Posts

Give Thanks

The Books I’m Thankful for Today

one

In October I enrolled in another Hugo House poetry class, again with the amazing poet, translator, and teacher Deborah Woodard. The class focused on the work of Fernando Pessoa, born in Lisbon in 1888. Our main text, Fernando Pessoa & Co., edited and translated by Richard Zenith, gathers together work by Pessoa and three of his heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa created entire biographies for these alter-egos and considered them mentors and colleagues. He is, Zenith tells us, “an editor’s nightmare,” but also a treasure trove:

Pessoa published relatively little and left only a small percentage of the rest of his huge output—over 25,000 manuscripts have survived—in anything close to a finished state. The handwritten texts, which constitute the vast majority, tend to teeter on the brink of illegibility, requiring not just transcription but decipherment. (Richard Zenith)

Pessoa prided himself on being impersonal, even invisible, a crossroads where observations took place. He deplores philosophy and metaphysics. I had difficulty caring about him for almost the entire stretch of the course. But…as usual…as I read and considered (and attempted to write my own poems), I began to feel curious about this poet, writing in another language, in another time, and living in a place I have never been. I have a feeling Pessoa would have approved of my journey, both the reticence and the curiosity.

Here is one piece, from the section titled “Uncollected Poems”:

It is night. It’s very dark. In a house far away
A light is shining in the window.
I see it and feel human from head to toe.
Funny how the entire life of the man who lives there, whoever he is,
Attracts me with only that light seen from afar.
No doubt his life is real and he has a face, gestures, a family and profession,
But right now all that matters to me is the light in his window.
Although the light is only there because he turned it on,
For me it is immediate reality.
I never go beyond immediate reality.
If I, from where I am, see only that light,
Then in relation to where I am there is only that light.
The man and his family are real on the other side of the window,
But I am on this side, far away.
The light went out.
What’s it to me that the man continues to exist?
He’s just the man who continues to exist.

8 November 1915

Alberto Caeiro

two

I’ve been reading—or reading around in—another strange book, this one titled The Ashley Book of Knots. It was written and illustrated (3384 numbered illustrations) by Clifford W. Ashley, and first published in 1944. My copy belonged to my paternal grandfather (a Navy Seabee during WWII, which must explain why the book looks so well-read; I could go on a bit about my grandfather—as he was in his 40s and had 5 children when he enlisted; he kept his paychecks [from what I’m told], but wrote letters home signed, “Your poet, Gene”). His name and the date, Eugene H. King, 10/14/46, are written on the inside front cover. I can guess that the book came to belong to my father in 1959, when his father died. Since 2012, it has been mine, and this year I finally took it down from the shelf.

I’m working on a little chapbook of poems (at least I think it’s a chapbook) to turn in for my Hugo House class project. I’ve titled it “Keeper of Knots,” after Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep. (Which begins: “I’ve never kept sheep / But it’s as if I did.”)

three

I’m immensely grateful to have been able to join Priscilla Long for the Elliott Bay Zoom / Eventbrite launch of her new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. After losing my father at age 82 to a stroke; after accompanying my mother through ten years of Alzheimer’s, stroke, and skilled-nursing care, then her death at age 86; I had pretty much decided that I’d better get things done right now, because I would be decrepit very very soon.

Although I had read drafts of Dancing previously (I wrote one of the cover blurbs), it was wonderful and timely to read it again. Priscilla Long provides us with dozens of models of old creators, not all of them able-bodied, but all—in their 80s, 90s, and 100s—joyously still in the game.

There is so much great stuff here:

Our ageist stereotypes equate old with ill, old with decrepit, old with physical and mental decline. Yet the majority of people over age 85 do not require assistance in daily living and some of these provide assistance. (p. 15)

Long is also a science writer, and her book is meticulously researched. The information about cognitive development (not decline, not maintenance) in old age is something I wish everyone I know would read.

And, speaking of my mother, late in the book, in a section on elegy, Long writes:

Art can provide a shelter, a kind of home, a means of sustenance, for a person in the midst of the shock and sorrow of grief. At the age of 90, the pianist/composer Randolph Hokanson said, “I continue to play because I love music so. It has been the sustaining force in my life. I’d go down the drain without it. It was such a savior after my wife died.”

