Stuff Happens

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But bad stuff does happen. Wednesday evening, for instance, while my 18-year-old and I were on our way to a homework date, another car slammed into ours in a parking lot. The driver wasn’t able to explain why she was zipping along so fast. Our car had to be towed, and we were lucky it wasn’t worse. (My daughter’s life flashed before my eyes; I’m still shaking.)

It certainly feels bad to me, but when a friend said, “Maybe you should blog about it,” I decided that, wishing away the fact of the thing wasn’t helping, and I remembered that writing could help.

Writing always helps me find some objectivity, to hold things at arm’s length and look at it. But writing can help me process feelings, too, not so much “at arm’s length,” but bringing them up close and holding them. There’s probably an analogy here between that sensation and the way the accident happened in a split second and in slow motion.

There’s also something to scribble about in the way all those intense feelings flooded back when Emma texted from school the next day that her back hurt and she couldn’t take a deep breath. I want to remember the kindness of the woman at our clinic who stayed on the phone with me until she found us an appointment. The doctor who examined me, too, and said, “Get a massage; you need it for the tight muscles in your neck and shoulder, and you need to have a good cry.”

Many years ago I heard the poet Chana Bloch tell about the range of emotions she went through when she learned that she had cancer. I also remember how beatific she looked, repeating for our benefit, “I am going to live through this, and I am going to write about it.”

Stuff happens. And even the bad stuff becomes material, for a writer. But first you have to figure out how to get through it.

 

 

 

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

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The only complaint I can make about my trip to Ireland is that it was too short. Nonetheless, in two weeks time, Carla and managed to squeeze in an amazing amount of touring, sight-seeing, and poetry. I thought that I would blog about it, my very first day back, and the next…and the next. But it was just too overwhelming to process, and what should I focus on?

An Exercise for the Overwhelmed Writer

When my students felt overwhelmed by a subject, I used to assign an exercise in which they had to list ten things they could put into a piece of writing, you know, if they were really going to get down to it. It works for an ordinary day (it’s a Heather Sellers‘ exercise), so let’s see how it manages to contain my two-week sojourn:

  1. After landing in Dublin on Sept. 29, we drove (all day!) to Castletownbere, which is the largest fishing port in the country. My first Irish Coffee (in Ireland, that is) was imbibed that evening at MacCarthy’s Bar (which happens to grace the cover of this book).
  2. The next day, we hiked up to a stone circle — “20 minutes” our B ‘n B host said. It took us 2 1/2 hours, and according to my fitbit, we walked 5 miles, all told. But, worth it. It was our first up-close introduction to Irish sheep and cows and stone fences. And the pied wagtail.
  3. Although we weren’t successful at finding a poetry reading (as advertised) on the Beara peninsula, we had better luck on our second night, in Cork. The reading began with part two of a Poetry Slam contest, held above a pub, rather late at night. After that, an open mike allowed us to share our work. Four young American poets were also there and read, and a host of Irish poets. And, yes, the next day we visited Blarney Castle and, yes, I did kiss the Blarney Stone.
  4. Everywhere we stayed, we had a great experience with our Air B n’ B choice, and in Limerick what made it special was Emmett at Nelly’s Corner Cafe. (Did I not take a picture of him?) He was always there, no matter what time we stumbled in, and introduced us to black and white pudding, plus the most amazing cappuccino’s. He pointed us toward St. Mary’s Cathedral (the oldest building in Ireland still used for its original purpose), and King John’s Castle, which, if a bit commercialized, gave us a thumbnail history of Irish oppressions. 
  5. In Limerick, on Oct. 4, we attended the “Make a Joyful Noise” poetry reading and open mic. Featured readers were Michael Gallagher and Lorraine Carey.
  6. Listowel deserves a longer stop — as they host a full-on literary festival every May. I was pretty delighted with the Listowel Writers’ Center (I want one in my neighborhood), complete with barista.
  7. In Sligo we stayed with Durkan and Nicola at an Air BnB waaayy off the beaten path. The house was built in the 1790s, and was preceded by another manor house, and before that, by a castle. I asked, innocently, “So your family has lived here since the 1790’s?” “Our family has lived on this land since 243,” I was solemnly informed.
  8. We had done a lot of driving that day (“Mad. Certifiably mad,” Durkan said when we told him how far), so we almost talked ourselves out of finding the open mic down in Sligo town. But we decided to go — and once again it was amazing and unique and we were glad to be there. The Illuminations Poetry Reading, hosted by Patrick Curley, met in The Bookmart and the readers and audience squeezed in amid the books to read poems and excerpts of plays.
  9. On our drive from Galway (could do a whole post on the nightlife there) to Belfast, we detoured to the coast to find breakfast, and happened upon the mythical island of Hy-Brasil. Later I purchased a book of poems by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and found that she had written a series of poems about the island. There was something magical afoot on this entire drive — including a labyrinth, and the ruins of a 15th century Abbey at Fenagh.
  10. About Belfast in Northern Ireland, just Titanic. Also amazing food, great pubs, and so much more that it really deserves its own top-ten list (as do all the items here). And for Dublin, ditto. Both of these are international cities with a million things on offer. In Dublin we walked through St. Stephen’s Green; we saw Ulysses at the Abbey Theatre; we went to Trinity College and spent a blissed-out hour with the Book of Kells and other manuscripts; we had tea with Carla’s professor (from 54 years ago!), Dr. Maurice Harmon, and his wife, Moira (a true highlight in a trip full of highlights); we shopped for sweaters. We visited bookstores and listened to really bad poetry. We found Harry Potter in Irish. We were…overwhelmed.

