How to love the living

What I Learned From My Mother
 

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

 

— Julia Kasdorf


Try This: Dear You

Oh, Emily, we feel your pain.

I've got letters in my hand and letters in my head. Let's write! 

Some of my most satisfying writing is rooted in letters. In these of-the-moment conversations, nothing is planned, prepared, or overthought (though, admittedly, sometimes overwrought). 

Try This: It's Mother's Day season. Write a letter to your mother, or the person you wish were your mother, or a letter to yourself about your mother, OR, if you are a mother, write a letter to your child, or the person you wish were your child . . .

You don't have to send the letter. Just be willing and real. Keep the mind open and the pen moving.

If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it. Or burn it. 

Get Inspired: How much do I love letters? I'm now reading books of letters: 

Dear Mr You
by Mary-Louise Parker

Yes, the author is an actress (loved her in West Wing) but she's not one of those annoying has-beens who dabble in books, y'know like launching a perfume or recording an auto-tuned song. Parker is a writer's writer: sharp, tender, perceptive, and this is a collection of letters written to men, real and imagined, who have shaped and informed her life. 


Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room
by Kelli Russell Agodon

This book of contemporary poems is dedicated to "those who write letters to the world" and includes letter-poems both funny and profound, such as Letter to An Absentee Landlord, and Letter to My Sister, Who is Still Drowning.  

 

The Beauty of the Husband
by Anne Carson

In what she calls "a fictional essay in 29 tangos," Anne Carson writes to and about a husband as their marriage falls apart. Inventive and bold, Carson defies definition — is this poetry? prose? shadow and tricks? — and that's what makes her work so viable, so strong. 

His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.

  . . .  How do people 
get power over one another? is an algebraic question

you used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.”
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce 
a golden rule.


Start now: Write a letter. If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it, burn it, or just let it go. 

 

Thankful Thursday: Bits, Lists, You

1.
The best thing I’ve heard this week: I enjoy you.  

And this: Thank you for talking to me.

2.
People shouldn’t feel so grateful to be heard, to be seen, but there’s so much loneliness it permeates the pores.

I'm trying to say it takes so little to be kind. And if my occasional glimmer can brighten a moment, that strikes me as both hopeful and sad. 

3.
Last night in a dream, my tooth was rotten. I could touch the soft bone of decay. And the dream asks the dreamer: In your life, what must go?

4.
A string of passings this month. It’s time, but I’m always surprised. One day we’re chatting, the next day dead. I hope I never get used to it.

5.
As National Poetry Month comes to a close, let me share one last thing: this poster. Designed by Debbie Millman, this great blend of graphic and literary art features lines from over a dozen classic and contemporary poems. Read the poems here. 

6.

Before she died, we ate rainbow sherbet. It tasted so good. I think of that now, how that’s the best way to live, savoring the sweet right to the last.

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, poems, and more. What are you thankful for today? 

 

Survival serves us



Feeling overwhelmed, uncertain

and full of wonder is not a feeling I’ve

yet escaped and don’t hope to escape.

— Peter Rock


Peter Rock is the author of seven novels and a short story collection. 

His best-known book, My Abandonment, [one of my favorite novels] is based on the true story of a father and his 13-year-old daughter who lived in an urban forest in Portland, Oregon. His most recent novel, Klickitat, is a young adult novel centered on two sisters and wilderness survival.

Peter Rock is now featured on 3 Good Books, a blog series I host in which I ask writers to share their favorite books on a given them. 

 

 

Love that line!


Some of the saddest words in the English language are ordinary, generic and Relaxed-Fit-Khakis. 

 
— Dale Harabi
Not Your Average Jean Jacket, The Wall Street Journal 

 

More great lines: 

Praise songs were sung . . .

Now ninety . . . 

Selfishness and greediness . . .

Fresh writing shines across forms. Not just your standard novels and poems, but in billboards (The Joy Team), water bottles (Vitamin Water), coffee lids (Dutch Bros), horoscopes (Holiday Mathis) and more. I could go on (and have) but it's your turn now. Read a great line lately? Please share! 


You can be a winner (yes, you!)

Ahhh, April. Flowers bloom, birds sing, and poets shine under the new spring sun.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month — the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets marking the event in myriad ways — I’m taking part in the Big Poetry Giveaway.

How It Works:

1. Start here. 
I’m giving away three poetry books. No pressure. No obligation. No cost to you. 

2. Enter the drawing. 
Type your name and email address in the comments section of this blog by end-of-day on April 30, 2016. I'll draw three names and mail the books to the winners. That's it. Easy, huh? 

3. Win even more. 
Visit Allyson Whipple, master hostess of the 7th Annual Big Poetry Giveaway. On her blog you’ll find a list of participating bloggers. Visit her blog to increase your chances of winning books (and meeting fun, nice writers and readers).

4. Have fun. 
Open your mind. Insert poems. Live more deeply, madly, moonly.*  

Enter my drawing to win these great books:

The Less I Hold
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 

Selected Poems
by Barbara Crooker

 

Thin Skin
by Drew Myron (that’s me!) 

 

* with a nod to e.e. cummings

 

Thankful Thursday: Sweet Spontaneous

Spring, like poetry, makes us humble, writes Annie Finch. 

And giddy. I'm drunk on blue sky and sunshine. In this string of clear days, I revel in the loopy leaps of e.e. cummings. I'm at one with bees buzzing the blossoms, and the squirrels fatly lapping the trees. Spring unspools, turns me astonished and grateful. 

We made it? Yes, we made it through winter's gloom! 

Is it any wonder National Poetry Month is in April, smack-dab in the flush of spring and all its poetic possibilities?  

O Sweet Spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and

poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

         beauty                  how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
         (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

              thou answerest

them only with

                                spring)

 — e.e. cummings

 

Read: Spring Ahead, an essay by Annie Finch, at the Poetry Foundation. 

 

It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today? 


On Medicine & The Arts

Ruth Madievsky blends the mind of medicine with the heart of art. She is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California's School of Pharmacy and a research assistant at an HIV clinic specializing in maternal care. 

At 3 Good Books (the blog series I host), Ruth shares her favorite books on the theme of Medicine & The Arts. 

Propofol

My kidneys are leaning into the wall of my back
like a pair of boxing gloves,
the way my grandfather is leaning
into the idea of an operating table,
a paralytic agent, his body
a space station for someone else's hands.
I work in the hospital where it will happen.
I work and wait for the part
where the lungs I keep wanting this month to be
stop huffing propane, stop threatening
to make like my patient's veins
and collapse. Inside
the sterile compounding room, 
I shoot drugs,
down an IV bag's gut. I listen 
to the outer-space hum of machines
that eat the air out of the room.
There is nothing sexy 
about incision.
There is nothing about the phrase
nasogastric tube
that makes me want to look
both ways before crossing the street.
I want to hold him 
like he is something other
than a mucus membrane.
Like maybe the planet inside him is Pluto, 
like it's not really a planet at all. 

— Ruth Madievsky
from Emergency Brake 

 

Thankful Tuesday: Because I'm desperate

Jenny Holzer, artist

Today, surveying the splendors of spring, I discovered a chair lodged high in our tree. 

It's been a wet, windy, gray winter. And now, according to the calendar, we're in spring. But the sky is hanging fierce to its damp mood, shaking out rain and gloom.

Wearing my tired sweaters and scuffed boots, I shake my fist at the sky. "Please," I plead, "let me wear something other than high necks, thick sleeves, wool and fleece."

I won't even ask for an open-toe shoe. Even a shoe without socks would suffice.

But because rain and bitterness threaten to rust my heart, I'm challenged to set aside my gripes. And so, I look past the neighbor's deck chair wedged in my spruce.

Setting aside the furniture, I see camellias in a burst of hot pink, a clutch of hyacinths, and a shag carpet of grass. Daffodils, my favorite announcement of spring, pop up in unexpected places. As if wild, they dot remote roads in a random pattern, and patchwork through vacant lots and scraps of land. 

In the gray of a record gloom* spring flowers are the happy-to-know-you welcome wagon. They arrive to the party early, and with too much enthusiasm. But, oh, how I'm drawn to the tender promise. Hand me a loopy bouquet of these spring charmers. I'll never turn from the innocence of those not yet battered by weather and wear. 


* not just my disposition, but real data showing Oregon's wettest winter on record.  


It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. And today It's Thankful Thursday on Tuesday because the best way to minimize a sour mood is to move toward gratitude. What are you thankful for today? 


On Sunday: The Challenge of Humility

 

So, this is our ongoing challenge: Not to turn everything into us. In truth, the deepest function of humility is that it helps us take experience in on its own terms, not violating its own nature — all in an effort to be nourished by life that is different from us. Through this effort, we find the corresponding seeds of such life in us. They are the common seeds of grace that can sustain us. 

- Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening 

 


You're wondering if I'm lonely


We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?" 

             — David Foster Wallace

 
I've spent my life swinging between alone and lonely.

Alone, as in solitude, as in quietude. Alone is where my real life happens.

Lonely is sad, wanting, an aching yearn, an enforced aloneness. Lonely hurts.

And yet lonely carries a certain sort of necessity. To truly feel fullness, you must know emptiness.

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

— Adrienne Rich


I'm trying not to wear my loneliness, and yet it fits. It's become convincing and comfortable. Initially, the fit is snug, but with time there is loosening, acceptance. It's not flattering, but loneliness makes the body invisible, the mind numb. I turn inside myself.

I'm trying to believe that loneliness is not a character defect, not a resignation, but I'm wondering, now, if it is a default setting and I haven't the energy, or trust, to turn the channel. Decades since it's aired, and I'm still watching reruns of M.A.S.H. I'm mixing my metaphors. Loneliness makes you blurry. You lose definition. You mistake edge for action, feeling for thought. Loneliness is so far from alone that though you're lost, you no longer ask for directions home.

It’s not that 

I’m lonely but that
I went to bed too
late and alone
and miss the promise
of you.

It’s not that I’m sleepy
but in the morning
I wake slow and
wide, do not stir,
do not want
this quiet time
in solitude.

It’s not that I
don’t like solitude
but that my
mind travels
and confuses
not here with
gone, slow with
sad, alone with
lonely.

It’s not that I
am alone but
that my body
is a planet
in the
dark
without
its star.

— Drew Myron


Are you still with me?

Loneliness is both penetrating and true, mean and cruel. Who are you now? and now? and now? When loneliness pushes for answers, you want aloneness to rise, to take charge, answering: I am here. Full, feeling, alive. 

 


Baby bangs are not for you (or me)

We've got rough patches and easy streets. Weeks that move like months and days that last a year. This past week, I've known each stretch. In the spirit of William Stafford's Things I Learned Last Week, I offer my own (puny and profound) nuggets:

Things I Learned Last Week

1.
Athleisure is mostly leisure. 
Is everyone exercising, or just wearing lycra and driving to the store for more Cheetos?

2.
Baby bangs favor no one.
I know because in 1999 I tried blunt, super-short bangs and my already-full face took on funhouse mirror proportions. It was the longest growout in history, rivaling that of my current bad hair situation: short-in-the-back, long-in-the-front, otherwise known as the reverse mullet or the midlife mom cut.

3.
It's not cars or coal destroying the planet — it's cows!
No really. My sources are legit: a former cattle rancher, National Geographic, and the documentary Cowspiracy.

4.
I'm not alone, and poems prove it.
Ada Limon shares my love of quiet (and my disdain for phone calls):

The Quiet Machine

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the
floor in the kichen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silence when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's
how this machine works.

- Ada Limon
from Bright Dead Things

5.
The answer is gin.
On those gravel-in-the-shoe sort of days (or weeks), gin and a friend provide solace and grins (emphasis on friend, because drinking martinis by yourself is just sad).

 

Your turn: What have you learned?


Our strange, ruined, rotting bodies

Franny Choi - poet and teaching artist

Do you know Franny Choi?

She's a poet and teaching artist, and I like her style:

I am most drawn to work that places me in my body,
work that awakens me to the heartbeat, to breath,
to muscle and bone . . . " she says. "By 'body language'
I mean not only speaking about the body, but asking how
our (strange, ruined, rotting) bodies would speak if we let them."

On 3 Good Books, Choi explains why the topic of body language resonates through her work, and offers book suggestions too.

 

Thankful Thursday: Shirley & other wonders

Shirley Plummer - photo by Chris GraamansShirley says she needs to do more.

"I should write every day. I should write in forms. I should challenge myself," she says, with a head shake and a sigh.

We're admiring her book. Her debut. At 85, Shirley Plummer is now a published poet. 

I'm so happy for Shirley my face hurts from smiling. And happy for the power of writing, for the magical, mysterious way creative expression can lift and change.

While she had long dabbled in words, it was only five years ago that she began to take writing seriously. She read and studied and attended a weekly writing group. She forged friendships with writers and exchanged ideas. Her days and journals swirled with words.

A few years ago she fell ill, and then fell down. What followed: surgery, rehab, slow unsteady steps to something that looked like normal. Not so much recovery as readjustment. Her mind, she says, isn't as sharp. Loose change rattling. Cloudy.

When she says, "I can see the end," she's not talking about today. But she's got a lot to do, she says, and ideas to explore.

But first, she has reading events to celebrate the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Task of Falling Rain.

Are you in Oregon? For the love of Shirley and poetry and creative expression, please attend her book release parties:

• Saturday, February 20 at 2pm, Waldport Community Center in Waldport, Oregon

• Saturday, March 5 at 2pm, Yachats Commons in Yachats, Oregon

If you're not nearby, give a nod and a note of thanks to the force of creativity which saves, changes, lifts and connects.

It's Thankful Thursday. Is there anything better than gratitude (which is really just another form of love)? What are you thankful for today?

 

Can't get you out of my head

 

we spread a blanket      spread
ourselves               almost pulseless

in pacific deception


- from A Duet of Novices by Gail Waldstein
from The Hauntings

 

I've got word envy. Or poem envy. Or something like a revved-up appreciation for another's work.

Does this happen to you? You read a line, a passage, a chapter, and you are moved, but it comes with a twinge of wish. As in, I wish I'd written that.

These twinges, this envy, at first feels petty but is really instruction in disguise. This yearning awakens, and then asks why? And the why leads and encourages us to find our own version, our own voice, our own way. 

What's leading you?


Thankful Thursday: Yes


Say yes.

Yes opens the door.

Lately, I've enjoyed a sequence of yes. Like shopping for a car, once you notice the Subura, you see Suburas everywhere (or you just live in Oregon).

My friend Vicki sends out a weekly poem (she researches and writes backstory on each poet. It's a great free service produced by a real poetry appreciator). A few months ago she asked me to serve as guest curator. I shared a few of my favorite poems, including God Says Yes to Me by Kaylin Haught, and concluded with one of my own, Turn Up the Quiet.

One of her readers noted that yes made a frequent appearance. I hadn't noticed, and thus, began a fun exchange:

In response to yes, Careful Reader sent me a no poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov:

no no
no and no

no and no and no and no
and no and no and no and no
and no
and I     no

I responded with another yes poem, an excerpt from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong:

Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.

When Careful Reader said she was having trouble finding no poems, I felt heartened. Yes had triumphed.

Still, I kept on the search, digging up more yes poems (though at this point, vindicated, I kept them to myself). I found this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

Divining

Not just on the wall—
the writing's on the sky,
the river, the bridge, your hands.
Wouldn't you love to believe
all those blue and red lines
make a map, and if only
you could read those lines,
you might know where to go
from here? Yes, we're lost
and wrinkled and surely doomed,
but god, in this moment
between concerns, isn't it beautiful,
the place where we wander,
this hour when gold gathers
just before the plum of night?


Wanting to know more, I discovered Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer approaches writing and life with yes. I liked her style, and I reached out to learn more. Rosemerry is now featured on the blog series I host, 3 Good Books, sharing her top picks on the theme of, you guessed it, Yes.
 
Don't you love the power of poetry, how it nudges us to pause and consider, how it moves us toward yes? 

 
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?