Is it too obvious to say that one advantage of growing old is to remain alive to the beauty and suffering of the world? To make an elegy is to express that beauty and that suffering. (p. 151)

Thus it has been for me. I love thinking that I will continue to be here (for another 40 years!), reading, witnessing, scribbling—and sharing my work with you.

If you would like to watch the video of my conversation with Priscilla, go to her website: https://www.priscillalong.net
(you can clip past the first six minutes).

May you have an amazing holiday and holiday season. Thank you for spending a few minutes of it with me.

Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

I cannot say enough about this amazing book by my good friend and long-time co-conspirator in all things creative, Priscilla Long. Watching Priscilla produce this book, reading drafts, devouring a number of her sources, has been a game-changer for how I think about aging, and how I want to behave in my next chapter.

To read the Northwest Prime Time review, follow this link: https://northwestprimetime.com/news/2022/nov/08/dancing-muse-old-age/

And, most important, sign up to attend the virtual book launch here:

There will be a virtual book launch at Elliott Bay Books November 15 at 6:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/priscilla-long-dancing-with-the-muse-in-old-age-with-bethany-reid-tickets-429907824877

You can order the book through our sponsor, Elliott Bay Books, your local independent bookstore, or anywhere books are sold.

The #SealeyChallenge

Here it is, the last day of August, and already it feels like fall. Leaves are changing color, the air is cool, and this morning a light mist accompanied me on my walk. It’s a perfect day for curling up with a book of poems.

Lucky me, I’m a long-time follower of Kathleen Kirk’s blog: Wait! I have a Blog?! and all through August she’s been doing the #sealeychallenge and reading a book of poetry a day, then sharing her thoughts with us. (See this link for a LitHub introduction to The Sealey Challenge.) So I enjoyed glimpses of lots of poets and books of poetry, ordered a few new ones, and sighed with pleasure to see some old favorites.

You can catch Kathleen’s final post here: https://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/2021/08/and-there-is-many-good-thing.html and scroll back through to read all the reviews.

But (Wait!), what’s our assignment for the week? Maybe take a quick squint at Kathleen’s August 14 review of Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic. I’m noticing this excerpt from “Indigo & Violet”:

Indigo’s deep, black before dawn.
Violet’s an evening song.
Indigo’s ex is silver,
Violet’s–obsidian.

–and it makes me think of my great-aunts whose names were Rose and Violet and Opal. Come to think of it, there was also a Pearl and a March, the latter being not a color but provocative in its own way. (And a provocative woman, too.) What if you introduced us to a color as if it were a person? Who would that person be? How would they behave?

 

Priscilla Long: HOLY MAGIC

For our last book of my National Poetry Month jamboree, I reread Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic (MoonPath Press, 2020) and was once again astonished by its interplay of light and language, science and art, artists and song. If you don’t already have this book on your shelf, you should find a copy immediately. It’s a tutorial in how to live …and write. And though suffused with color and light, it isn’t afraid of the dark: death marches through these poems with its equal-opportunity scythe (Trayvon Martin, Matisse, Otis Redding, the poet’s sister, old friends, old loves, even a young T. Rex). Comprising seven sections and 56 poems, Holy Magic is … well, magic. I loved spending time in this book again, and delighted especially in soundplay that bumps and grinds and burns its way through every page:

Fire is cookery, crockery,
Celtic cauldrons worked
in iron or gold—smoke
of sacrificial fat.

(from “Ode to Fire”)

Holy Magic is arranged by the color wheel, and so artists are invited in, not just their art—as it strikes me this morning, but their bodies—as in lines from this short poem dedicated to Meret Oppenheimer:

Kisses rot under logs.
Lost purple thrills
perfume purloined shadows

(from “What Can Happen”)

Priscilla is one of my oldest friends, and of course I contacted her and asked a few questions. She responded with a treatise on how to gather poems and turn them into books. I am happy to share all her largesse here. (For more along this vein, see her brilliant, short book Minding the Muse.) I started the email exchange by asking how books are made; she went straight to the poems themselves:

First comes one poem and then another and then another and then one book and then another and then another. I’ve composed 667 poems so far, the first in the 1970s. I keep the poems in three-ring binders, latest version only, in chronological order, with the date of composition (not dates of revision) at the bottom, along with any publication data. This is a resource base essential to my process of shaping a book.