    What One Writes Next

The next step in this exercise is to choose one item and begin again. You can start by listing ten things just pertaining to that item (a useful strategy if the overwhelm continues), or you can simply begin writing.

Thank you for sticking with me this far. I’m sure I’ll have more to share with you, stay tuned!

Where I’m Writing From

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Well, right now, I’m writing from the Lynnwood branch of Sno-Isle libraries. But by tomorrow afternoon I’ll be on the road to meet my friend Carla in Bellingham, and the next morning at 8 a.m. we’ll be on an Air Canada flight to Dublin, Ireland.

Just, wow. 

What Carla has in mind is a poet’s tour of Ireland, and a two-day stopover in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She invited me to come along, and one of the amazing aspects of this trip is that Carla has done all the work. All I’ve had to do is write a couple checks and print out an itinerary. She booked the flights, the Air BnB’s, contacted people hosting poetry readings, wrote a flyer introducing us, and told me what to pack. Between Carla and Triple A, I’ve had a pretty easy time of it.

I paid a little extra on my phone plan in order to have unlimited access to data on my I-Phone, but if you don’t hear from me while I’m there, I’ll be back in touch mid-October.

Meanwhile, here’s a poem by Irish poet EAVAN BOLAND: 

And Soul

My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deck chairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once, that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it,
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
given our weather,
fail—
       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud color reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,
as if that wasn’t enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech—
coast canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief, at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again—fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.
“And Soul” from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©2007 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: Domestic Violence (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2007)

10 Things Emily Dickinson Taught Me about Writing Poetry

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During Postcard Poetry Month, otherwise known as “August,” I decided that instead of merely writing a postcard poem per day and mailing it to (usually) a complete stranger, I would focus on Emily Dickinson (1830-1885). I posted about this on the blog a while back, and shared the rules—er, guidelines—I had decided to follow. But now that summer is well and truly over, I wanted to take a minute to share what I learned in the process.

If you attended my craft talk at the Ballard Library, you’ve already heard these, or an earlier version of them.

  1. Perfection is not the point. Dickinson faithfully confused it’s and its throughout her poetic career. The Franklin edition (1998) of her poems restores her punctuation and misspellings, for instance, opon, instead of upon.
  2. Similarly, if you’re going to write with Emily, you can’t worry about being linear. As one of my professors used to say, “Stop making sense!” Dickinson leapt from idea to idea, even when she wasn’t using a dash to skate across on. (Or opon.)
  3. Understand the many ways to rhyme–full rhyme and slant but also alliteration and assonance and consonance, etc. In one of my favorite poems, “The Soul has Bandaged moments -” (F360), Dickinson mixes conventional rhyme (hair and fair) with hours / doors and rose /paradise.” Even her very faint chimings add up and create her effects.
  4. Use the most exact, evocative words you can—not “red” but “cochineal.”
  5. In fact, be willing to steal a whole lexicon. Dickinson had a naturalist’s eye for flowers and insects, birds and rocks. If you want to write about a subject, borrow its dictionary.
  6. Your word choices will have consequences, and once you use a great one, watch for its effects to ripple through the poem. “A Word dropped careless on a Page / May consecrate an Eye” (F1268).
  7. Emily Dickinson seemed to find reality overrated. She loved swapping body parts, furniture, houses, and geographical features. She gave the sea a basement, made possibility a house to dwell within, made the soul stand ajar like a door, and put bees in carriages. You can too.
  8. Her literary allusions, likewise, were grand. She wrote about her favorite writers blatantly, and I’m giving you permission to write about her in the same way. You can put her in the title, or use an epigraph from her work if you want to make the allusion obvious.
  9. So far as we can tell, Dickinson did not care to publish— “Publication is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man”—but she didn’t let that keep her from taking her work seriously. She shared her poems generously with her friends, writing as well as almost 1800 poems, enough letters to fill a 3 volume edition. She revised her work and kept track of her own variants. She bound her best poems into booklets, called “fascicles” by Dickinson scholars. After her death, her body of work was impossible to ignore.
  10. No matter what else you do with your time, if you want to write, then be a writer. For at least a few years at the height of her powers, Dickinson wrote a poem a day, and it’s easy for me, reading her letters and fragments, to imagine her writing every day for the rest of her life. Being a writer is in the same category as being a parent, or a member of a particular religion, or for that matter, a non-smoker. If you’re a writer, then you’re always a writer.

I dwell in Possibility – (F466)

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –