New, Old, Forgotten and Found

Last month’s post calling for book suggestions delivered some great additions to my list. With the holiday break, I settled into some good reads, including these:


The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
Sharp writing and painfully real characters make this story shine. In her debut novel, Hemmings deftly creates a smart and endearing story of a father forced to wake up — and take charge of his two daughters — in the midst of his wife’s death. The book is now being adapted for film, so read it quick before airbrushed actors glam up the grit of true emotion.

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
I’m late to the party on this on this critically acclaimed and wildly popular book. Published in 2000 and later made into a movie (not to be confused with The Secret Life of Bees, an enjoyable book turned into a painfully sappy movie), Bee Season is snappy and sharp, and told in the voice of Eliza, a quirky 11-year-old pursuing the national spelling bee title.

Practicing for Heaven, by Julia B. Levine. I’ve waxed on about this contemporary California poet before but getting a Christmas gift of her early work reminds me that I can’t say enough about her ability to turn crisp pain into warm insight.

I didn’t want to like it, but I have to admit Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is a good, engaging read. The story of a Massachusetts prep school initially made me groan. I mean, really, do we need another story of overindulged teens? But this story is smart, the characters are complex, and the book is a true page-turner. I read it in one sitting.

There are still a few days left in my self-declared and official Holiday Reading Season (wherein participants are allowed and encouraged to further the sport of reading by lazing about for hours, absorbed in books). I hope to enjoy — and in some cases, revisit — these books, too:

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson was suggested by reader Beth. Critics have hailed this book as brilliant, multi-layered and spiritually contemplative.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King
I’m a hit-and-miss fan but King’s new short story collection has garnered great reviews, and I’m eager for some bite-size reading. He’s so darn prolific (he’s written over 40 books) that over the years he’s gone beyond his trademark horror to offer a bit of something for everyone. My favorites are On Writing, a blend of memoir and manual, and Hearts in Atlantis, five thematically linked short stories set during the Vietnam War.

Unless by Carol Shields
Reader Auburn McCanta shared my enthusiasm for The Stone Diaries and couldn’t wait to read more of Shield’s work. Sadly, the author died of breast cancer in 2003. Unless, published in 2002, was her last novel. While she left us 10 novels, three short story collections and three volumes of poetry, I’m still hungering for more.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Anything by this quick-witted writer is worth reading. She’s smart, tight and wry.

What’s on your library list? On your desk? By your bed? What's got you glued? I'd love to hear from you.

Poetry is back!

Thank you, Barack Obama, for bringing back the art of words. President-elect Obama has selected Elizabeth Alexander to compose and read a poem for his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Alexander will be only the fourth poet to be featured at a presidential inauguration. Robert Frost read at John F. Kennedy’s in 1961; Maya Angelou and Miller Williams read at Clinton’s in 1993 and 1997.

Alexander is an award-winning poet and professor at Yale University. She has written four books of poetry and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her collection American Sublime. Last year, she won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

God is a vowel

Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties — prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery K follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM, obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual load.


Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful. E can sound like I or U. –IBLE and –ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will just as soon pair with A, I, or O, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter that can be two things at once.

Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.

— from Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg

Hardy Boys inspiration

Pen, paper, journal. These are critical tools for writers, dreamers, artists, wanderers. . . . well, anyone, really.


That’s why everyone should have a journal from Ex Libris Anonymous, a Portland, Oregon company recycling old books into quirky journal treasures.

Owner Jacob Deatherrage finds classic used books (Dr. Seuss and the Hardy Boys, for example). He keeps the retro covers but replaces the inside pages with blank sheets, perfect for writing or sketching.

Throughout the books, he retains cover pages, illustrations, library cards, maps and inscriptions that give a worn, warm vibe, and then he reassembles it all together with a black spiral binding. It’s fun! It’s genius! It’s art!

Each time I order a journal – and there are hundreds from which to choose --- I am selfless and giving. I purchase these gems with the best intentions, to gift them to all my friends. But, a few days later, when the journals arrive, I can’t bear to give them away. So clever! So crafty! So mine!

Get yours here.

Young Writers make the news

Yesterday I heard a poet say that writing is an act of redemption, and I couldn’t agree more.


Again and again, writing has saved me. Writing offers small light when the darkness is deep, and provides solace and direction when the days are long and lonely.

The process of writing is wonderfully mysterious. Combining the physical (hand gripping pen) with the mental and emotional (mind unfurling) can produce powerful, unexpected results.

When Kimberley, a young woman in the teen writing group I lead, says, “Writing saved my life,” I recognize her gratitude and sigh with shared relief.

A short bit of her story, and the story of the Young Writers Group, made the news this week. The Newport News Times ran an article about our group (read it here), a program that has enjoyed such success that we’ve added reading and writing programs for younger students, too.

I’m grateful for these students who stretch my heart and sharpen my mind. And I’m thankful, too, for words that rise from darkness to offer light.

We are the music makers

As surely as The Wizard of Oz hits the cable channels each October, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory plays every Christmas season.

As a child, I liked the trippy 1971 film but as an adult I like the timeless movie even more. Watching Wonka last night, I’ve come to love Gene Wilder’s mocking nerve, and appreciate the zingers aimed at overindulged children and their pathetic parents. And I have finally have caught the shower of literary references.

The classic film is sprinkled with great words from Ogden Nash, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, John Keats, and Lewis Carroll.

Proving that words really do produce ripples of influence, Willy Wonka is peppered with poetry from the past. In turn, Wonka went on to influence scores of new artists.

For example, the first lines of a poem by British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy are spoken by Wonka:

Willy Wonka: "The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries."

Veruca Salt: "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?"

Willy Wonka: "We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams."

Ode – once experienced in Willy Wonka -- went on to inspire countless creatives. The first two lines have been used as an album title for Joy Electric, and for a track by Aphex Twin. A New York band even dubbed itself We Are the Music Makers.

The O'Shaughnessy poem comes from the collection Music and Moonlight, published in 1874. Ode is often quoted, but rarely provided in its entirety.

Ode

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming—
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man's soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man's heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day's late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry—
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God's future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

I thought of you

My hands are cold, my forehead clammy and my mind restless. I am showing signs of good book deprivation.


I raced through two books this long weekend. They were fine, pass-the-time books, but nothing that left me riveted, shaken, sated. I am desperate for a can't-put-it-down, move-me-to-tears, don’t-want-it-to-end book.

Earlier this month, a friend sent me a book. I thought of you, she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the title — Bad Girls – or the irony. It was entertaining, funny, and a bit naughty in a good-girl goes bad for a reckless moment kind of way. But most of all, I loved that Dee enjoyed a book and thought of me.

As Christmas approaches, I want to return the favor, give books that offer comfort, laughter, guidance and tears. Books that say I thought of you.

My booklist is chocked with turning-point reads that ignited my mind, expanded my perspective and left a mark on my heart. A few favorites include:

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott
Irreverent and real, Lamott shares her spiritual journey without being at all preachy or "religious."

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
The master of freewriting, Goldberg offers mental jumpstarts for writers.

Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton
When I was younger and alone, Sarton's book affirmed my solitary choices. Nothing escapes her examination in these seemingly simple journal entries that reveal a rich interior life.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, by Terry Tempest Williams
A profound metaphor of change, blending mother-daughter dynamic with a powerful and shifting Utah landscape.

Comfort me with Apples, by Ruth Reichl
A touching coming-of-age memoir by the former editor of Gourmet magazine. Even for non-foodies, this is a great read.

The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shield
A Pulitzer Prize winning novel about one woman's life. It's not the details of Daisy's life that are so riveting, but the elegant and engaging prose that makes the story so beautiful.

There are more books, of course, but as I review the list I realize I have already gifted my favorite books over the years. I need new material and I’m taking suggestions.

What books have touched, lifted or altered your heart? your life? your path? I’m eager to dive into the next great read, to sink in and savor, and to pass it on with love.

Out of the forest

Years ago the question was this: If I write words that no one reads, am I really a writer?

Now, the question has a digital twist: If I write a blog that no one reads, am I really a writer?

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write,” says writer/poet Robert Penn Warren.

If he is correct, a writer’s real concern is not with audience, approval and acknowledgement.

Still, the existential question of what makes a writer leads to the core of dilemma and doubt: Is anyone out there? Are we in the proverbial forest, where trees — and words — fall with a silent thud?

In this blog-age, writers are slicing the silence with long-winded whines of Read me!

It’s what every writer wants. It’s why millions of books line store shelves, why thousands of readings take place each week, and why there are zillions of blogs just like mine. Writers want to be heard, read — and here’s the greedy part — acknowledged.

See me. It’s the song of the times. And not just for writers.

It’s why 100 million people now use Facebook, and join MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. We — myself included — spend countless hours distracting ourselves, stumbling through websites, sifting through blogs. We savor and sort, experience, extract, move on. We’re living in, as the New York Times says, a “brave new world of digital intimacy.”

And now the question expands: We’re all connected but to what depth?

When we share the mundane, as in Twitter’s moment-by-moment reportage and Facebook’s What are you doing right now? status reports (answer: “I am waiting for the bus”) do we really grow emotionally closer? Are we elevated, illuminated, entertained? Or do these moments of incessant contact simply increase our narcissism while distracting us from silence and reflection, the very things necessary to create books and poems and discourse to deepen our lives and counter the mindless chatter?

The genius behind Facebook, 26 year-old Mark E. Zuckerberg, has never known a world without caller ID, cellphones and Internet connection. Indeed, the young creatives driving technology today have always experienced the immediacy of online access, digital cameras and text messages. In this age of ‘digital intimacy’ genuine communication and deep connection may not be the point.

We've stepped out of the forest. We're all just screaming to be heard.

The Unwritten

W.S. Merwin

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

In praise of light

We're half deep in the official month of giving thanks. Why limit our gratitude to a single day?

In my childhood, we wrote thank you notes year-round. Taught by my mother early on, offering appreciation was an exercise, both in writing and in the power and importance of gratitude.


As I got older, I was glad for the training. I knew that attending a party, or landing a job interview, required the same decorum: Express your gratitude, and right away.

It’s probably because I love to write — from grocery lists to customer service surveys — that I’ve always enjoyed penning thank you notes. And I’m nearly giddy when I am the recipient of the same.

The magic of gratitude is that the more you acknowledge good acts, gifts and intentions, the more you attract. Goodness multiplies. The more you appreciate, the more you see to appreciate.

The other night at the Young Writers Group (a weekly gathering of teen writers and adult mentors), I shared Barbara Crooker's “Praise Song," a poem I had carried with me for three years.

We went around the circle, each of us reading a line. As we focused on every single word before us, the air shifted, grew still and reverent. We seemed lifted in a sort of poetic praise. Indeed, we were in song.

We then used the poem as a prompt, writing on thankfulness for 15 minutes. The students were rapt. Pens flew fevered across paper. The results were strong.

And that just may be the beauty of gratitude. It encourages a single-minded focus while flooding the heart with rest and rejuvenation.

The next afternoon, after three days of high winds and fire-hose rains, the sun reappeared grand and sure. A full moon brought the drama of high tides, coupled with a clear blue sky.

From a damp sandy beach, I sat washed with appreciation. I wrote scores of thank you notes, and offered gratitude like candy, sweet and easy.

I praised the post office crew that keeps me connected to the busy world beyond this small town and big sea.

I praised volunteers who join me each week to read with the youngest and write with the oldest. Those whose greatest gift is the willingness to listen and to love.

I wrote more and more — notes sent and unsent — to teachers and mentors from years ago, to people who’ve come and gone, who touched me deep for just a bit, or stayed for years steady and sure. To those whose names I never knew but whose actions marked my heart. To those who have passed, and to those still finding their way.

As pelicans circled the churning shore, I sat hushed and still, praising soft light and long shadows, all it touches, all it reveals.

Praise Song

Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.

— from Radiance, 2005, published by Word Press

Secrets


This and more at Post Secret, a simple art project that began four years ago with a collection of anonymously decorated postcards revealing secrets never told. The idea -- and the catharsis -- proved so powerful that secrets now fill several hefty volumes, and a wildly popular website that is updated weekly.

Applause at the intersection

Eager to drive in the traffic of creative space, I am giddy with the intersection of art and words at Action Poetry.

Simple and brilliant, the website features 11 poems written and read by Billy Collins, with each poem paired with a short, animated film.

A prolific writer and a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins is considered one of the nation’s most ‘accessible’ (code: he writes poems that are easy to enter, understand and enjoy) poets.

Produced in 2007, the animated poems were initially intended as filler between programs on the Sundance Channel. To that end, advertising powerhouse J. Walter Thompson commissioned a variety of artists who created a blend of wry, amusing and unexpectedly touching poems-on-film.

As with Poetry in Motion (the New York program that posts poems on subways and buses) and Poem in Your Pocket Day (celebrating National Poetry Month), Action Poetry shows what happens when words climb out of books to lift off the page and soar into a larger world.

Poetry lives in the everyday — and what a beauty when it emerges in such unexpected ways.

Yes and No

Simple questions can reap the most conflicted answers.

The other day a friend who is contemplating a cross country
move asked if I enjoyed living on the ocean's rim. The question
spun in my head for days before this answer emerged:

From the Oregon Coast, in answer to her inquiry

When she asks how I like living on the edge of the earth,
I do not answer right away. On the third dawn, rain arrives,
steady and firm, wears me awake. I cocoon in bed.
In the dark hours, I say cocoon. I make it mean that I am
happy and satisfied in this warm bed with its thick blanket.
But my cold feet want to burrow in familiar softness,
want to know a morning without socks.

I have turned inside myself.

In these four years on the basalt line, I know variations
of mold, beyond the fuzz of overgrown cheese, the kind
of insistent dank that coats every corner, eats every crevice.
And mildew. My sense of smell as strong as sight. The sour
milk of old homes, the odor of wet wood and dirty secrets.

When she asks, I know she wants hope and harmony and the
possibility of every new thing. I know. I asked, too.
On my first visit, I sat under an airbrushed sky, sated on a
soft beach shore. I grew tall, lithe, lean.
Here, I said, I will be a better person.
I did not know irony or hesitation.
Every pore bore happiness.

When she asks, I am lying on the couch,
curled over hot coffee. The air is heavy as stone.
Hundreds of gulls float like confetti across a static sky.

I am fixed, haunted with sadness or fear or illness,
I’m not sure which, and I write letters to friends I no longer
know. My husband brings flowers and rubs a calloused hand
over my lined, tired face. Without words or pause, he is trying
to erase what we don’t understand. And I am eating peanuts
by the bowl, and moaning with regret. And I am driving the
car and crying because it is only in motion that I feel progress,
and only in progress that I remember to breathe, and though I
clutch the inhaler in my sweaty palm, this is not an asthma attack
because attack implies sudden and for weeks my throat closes
around words, my lungs grasp for air.

I call it malaise because with this word, like cocoon, my mouth
goes soft and southern and I am reborn gracious, relaxing on a
wraparound porch, talking in a drawl that pulls us in a warm,
full circle.

When she asks, I pause, remind myself that we chose this place.
To leave family and friends and jobs and cities and movies and
restaurants and all that seemed too big, too much, too pressing.
All of it crushing us into small, petty people with small, petty
gripes about heat waves and barking dogs and freeways clogged.

When I answer, I will remember how we invited this adventure,
the Uhaul packed tight, our smiles wide and sure as we drove
from everything safe and good and right. We were exploring
what we didn’t know, in a place that would ebb and flow,
test and reward.

I will tell her of light on waves, after days of rain
how the sun meets the shore, breaks me down and apart,
releases something like hope.

And everything is green and fresh and ferns and quiet.
Vast.
I will offer this: Words cannot explain the beauty
but I keep trying in letters, in lines like this,
in the way I return his grip, grateful, saying,
Yes, I am blue in this bigness.

And still, and still, again and again,
though I doubt and forget,
the sky opens, gulls circle and land,
my heart flutters and expands.

— Drew Myron

A call for (creative) action


Spoiler Alert: This is a shameless self-promotion.

Dear readers, writers, artists, and eager, inviting minds:

In the interest of encouraging art and poetry,
In the advancement of new forms of old expression,
In a call for the experience of truth and power and joy,

You are invited,
encouraged,
urged

To enjoy,
read,
purchase,

Forecast, the special edition exhibition book
combining paintings by artist Tracy Weil
and poetry from writer Drew Myron.

Just in time for
the holidays,
everyday,
today.

Forecast is
the ideal gift,
guilty pleasure,
blissful, joyful, engaging
intersection of art and words.

Get it here.
Buy now. Enjoy always.

Search & Stumble

The world is so big, with so much to see. Thanks to StumbleUpon.com, I get a kaleidoscope view. And you can, too!

Check out StumbleUpon.com, a powerful website sampler offering a grab-bag of souped-up, search engine surprises. The free service matches your personal preferences and interests to thousands of websites and blogs, many of them obscure little treasures you would have never found on your own.

When I’m feeling stuck or uninspired (or avoiding the laundry, the bills, the deadlines looming), I stumble for a creative restart.

Today’s favorite stumble is Linda Zacks, a New York artist experimenting with art and words to produce an intriguing mash of edge and allure.

An accomplished graphic designer and illustrator, Zacks also creates one-of-a-kind handmade books incorporating the art of typography and photography. I especially love the way type emerges as an artform in the gritty book (pictured above), "I swallowed a rainbow, got drunk on air & puked it up all over the world."

Life is short — but unbearably long when rules and responsibilities slow your step. Go ahead, take some time to stumble around.