I had written many dozens of poems and seen many published in journals before my first book, Crossing Over: Poems was published by The University of New Mexico Press. The shape of that book was strongly influenced by the press’s mission to publish poetry having to do with the West. I’ve lived in the West for almost forty years but grew up on a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, so have many poems having nothing to do with the West. I put all the poems “of the West” in a file folder and went from there.

My second book, Holy Magic won the Sally Albiso Poetry Book award from MoonPath Press. This book is organized by the color wheel. I’m entranced with colors, their histories and lexicons and power to influence our moods and being. Often I work a theme in both poetry and prose, and this is the case with the color poems in Holy Magic. Thus I have poems titled “Blues Factory” and “The Blue Distance” and “Otis Redding” and also a prose piece titled “Blue Note.” As usual I already had some of the poems and also composed many new poems to fit into the wheel.

The third book, which I’ve just completed and started circulating, is titled Somewhere / Nowhere / Here: Cartographies of Home. For the first time, I had the title first, a capacious title, I think. Again I went into my old poems to seek ones that fit (and were not published in a previous book) and also wrote new poems. It has been a tremendously enjoyable project.

Completed before the pandemic, many of the poems in Holy Magic resonate with the last year’s solitude, from which we are only now emerging (I haven’t been inside a room with Priscilla for 14 months!). This poem, for one instance:

Tasks of Solitude

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence. —Muriel Rukeyser 

To learn the dawn-purpled dark,
winter’s ruby light rinsing
rugs and books. To hone obedience
to cats: cat-blinks, cat-lappings.
To keen the silvery moon
hung on a dark throat.

To unlock the door:
to enter the room of blue jugs.
To pour darkness from the coffeepot,
to learn the edges of darkness:
doorjamb, floorboard, candleflame,
the wavering edge where desire
thickens and vanishes like smoke.

—Priscilla Long

But, lest you think she works in isolation, this:

Poetry happens as part of a community, beginning with the community of all poets, living and long gone. My friend Bethany Reid (of this blog) and I have worked together on poetry ever since we met in the poet Colleen McElroy’s workshop in 1989 in the MFA program at the University of Washington. In the past year we have undertaken the project of alternately finding a model poem to scrutinize and learn from. We then each compose a poem and we workshop them at a weekly meeting (on Zoom).

I have my monthly workshop, brilliant perceptive writers and visual artists that I cannot do without. We have been meeting for thirty years.

I am a teacher of writing, including poetry, but I take a class from time to time, mostly at Hugo House. I like classes that involve generating new poems: I’m about to take another from the fine poet and teacher Deborah Woodard. During the Holy Magic process I took a class from Sierra Nelson on writing color poems—a great class!

Reading a poem at one or another of the open mics around town (now around Zoom) is an essential piece of bringing a poem up.

My final question was to ask how she knows when a book is finished. How do you stop fidgeting with it, and send it into the world?

How do I tell a when book of poems is thoroughly cooked? After it is what I call “quote done” I read over the whole thing every morning. This can go on for months. Most mornings I find something to tweak. When several days go by with nothing to tweak, it might be done. Then there’s the process of having one or two poets read the whole thing. Their ideas are important and invariably prompt further tweaks.

Now I am in the floundering-about stage of shaping another book. What are my themes and concerns? Animals? The environment? Our beloved, broken country?

One more short poem to whet the appetite:

Consider the Red Pear

So what good are your scribblings? —H.D.

Beauty. The red pear
Cézanne painted among jade
and wood. Or Miró’s orange
sun rising in Red Sun. Or H.D.’s
charred apple tree blooming
in the bombed ruin of London.
The poet’s pale petals drift
down our long years. Art endures.
The stylus, the palette,
the pen, the quill endure. 
In my backyard, a stone
Buddha laughs.

—Priscilla Long

To learn more about Priscilla, visit her “about” page at her website, which includes this interview with Seattle book-goddess Nancy Pearl.

To purchase Priscilla’s books, or any books you have encountered on your journey with me this past month: