours. We went there to camp, but of course, arriving on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, all the spots were taken. I'd wanted to come down on Tuesday night to try to get a space, but there had been arguments. In fact, he wanted to go to Death Valley, but I was so tired from commuting I just didn't want to spend six hours in the car each way for a long weekend trip. He would only go at all because I'd said he could go to Death Valley on his own the following weekend. It was odd that he seemed to think he needed my permission for this, or that it was a negotiation.

We decided on a longish hike we found in a book of hikes that was decidedly unhelpful. The book was about 5" x 8", so the maps, such as they were, were small and lacked detail. It had a rough line drawing of the elevations and the terrain, and directions that read something like this: "follow the trail among the rocks about 700 yards, then veer left beside the wash. After about half a mile, the trail turns right between two rocks and climbs for about another quarter mile." Well, if you've ever hiked in the desert, you'll know that it is nothing but rocks and washes and what look like trails but might turn out to be ancient goat tracks. Also, it's impossible, ever, to figure out how far you've walked. George was moving fast, distracted, wanting to climb up things and see the views, always ahead of me and my book. I struggled to make sense of the directions, but probably quite soon we were lost. Not admitting it and back-tracking, however, we got deeper and deeper into the park. At some point we probably left the park boundary. Up and down massive rock and scrub landscapes we went.

We'd chosen this hike thinking it would take more or less exactly until dusk. Suddenly it was dark (late November), though the air was really pleasant and the overcast sky kept the temperature from getting too cold. I was suprirsingly comfortable. And once we got to a point where I could actually see a little ribbon of road with its beads of headlights in the distance, I was surprisingly peaceful, too. Now it was just a matter of walking until we hit the road. And when we did, we got to a Medical Center, and called from there for a taxi back to the park and our car-- a $15 cab ride if I remember correctly.

George and I hardly talked the whole time, but I just can't explain how peaceful I felt. I hadn't felt that calm for months. I still think of it as a really good memory. Even later, when he said he was wishing he was with his girlfriend instead of me the whole time, that didn't diminish my feelings about that day. I just felt really safe and confident and good. Sure, my feet hurt and there was one panicky time when we were really, really lost, down in a canyon with no clear ascent out, but overall, it was so, I don't know, more manageable than I would have expected. So not scary. We had water and food in our backpacks, and if we needed to we could have just lay down and gone to sleep.

I wanted to write a poem about Joshua Tree for a long time. I thought I would try to write a sestina. I think "outdoor" stuff like this makes for good sestinas, because in a sestina the last word of each line repeats so you have to keep reusing the same six words. And in the desert, as I mentioned in my last post, there are about six things. There's something elemental about it. I also like sestinas because, since they have long lines and are such long poems, they tend to have a narrative push to them, a narrative appeal. They have to go somewhere and keep moving through the structure. In this way they are the opposite of villanelle's, which keep circling back to the same spot.  For those of you new to sestinas, notice the end words (in some form-- the variations are most of the fun for me) are the same in each stanza: desert, empty, lost, carry, water and trail.

It was two years later that I wrote this sestina about the desert, and it took a turn to this story, as did my talks with Steve in Joshua Tree last week. It's still one of my favorite poems, though I never did find a magazine to publish it. I sent it to the "sestina editor" at McSweeney's who wrote back a really nice e-mail saying he LOVED it, but that the editors thought it wasn't witty enough. Witty, it is not.

Desert Sestina

I feel at home in Joshua Tree’s desert.

There’s peace in the vast emptiness,
the illusion that you could never get lost
because you can see so far, and sounds carry
over desert like they carry over water,
alerting others to your presence on or off the trail.

Have you ever noticed how two women on a trail
will talk and talk, never running empty,
but couples are more quiet? In the desert
they stop briefly to share a bottle of water
as if time together allows them to be at a loss
for words, or many ways to show they care.

I pay attention to these things now; I care
what brought these people to the desert,
and wonder if it makes them feel full or empty,
the barren rock beneath a sky the color of water.
I know it’s hard for anyone to stay on the trail
and in the world, as in the desert, easy to get lost.

Two years ago my husband and I got lost
following a wash we mistook for the trail.
Four hours we walked in the dark in the desert,
each ridge we climbed showing us more emptiness.
My husband was worried. He tried to take care
of me. I told him it was warm and we had water.

Finally we saw the lights of the highway, like water,
an oasis of cars, and we walked toward it, far from any trail.
I felt oddly peaceful in sight of town. I didn’t care
how far we had to walk through the emptiness.
I didn’t know that my husband was already lost.
Finally, we reached a medical center, nearly deserted.

It would be less than three months before he would desert
me and our good marriage, leave me like a fish out of water,
flopping. I was left to find my way, build a new trail
out of my grief over so large a loss.
Watching him go down so fast, that he didn’t care
enough to try, left a deep, vast emptiness.

I revisit that loss, working it out in the desert.
I stay on the trail and carry plenty of water.
I know in the big emptiness there’s also clarity, bedrock.

Hotel Poetry

OK, so more luxuriating than writing on my retreat. It was a good weekend, and I did read and think and even write a bit. I was reading Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose Messenger: New and Selected Poems I bought after hearing her read at the College of Saint Benedict last week.

It was a good reading, and she was speaking my language. I associate her with the early low residency MFAs, Warren Wilson and the one she founded at Vermont. Her name was around, but I don't remember reading her work as a graduate student in the late-1980s. The language she was speaking was narrative and lyric. She read some narrative poems, a poem she called a lyric that sounded like narrative to me-- it had a setting, characters, even a small action. She had spoken to a class earlier in the afternoon where she'd explained what she meant by these terms, and why she was referencing her poems this way.

She also talked about getting tired of writing narrative and consciously switching to lyric, and then going back. At the end of the reading she read new poems, without punctuation, packed with words and association and ultimately seeming like more work than they were worth. I'd have to see them on the page, but afterward a friend summed it up saying, "What is it with contemporary poets piling on words?"

My favorite of the poems she read were a series of monologue sonnets set during the 1919 influenza epidemic. The poems were elegant and detailed, evocative and believable. I asked after the reading why she'd written so many about this epidemic, and whether they were based on research.

She said they weren't based on research, as her research had turned up no stories of the influenza at all. One book on the subject full of facts, but no stories, no mention in literature except for one paragraph by Willa Cather. How all those authors could have lived through something that decimated the population and not leave a creative record was beyond Voigt's understanding, and is beyond mine. I'm interested in collective memory and more particularly in collective forgetting, so this was equally interesting to me. Voigt said the lack of a record gave her creative license to "make it up," focusing just on not being anachronistic and fully imagining each situation.

Her starting point was a story a friend of the family had told, a country doctor, who had traveled during the time of the influenza with an empty bag, seeing the ravages of the flu but unable to offer any treatment or relief. I can certainly see how helplessness like that could take hold of someone and result in poetry. And once you're in that place, and exploring that story, other characters speak to you-- if you're lucky.

I fed on her poems, on the language and lines, and attempted something. I made a heading: "Garden Poems" and started to try to write about vegetables. I wanted to make them one by one, carefully drawn like illustrations on old-fashioned seed packets or calendars, or traced on cloth to be embroidered. That would make them lyrics, I think, crafted pictures, standing alone. And it would depend on music and shape, on craft. I started with carrots, and moved on to peas. And for a few days I kept that image of the carrot in my head. When I read the poem again today, it seemed oddly perverse, sort of darkly sexual, in a way that made me embarrassed. Not at all like the image on the side of the seed packet. But not far off Roethke's root cellar.

Prairie Poem

I've been feeling very creatively backed up-- which makes me simultaneously anxious and depressed, all sorts of bad cycling going on. I want to write, think, read, have time to range around in my life of the mind, and I haven't the time or energy for it. So I get overwrought, which isn't pretty.

Last week's project photographing and identifying the prairie flowers kind of set me off. It might be all those names swirling around in my brain. But mostly it was something I wrote off-hand about the grey-headed coneflowers. They're sort of the ubiquitous and most important/identifiable prairie flower. And in a way they're like the saddest daisies. Their petals hang down. The petals are thin and straggly. Like a paper hula skirt or child's crumpled dance costume. I wrote: "the grey-headed coneflowers with their second-hand skirts." That was it, the only piece of poetry I seemed to have in me. But there it was nonetheless, a piece of poetry in me.

The book I finished reading today on Emergent Christianity has also got me worked up. I can't figure out what it is or what it means, exactly, and I remain skeptical while at the same time thinking it could be talking about me. It's possible. They use words like "community" and "conversation," to keep it open and undefined. But there are still so many buzz words on the pages of the blogs and web sites about it. Is it just another form of the great evangelical "church for the non-churched"? There is a lot I don't know, and I can't figure out quite how to learn it. This is the great thing about life, of course. It does get me a little charged up, though.

And just before dinner, I worked on this poem. It doesn't yet have an ending, just a place-holder, but I just needed to get the names out there, get things shaped a bit...I need something to happen in it somehow, to make it become a poem. I do like the second-hand skirts, and the caterpillars on stems... The photo above is blue vervain, possibly my favorite. One could certainly write a whole poem about them, couldn't one?

Prairie Restoration

After plowing and herbicide
and burning and more
herbicide and seeding,

after years of weeds
and weed seeds stirred up,
and spraying, dying back,

to get to some ground
that doesn’t remember
a century of farming,

then we have prairie,
all that’s taken hold,

distinct and nameable:

blue vervain, aster, bergamot,
purple and white prairie clover
like caterpillars on stems,

water hemlock by the pond,
loosestrife, false sunflower,
its cousin, black-eyed Susan,

germander and partridge pea,
milkweed and yarrow,
coreopsis and butterfly bush,

and queen of them all,
the homely prairie coneflowers
with their second-hand skirts.

They sway and bend

like a children's ballet:

no technique, vulnerable.

They summon the bees,
the butterflies, the birds,
the weaving and darting bugs,

the small and large lights,
they take it back,
they take it all back.

The Great Emergence

I've been reading Phyllis Tickle's book The Great Emergence, with my skeptic heart engaged and as open as I can pry it, and the book has definitely resonated with me. Resonated is a word I would like to not allow myself, but there it is. I'm involved in all sorts of new ways of thinking and being because of the monastery-- right now I've been grappling with what they mean by "discernment." There is even a "discernment process" used by the monastery for making large decisions, that involves going in and out of group discussion/feedback and individual contemplation. And I think it works for the community, if it works, because these women pray the Liturgy of the Hours and are engaged in daily lectio divina, contemplative reading of Scripture. This practice builds in them a present-consciousness and awareness the likes of which I've never seen-- and which I've seen and remarked on quite regularly in the Benedictine monastics I know. It makes for an incredibly tuned-in community of fierce, smart women.

Today I read chapter 4, and at the end of the chapter she names the "essential questions" of our time, a time of upheaval in the underlying systems of meaning that have guided Western humanity for the past 500 years, questions that we ask because of Darwin, Faraday, Freud, Jung, Einstein and more recently Joseph Campbell. The three essential questions are:
"1: Where, now, is the authority?...
2:What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human?
3: What is the relation of all religions to one another-- or, put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions?" (Tickle, pp. 72-73).

Well, I thought to myself, those are the three central questions addressed in my second book of poetry. Those are exactly the questions that I've been thinking about and asking myself about for most of my life-- certainly since I was twelve years old and we converted overnight from Catholicism to the Assemblies of God. And, in fact, the authority question is the one question hanging over all the women's religious orders of the United States at the moment, because Rome is attempting through an Apostolic Visitation what seems to be a "slap down" of their individual authority for what seems like no good reason at all. And personally, not speaking here in any way for the monastery or any of its members, I suspect Rome has overstepped and will find out that the "people in the pews" don't care what Rome thinks. I think it will be, if not the end, a blow to that particular authority. And don't take my word for it-- read the 420 comments posted to the New York Times front page coverage of the Apostolic Visitation and two other investigations and criticisms of women religious by American bishops and Rome.

In the discernment process, the community is asking: "What do you believe the Holy Spirit is calling us to given what we know?" It is a question that can only lead to boldness, I think, in facing the future and in walking into whatever new world we find ourselves in.

A Poetry Story about Ducks

The first entry I wrote about the ducks was called "Two Ducks." It was sort of an inside joke between me and my creative writing students. One of the best ways I got students talking about "What makes poetry," was through an anecdote I'd heard.

A writer who had been in the Iowa Writer's Workshop told a group of us at a lunch table about the day one of the students, a wise guy, came into class ("workshop") with his poem. He handed out the photocopies for discussion. On the page was this text, which I would write on the board:


Two Ducks

two ducks



"Is this a poem?"
Some students would say, immediately, "no way." When I asked why not they'd insist you needed more to make a poem, something to make these ducks stand out and mean something. Something more descriptive, some simile or metaphor, or maybe action. A story or a more particular image. What did the poet want to say about the two ducks? Why should we care? We could talk then about emotion in poetry, our expectations, and about the tools of poetry: rhythm, repetition, figurative language.

Others would say, "It's a poem if the author says it is a poem. Maybe it means something to him or her." To which, invariably, someone would say: "It's just two words. Two plain words. You can't even say someone wrote that." Then we could talk about communication in a poem, audience, whether there were any rules or definitions, any limits.

The joke about the notoriously mean-spirited Iowa Writer's Workshop goes this way: "So he passed out the poem. And someone said, 'I don't like the first line,' and someone else said, 'I don't like the last line,' and someone else said, 'I don't like the title.' And we were done."

But my class doesn't go this way. I push my students farther-- can we make meaning of this? Are the title and line like reflections of two ducks on a pond, and so do we have sort of four ducks? Isn't the word "duck" kind of shaped like a duck, with a tall neck and forked tail? Do we all think the same thing when we see the words "two ducks" because we all have this shared image of what two ducks look like? Is it calling upon some primal, elemental experience we share-- of two ducks? Or, expecting more, does it dislocate us? Isn't "two" a strange word, not at all sounding how it's spelled? And yet ducks is so harsh and obvious. Is it a love poem? I am, of course, teaching them about "language poetry" here. For more on language poetry, click here.

And in the end I'm with the majority, in that I don't want as the reader to have to do all the work to make what is on the page mean something. I want the poet to tell me a little more than this. I want there to be a consciousness and author behind the poem who is willing to share something of the human experience with me. I prefer linearity, narrative, accessibility. But that's my preference. It doesn't mean it isn't a poem. And in some ways I, too, revisiting this poem again and again over the last twenty years, have come to see something in it, and something more in ducks as well, which I attribute to the poem.

Nostalgia

Lately I've been nearly overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia. I've been avoiding writing in the blog, because I'm afraid I will be too sappy.

Part of it is the number of people I've reconnected with lately. For about eighteen months, since our high school reunion, with several close high school friends I'd lost touch with. And I just joined Facebook, against my better judgment, to connect to college friends who used to write on an active listserve. They all went over to Facebook and I miss them. But now instead of the fifteen or so folks who did that, some of whom I only knew on the listserve, I have like 50 correspondents, people I knew oh so long ago and who knew me when I was 19 or even 13. I've kept my friend list only to college acquantances. And there they are with their photos and the photos of their children, and it's a little overwhelming-- all those lives in all those places, truly all over the world. In a way it makes one feel connected, but it also makes me feel a little lonely-- like there are all these distances, all these fragments. And of course worrying just like in high school and college if people will be my friend!

Facebook itself is very fragmented, very daily, with people posting what they are doing right now, and posting links to articles and taking quizes and posting their scores and inviting people to make lists and answer questions... One person filling my box with "gifts" like ball gowns and chocolate and spiritual mandalas. It's craziness that I think I have to learn how to navigate-- what will I participate in and what will I not.

Mostly I've liked seeing people's pictures. Jake playing the lute, Jeanne's retrospective of ten years of pictures of her son in honor of his first decade. I wanted to post Billy Collins's poem "On Turning Ten" on there, but kind of got distracted and didn't figure out how to do such a thing. It's a great poem, one of my favorites, about nostalgia. How silly we are, taking ourselves oh so seriously. How happy I am to be here, and 44. So then, in this staid forum, a poem:


On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.

But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Blog

Today I felt some urgency to get a new entry on the blog, but really had nothing to put down that was "blogworthy." For the past two weeks I've been thinking about the reality I'm creating in the blog. In a way, it's a perfect form for me. After writing a full-length memoir, and all those years writing poetry, I know what I enjoy is creating a narrative out of my life. In a way, I've been blogging a long time, writing essays, practicing narratives, making written pieces out of what is in my head. In the blog, though, because it is immediately public, I right away began making choices. I began from the beginning leaving things out (beginning with the essay I wrote that occasioned the blog in the first place). I've been going back and taking things out-- things I would otherwise say or even write, things that I think are important to the story. It is not censorship, exactly. When I write them in the first place I hesitate. When someone responds or suggests I take something out, I do. It is sensitivity, I suppose. It privileges a certain story, however. I took something out in a past entry already once this week. I wonder about that, because I know my poetry and maybe most of my writing has come from a darker place. A place I value for its beauty and honesty. The blog is true, too, but it creates a certain picture of my life. And this picture is in large part fiction, as all narratives are, and it's a different narrative than the one I've told so far.

It's pastoral.

To write these entry/essays, I need to be engaging with things-- movies, experiences, the natural world, ideas. These past few weeks my chief engagement has been with movies. So I could sit down and write a film review. I don't want the blog to become one thing only, but I can only write about what I'm engaged with. And in fact there are other stories I could tell-- about all I'm learning about the aging of the monastery, and all the sadness that comes along with watching the Sisters flounder and valiently keep on, and struggle with their individual and collective fragility. But that is a private story, to be told some day but not now.

And it is winter, so we're watching a lot of films. And I'm not writing poetry, but I'm thinking about the fact that I'm not writing poetry, and sending out my second manuscript to contests. Last night there was a poetry "event" at the college, a panel on politics and poetry, and there were two writers on the panel who interest me, and they were going to talk about William Stafford, who also interests me. But we didn't go. I had so much anxiety about "the scene" of it, and all that it means that I'm not engaged by and in that world anymore. I had worked myself up sufficiently by the time I came home from work that I just wanted to be let off the hook and not have to go. We went out to dinner instead.

Tonight we watched Vicky Christina Barcelona, the latest Woody Allen movie, which struck me as a story straight out of Edith Wharton. It takes up Allen's perpetual fascination with the hedgehog and the fox, the romantic and the classical world view, the lure of the domestic and the lure of the artist life (which he calls passion). Two women go to Barcelona for the summer, one happily playing out her conventional plan for a good life (Vicky), the other a destructive and restless romantic (Christina). They meet a great artist and his ex-wife, a muse for everyone. The poor woman, Vicky, is now confronted by the prospect of living a conventional life with a conventional man until the end of her days. The great scandal of boredom. But of course, the real romantics in the film don't find love and happiness either. Their world view is counter to stability, so they have to destroy what becomes still and peaceful. There's no good end game.

The truth is, I don't know of lives with other people that are boring. No life stays the same. It's a matter of engagement-- engagement with anything close at hand. I might be wrong about that, but I also know that our society privileges the romantic, and the romantic doesn't lead to paradise.

winter (2)

It is now light enough when I get home to go and tromp around in the snow for about 40 minutes, from 5-5:40. It's the most gorgeous thing, really. The snow is very white and heaped in creamy hillocks. After one day my tracks are drifted into soft ridges or filled in completely. It's stayed cold enough that the snow is powdery and moving like sand. I think this is the reason to have 80 acres.

Now the deer are walking in my footsteps, the indentations left by the snowshoes.

The light changes pretty quickly and pretty dramatically, as the sun goes down red over the ridge where I-94 rises up a few fields over. Everything is incredibly soft. I think about taking pictures, but I know I couldn't capture it. You just have to be there. And it isn't easy-- after work to put on my snow gear and go out. I think of my mother who swims all winter in the early morning. She gets up in the dark and cold and puts on a bathing suit and jumps in a chilly pool at the high school. I could never do that. It's the best exercise for her because she has some arthritis in her hip. And my mother is driven by virtue. She knows it is good for her, and so she does it. I use this as a motivator to get myself outside-- because this is so much easier to do, dress warm and walk out into the beautiful landscape. And I've just this week reached some fitness plateau so it's easier.

I am a little surprised at just how much I like winter. I realize I'm bonding with this property the way I didn't in summer, when everyone said it was so beautiful. The flowers and weeds and thistles were high and there was much more of a barrier for me. Now I can really walk out into it. I feel like I can see everything and make my way. I feel much less likely to get lost, or overwhelmed. Even though it requires equipment, it is so much more approachable and manageable to me now. In the summer it's hot and I like to sit on the screen porch and feel the wind and watch the sun go down from there. It's a picture. But this is inviting to me.

All this makes me think of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man" in a different way. It always felt like a really gloomy poem, sort of nihilistic, but now it seems sort of the opposite.


The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


Well, I don't feel like "nothing" myself, and I do think when you say "not to think / Of any misery" you introduce the idea of misery in the poem even though you're negating it.

But I do feel that this winter, walking around our property, I am seeing "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And I do think it's because we had those days below zero that now, "cold a long time," I can walk out and be part of the landscape with the milder cold of 15 degrees.

There's a realness to the place, to every single thing. Every prickled stem and piece of grass that pokes out of the snow. And today I walked past three cattails-- and thought, "Now I'm in the wetlands." Places I can't go in summer. Suddenly clear and every piece separate and lovely.

Christmas and Obama

This morning I woke up with something still stuck in my head from two weeks ago. On the December 13 show of A Prairie Home Companion, Renee Fleming and Yo Yo Ma performed an adapted version of "In the Bleak Midwinter." It's one of my favorite Christmas carols, though (and maybe because) it's so moody. The experience was enhanced by being in my car, in the bitter cold, on my way to Saint John's University for the mundane task of checking out a video from the library. But it meant I was driving onto that lovely campus and past the dramatic bell banner as the song was playing. It was yet another instance of the great myth-making going on around Barack Obama and his family, but it was also very moving. Here's a transcript of the two adapted verses:

In the bleak midwinter
at the Christmas feast,
a family leaves Chicago
and travels to the East,
for a public mansion
in Washington, D.C.
in a time of trouble
and festivity.

All across the nation
sea to shining sea,
people watch the passage
of this family.
And the loving wishes
go out to them there,
all the nation beathes
a silent, hopeful prayer.

I have mixed feelings about all this mythmaking. I think it puts too much pressure on this one man and his decisions. I fear we're hoping he'll save us-- by which I think people mean, make things go back to how they used to be, restore prosperity. Last night the prioress, Nancy Bauer, gave a homily on all the messianic language in the headlines lately surrounding the economic crisis, and it does raise false hopes. As she pointed out, the messiah that showed up was not "the stimulus package" the Jews expected to free them from the Romans. If we want saving, we should look elsewhere.

At the same time, I am proud of my country and this choice, and I am hopeful that we can make it through this transition and hopefully see some real change, and some real character shown by our people, all of us together.

I read this morning that Elizabeth Alexander is writing a poem for the inauguration. I knew Elizabeth when she taught at the University of Chicago, and struggled because the hardcore academics in that English department didn't respect creative writers. I also heard that from the editors of the Chicago Review at the time. Elizabeth is a wonderful poet, and deeply humble and wickedly smart. The New York Times story kind of oddly fished around as to why she would be chosen. They suggested it might be her friendship with the Obamas, or something else. It bugged me that she still has to defend her talent. I guess the feeling is she's too "osbscure" to join the ranks of Robert Frost (for Kennedy), and Maya Angelou and Miller Williams ([for Clinton]. Williams is also obscure, but was a "senior statesman" of poetry.) It is interesting to note that our poet laureates aren't ever asked to do this task. In England, that's what poet laureates are for.

I think it's a perfect choice. Elizabeth comes from where the Obamas come from. She will understand her task completely, and be sensitive to it poetically and in terms of it being a public address. She's an accomplished, wonderful poet. And she's promised to be brief (which is more than you can say for Maya Angelou!).

Other Artist Friends, pt. 1

I want to post links to the work of two other artist friends who are very dear to me. One, Susan Mastrangelo, lives in Brooklyn and teaches art at The Buckley School on the Upper East Side. She has made art her whole life. When I lived in Brooklyn and would go to her studio, I always loved to see her new work and was amazed at how rapidly her work developed and changed. And I also saw the heartbreak of being an artist in New York through her. When I met her she primarily made sculpture. And there came a time when her studio, cut down smaller and smaller as rents continuously rose, was too full of work. In order to make room for the new work, she was dissembling and getting rid of old work, some of which had never been shown outside of her studio. When you live in New York City, it takes a lot of faith to make sculpture. It's not even something you can really give to your friends, whose apartments are as small as your own.

Susan's work can be seen at http://www.susanmastrangelo.com/. Her work has always struck me as quite autobiographical, and whimsical. It is beautiful and melancholy. I don't think she likes it when people say her work is sad. That has never bothered me. I have one of her prints, a portrait, which seems both sad and autobiographical, hanging beside my desk. What has kept me from hanging it in other rooms is that I messed up the framing. I had it professionally framed, but too tightly around the print. It needs room to breathe. I always feel bad about trapping the woman in the frame and I need to have it redone.

Susan was born on June 27, and I was born on June 25. We were both at Yaddo in the summer of 1990 and there was a party to celebrate the birthdays. It was more an excuse to get the serious drinking of summer started, I think, and just to have a party, than it was about us. A lot of people were in transition. Susan Mastrangelo had only been there a few days-- she was mostly there in July, and I was leaving in a few days, having been there three weeks in June. The party was held at a composer's studio that was out in the woods, in a sort of stone tower, with a bridge over a small moat. The party was as magical as everything else about that place. I remember strawberries and champagne, and dancing. But mostly what I remember was the walk back. A few of us women, tipsy and happy, walked home together and it was absolutely pitch black dark. But there were fireflies too.

In my new manuscript, I have a series of sonnets that answer questions. They are sort of opposites: "When were you loved best?" "When were you loved worst?" "What was the brightest day?" What was the darkest night?" I am playing in them on the figurative and the literal. That night at Yaddo is the setting for

What was the darkest night?

It was in the woods in Saratoga Springs,
after a party with champagne and strawberries we took
a bridge to reach, so dark we could not see
the path, our own white tennis shoes, our hands before our faces.
We could see fireflies, many fireflies, that gave
the dark a depth and height. No moon, no stars,
no light except those pulsing, love-lit tails
and the slow, languorous way they wove through the air.

Their flight was in our blood. And though
it was a month of nightmares,
the month I learned I would never take my life
and just how close I could come, I almost cried for joy
in that darkness. My laughter went up through the invisible trees
like birdsong, a flock of doves released.

I am not bothered by dark art, by melancholy art. That was a dark time for me, the spring and summer of 1990, when I was facing memories of sexual abuse from my childhood. It was also a great party, and a beautiful night, which I treasure. And once she got back in New York in August, Susan Mastrangelo made good on a promise to call me when she returned to the city, and we've been friends ever since. We're very different people, but somehow it works, and each time I see her or talk to her, I feel like no time has passed.

Phillies Win!

I was happy to see the Phillies win in front of that tough crowd last night. (I mean, when Tampa Bay hit that homerun to tie it up in the 7th, the silence was eerie. I didn't see the homerun ball get thrown back on the field, but I presume it was rejected by the fans. But seriously, not a single Tampa Bay fan in that stadium? More likely-- smart enough not to cheer.)

It made me think of my grandmother, who was a huge Phillies fan, and tough as nails. I can still hear her yelling at Mike Schmidt to get his act together in her living room on August afternoons. I don't have any poems about the Phillies, but I did write one in 2005 after the White Sox won the World Series and my father was out East in New Jersey burying his mother. So here it is...


I Imagine My Father after the Funeral:
a poem in 14 innings


My father buried his mother’s ashes
and that night stayed up late to watch
the White Sox battle fourteen innings
until after 2 a.m. to get a runner home.

It was the World Series, Game 3,
and he’d waited as long as anyone,
but now it seemed, like so much else,
he couldn’t remember why he’d wanted it.

Seventeen pitchers and runners left stranded
on both sides, the bases so far apart
and no spaces at all in that infield
even if you could make contact.

He was glad it was not the Phillies
his mother used to curse on the screen,
no praise at all when they won,
another beer, the power off.

Baseball will break your heart, the long haul.
He watched the wide face and white hair
of the former First Lady in the stands
beside her son, rooting for Houston.

Everyone at the funeral was proud of him
for having done what was right
when she had never done a single thing
but wrong by him, but still he was her son.

What dogged loyalty even she inspired,
when there was no money to be willed,
not even a Cadillac or the cubic zirconium
she won for S&H from Publisher’s Clearing House.

From the bench and bullpen are called
relievers and pinch-hitters one by one,
looking wild-eyed and young and stupid,
on the edge of moments great and small.

The ball flies so fast and strikes the mitt
so hard—how can anyone make contact?
How can anyone hope to send it straight
or curved or fast or any way and hit the mark?

It was the last duty, and though his name
had been the one she had remembered
longest, his face had made her smile at the end,
was that love, or even what he’d wanted?

When the unlikeliest of pinch hitters approached,
the replay showed the great surprise of that contact.
What part is luck when you’ve prepared
your whole life—is this what is meant by grace?

The funeral dinner was pre-paid and pre-planned,
so they ate well and his half-sister said what a waste
but still she signed every paper
willingly that didn’t cost her anything to sign.

It was my mostly quiet father who had yelled
until I learned the one cardinal rule of baseball:
never take a third strike. With two strikes,
good pitch or bad, go out and meet it, or miss, but swing.

Actually my father went to bed after the tenth,
no one to watch the game with him.
The game, he said, it started so late, and lasted
so long, it felt like it might never end.

Thomas Carey, OSB

These past two days as communications director at St. Benedict's monastery I've gotten a crash course in Sister Thomas Carey, a painter and Sister of this monastery who died in 1999. Her work is amazing, and I was familiar with it already. I've seen the posters in our gift shop, and there's an original oil hanging in my office. Her work is modernist, very colorful, and she painted a large number of Madonnas and Madonna-with-Child paintings. She also sculpted, Madonnas and a number of austere crucifixes. We are going to use one of her paintings for our Christmas card this year at the monastery. So I called S. Baulu Kuan who is an artist and who curated and produced a catalogue of Sister Thomas's work for an exhibition at the monastery's Haehn museum in 2004.

The image I wanted to use, she told me, was the Christmas card last year for St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul, a "daughter" monastery of St. Benedict's. They have a lot of Sister Thomas's paintings, including the one I wanted an image of, hanging in their monastery. And until the 2004 exhibit, many of the Sisters there didn't know what they had. If you go looking for examples of her work on the internet, you aren't going to find any.

S. Thomas's paintings are unsigned. And she gave many of them away, so they're hanging all over the place-- in private homes all over the St. Cloud area, and in other monasteries, and elsewhere. Which isn't to say she wasn't appreciated in her own lifetime. Blue Cloud Abbey in Marvin, S.D., commissioned S. Thomas to paint a series of Stations of the Cross that are among her best works. She painted them in the 1950s on 7' x 2' panels of walnut, and returned to do some restoration work on them in 1991-92. Blue Cloud Abbey was a very large monastery at that time, and Sister Thomas was a significant artist. And as you'll see later, in 1958 it was already brave to commission her work. She was controversial.

(By the way, Blue Cloud Abbey is a place I HIGHLY recommend you go see if you ever get a chance-- a community of men Benedictines out on the prairie near a town of 28 people. I stopped there overnight with my friend Bob Sauro on a trip two years ago, and he's still having nightmares, I believe, about the town of Marvin and what goes on there. [Bob has a website featuring his writings and great T-shirts based on vintage New Jersey sites you can find here.])

Sister Thomas had great humility. She never pushed her cause. If you read the catalogue of the 2004 retrospective, that comes through more than anything else about her. Some of the brothers living at Saint John's Abbey down the road had only a vague idea of the extent and accomplishment of her work. Brother Placid Stuckenschneider, a liturgical artist at Saint John's, wrote of coming face to face with her large body of work for the first time: "Where had she been hiding all this time?... To be sure, I wasn't ready for such a creative talent hidden behind the monastery wall." And this is truly the sign of a great Benedictine, her ability to work steadily at her art without ambition for fame or recognition. In fact, in an essay republished in the same catalogue, one feels her excitement at the great gift of her life as an artist in the monastery. She writes:

"When I came to the convent, I felt here a long-standing ... love of art.... There was an expressed hunger [in the monastery] for the beautiful, for the precious. There seemed a pervading awe for culture, the arts, for learning and the growth of worship. At that time the College of Saint Benedict was growing, along with the liturgy and the desire for liberal knowledge. We not only had a total submersion into a liturgical atmosphere and preparation with table reading and study clubs on the Divine Office, but also a terrific excitement about philosophy and the liberal arts in the college. ..

"I remember being told that if I were willing to go into art, I would not be rushed. I would be allowed to grow, and some day I would study in Europe. These were days of planting for the future. These were also the 1930s, when our world was falling apart, yet we were mindful of the liberal arts. Our focus was on learning for its own sake. Our focus was on culture. The whole community was hungry for learning.

"It seems even in our pioneer days as a community, when we would expect that survival would use up all our energy and push aside other values, we had not only the desire for culture but actually fostered its arts and its creative people as life-saving and worthy of great respect. Many have commented on what vision it took to build a virtual cathedral here on the flat lands of Stearns County, to provide an elegant chapel beyond all proportion to the rest of the visible evidence around us."

Sister Thomas wrote this essay, "Community and Creativity," in 1978. It was a happy time for her, when she was teaching in the art department at the College of Saint Benedict, brought in by college president Stanley Idzerda after he saw her work in 1968. She taught there from 1969-84, and while there, in addition to teaching and doing her own work, she collected 45,000 images of world masterpieces for the College's Picture Library. A hunger for beauty, indeed.

But her obscurity was not and is not completely a matter of temperament. The story the Sisters are quieter about-- although it is more open now as an example of "the bad old days"-- is of how Sister Thomas's work was banned, and she was suppressed. "Sister Thomas was ahead of her time," is how her friend Sister Kristin Malloy put it. "Not many people could understand and appreciate her art, including the local bishop. In 1954 she hoped that he would approve her crucifix, but disliking anything modern, he banned it. A half-century later, the same crucifix is considered by art historians as one of the most elegant expressions of contemporary religious art." The words "exile" and "officially censored" come up in conversation about her and her work. This is all the more striking to me given that it was also in 1954 that the monks of Saint John's Abbey hired Marcel Breuer, that master modernist architect, to design and build their abbey church, and construction began in 1958. As Sister Thomas was being shut down, the monks of St. John's Abbey were moving forward in ways that would make them internationally known for their liturgical vision and construction of a landmark modernist church.

A look at the chronology of S. Thomas's life shows 12 major exhibits throughout the Midwest in the years 1954-58. After this, she is teaching high school art at parochial schools, and the exhibits dry up-- a few pieces in annual Madonna Festivals, notably in Spokane, WA, far from the bishop of St. Cloud's watchful eye. It is only when Mrs. Idzerda, on the recommendation of Sister Kristin, hangs a painting in her husband's office to see if he likes it, that she is brought back to the art department at the college.

Meanwhile, she painted. She gave her paintings away. She didn't sign them. They're scattered to the winds-- who knows what is out there.

One mystery painting is this year's choice for a Christmas card. Sister Baulu, who keeps track of S. Thomas's work and brought it over for me to see, said she saw it for the first time only a year ago. When S. Kristin died, she left in her belongings a page of slides of Sister Thomas's work. Someone at the monastery passed it along to S. Baulu. In it was this Native American Madonna and child, and a few other works, which she'd never seen. We do not know where the original is. The slides are the only evidence. We may never know, unless the Christmas card reaches the owner (we send out 10,000-15,000!). As a Native American Madonna, it is outside the mainstream-- enough so that she might not have wanted to draw too much attention to it. There is another "Indian Madonna and Child" from 1958 that was commissioned by Blue Cloud Abbey at the same time as the Stations of the Cross, for the Chapel of the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Marty, South Dakota, an Indian mission church. How wonderful that they had that image-- and that she had the vision to make it for them.

It is not an uncommon story, the suppression of the women in the monastery-- for decades many Benedictine women's communities were not allowed to pray the Liturgy of the Hours that is at the heart of their monastic practice-- because it was believed to take too much time away from their active service ministries. Abbot Wimmer interfered with St. Benedict's Sisters on this account and from 1858-60 and 1880-1926 their prayers were curtailed to the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin.

It is also not an uncommon story, the suppression of women artists who were ahead of their time.

That Sister Thomas continued to create work, and continued to create work in this monastery (not leaving to pursue her career as an artist or over the disapprobation of the bishop), is a testament to her faith, to her love of Benedictine life, to her love of her community, and to the purity of her calling as an artist. Someone supplied her with paint and canvas and other materials, and time and space to do her work. In fact, she continued to attend summer art classes when the high schools where she taught were not in session, at Notre Dame, at the University of Minnesota, at St. Cloud State University. With the blessing of the prioress and her community.

In the catalogue, she is described in a community tribute this way: Gentle, Shy, Creative, and Imaginative. Also "Energetic: Her great talent and inner artistic conviction impelled her to unbelievable productivity foor Sister Thomas every minute counted; Resourceful: Her motto was that every difficulty could be transposed into a value, and opportunity; Happy: Sister Thomas was happy to be who she was and left her imprint in her paintings, feeling no need to sign her work. She delighted in her work and always turned out something spectacular; and Peaceful: She was a completely 'at home' personality; her being was in harmony with her art."

I know many artists who did not respond as Sister Thomas did to her circumstances. I know many bitter artists. Some have been my teachers-- well-published folks who felt their students got more fame than they did. My 85-year-old poet friend at Saint John's once called me "angry" (I told him I didn't want him to send me his used copies of Poetry magazine-- I didn't want that toxic, elitest rag in my house!), but I think he meant bitter. Lord knows bitter is the opposite of what I want to be. I want to write poetry out of joy, not hoping someone will publish it or recognize me. My intention is more and more to be a person who writes for its own sake, out of joy. The goal is to recognize that people have a hunger for beauty, and to seek to fill that need with what one makes. That is a lesson to be learned from Sister Thomas. I am trying to be worthy of it, as of so much about this place where I live and work.

At the end of Sister Thomas's chronology is this entry: "Painted angels' faces until she died on December 15 [1991] at St. Scholastica Convent." May we all be so lucky.