Two books by Lillo Way

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LEND ME YOUR WINGS, Lillo Way, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021.

FLYING, TRAPEZE POEMS, Lillo Way, Redbird Chapbooks, 2024.

Before Lisa Ashley invited me to read with her and Lillo Way, last fall at Eagle Harbor Books, I had heard of Lillo, but had not had the privilege of meeting her or reading her work.

Lillo is named after her grandmother, stage-name Lillo Dillon (1875-1939), a trapeze artist—in a family billed as the “The Flying Dillons, Demons of the Air”—with Barnum & Bailey. The 22 poems of Flying illustrate—illuminate—the original Lillo’s life: “trained to fly,” and first put on a tight rope at age four. It’s a story that of course a granddaughter would catch onto (and no matter how her mother tried to ground her). Of course Lillo Way’s personal history is filled with acting, dancing, and choreography. And award-winning poems.

In Lend Me Your Wings the grandmother’s story also appears, but in every poem in the collection (over 100 pages), flight is interwoven with fancy. I love the sound work in these poems, and the specificity. A half-moon is framed by a window, “mullioned and muntined.” Even a poem about snoring is staged: “A bulldozer of sound. A demolition derby.” Nothing, in Lillo Way’s hands, feels ordinary. Rain in Porticello is “knives and forks frogs and ropes / halyards halberds cords and threads,” “all spangle-bangled” and falling. Clothes are tasseled and sequined, and so is memory. A performance.

Here’s one short poem to show you what I mean:

Starlets

Eighteen starlings strung along a power cable.
Sunlings, really—day birds—shining blacker
than night in the light of the longest day,
all watching the same direction, as if danger
couldn’t possibly approach from tailward.
A chorus line in a shallow proscenium theater,
each chorine staring straight downstage,
world’s shortest-legged Rockettes,
shuffling a little up or down the line.
You figure it’s the best they can do,
forgetting that their dance is all pent-up,
waiting, in the wings.

They leave the high-wire dance floor in a fugue.
A crowd of crows bursts into raucous cheers.

—Lillo Way

Having read Flying, this poem makes me think of “The Glamorous Life,” where the original Lillo shares housing with other single female performers, their half-dozen languages, their raucous laughter. Ellen Bass calls Lend Me Your Wings, “a celebration and joy,” an apt description for all of Lillo’s poems, packed tight with what lifts us: trapeze arts, beauty, dance, fire, wings, song. I invite you to take a deeper dive by visiting Lillo’s website, https://www.lilloway.com.

The Gorgeous Nothings

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Another book I’m reading—very, very slowly—is Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, compiled and edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. (Christine Burgin / New Directions, 2013). The work of at least twenty years for the editors, these late fragments and drafts, scribbled on envelopes and the backs of letters, come to life in this edition, “itself a work of art,” as Susan Howe writes in the preface. It’s the next best thing to sitting in an archive and handling the actual materials that Dickinson touched.

I attended a sunrise service this morning, and standing on a beach at dawn made me think of Dickinson and her “gorgeous nothings.” It makes me happy to be able to share it with you.

Gregory Orr, image from Copper Canyon

poetry will save you

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POETRY AS SURVIVAL, Gregory Orr, University of Georgia Press, 2002.

In the depths of a blues my husband used to call “the Dempsey Dumpster,” I had a dream, or a fragment of dream that woke me in the winter dark, and this single line struck me and stuck with me, long after the details of the dream had vanished:

poetry will save you

I don’t feel too saved, not yet, but I have been reading a book, Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival, unearthed from stacks of unread books beside my desk, and I’m finding it helpful.

My goal during National Poetry Month is to post every day—to inspire you every day—but that won’t necessarily mean a review (I’m currently reading a friend’s 100-page poetry collection). But it could mean…something. So here’s a fragment from the great Gregory Orr:

On a day-to-day basis our threshold is constantly shifting and disappearing and being repressed out of anxiety, whereas in poetry we seek out poems that can take us to our threshold (or one of our thresholds). It is just such a place where we feel most alive, where both exchange of energy and change itself can happen. It is on a threshold, at the edge, where we are most able to alter our understanding of the world and our lives in it. (53)

I’m discovering, too, Orr’s delightful images:

It’s possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page on which a poem appears. (52)

Meanings in symbol are like the twenty circus clowns emerging from a tiny car, and we are well advised to yield to the naïve wonder of such abundance. (104)

In yesterday’s post I was tempted to use the clown car trope to describe Kathleen Flenniken’s dexterity with layers (upon layers) of meaning. I should have.

So, there you have it. I’m accompanying my dear friend Priscilla Long to Book Tree this afternoon (4ish?) for her workshop and reading, and I will be reading on the open mic. You could read on the open mic, too.

Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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DRESSING IN THE DARK, Kathleen Flenniken, Lynx House Press, 2025.

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Here is one poem for you—though I could have chosen any, a whole book of new favorites.

61

I remember myself as my own child

pinned at the chest to a list of wishes.
This isn’t the way I expected her to turn out.

I confused my inside and outside,
chose to be inscribed and circumscribed.

What would it mean to embrace myself?
my hands holding hands, packages, keys.

Balance required me to concentrate
on the doorknob, the groceries.

For much of my life I wanted to feel denied—
the principle of the grapefruit diet, of Odysseus

lashed to the mast while the sirens sang.
I trained on half-price racks of turtleneck sweaters.

We speak of ambition, the chef instead of the cook,
but Mother sat at a table

writing Christmas card after Christmas card
four days running every year.

Then she made the lebkuchen, shortbread,
and fruit cake. The true listener

doesn’t distinguish inside from outside.
She counts them the same. Bird song

and whatever you still could be.

—Kathleen Flenniken

You can find five more poems from Dressing in the Dark at New World Writing Quarterly.

Kathleen was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014. Visit her website to learn more about her. Order  her books at bookshop.org or your local independent bookshop.