Writing from "local ground (s)"

Wow, I haven't written here in a month. That's pretty terrible, but speaks to one of those issues for writers - those periods when other demands and stresses of life keep you from writing. Some of that has to do with paying the rent.

I am compelled to start posting again on a more regular basis, and compelled to start doing that today by a very exciting new release in which I am a humble participant. And it is this:

 

Local Ground(s)—Midwest Poetics: Selected Prose Verse Wisconsin 2009–2014, edited by Sarah Busse & Wendy Vardaman

DIGITAL LAUNCH TONIGHT, NOV. 19, ON FACEBOOK/TWITTER/TUMBLIR. 7-9 CST

Back in late 2012, I received an email message from Sarah and Wendy about an idea they had hatched, which piqued my interest immediately. Curious about the whole blogging thing, Sarah proposed an email exchange among several women poets here in Wisconsin who blog about writing - not blogging to promote their writing, but about writing itself, about writing poetry.

I was still feeling pretty much of a newbie in terms of poetry-writing, so I was excited, but also humbled, at the thought of being in an exchange of this kind with the likes of Sarah Busse, Jennifer Morales, Margaret Rozga, and Lisa Vihos.

National Poetry Month

Well, I certainly didn't start out the writer part of my life writing poetry. It took me decades to even venture into it seriously. But since I have, and since a few poems were published on Verse Wisconsin's online edition last year, and since I will have one or two in a poetry collection from Orbis Books later this year (info to come), and since I have started submitting elsewhere, I have to begin telling myself that I have finally come to poetry and it has sort of welcomed me.

As I have written here before, poetry may have more to say to us than any straight on prose because it touches resonances in the heart and soul that wake up those parts of us that might save us, dominated as we have been trained to be by the rational, logical, understanding mind.

We understand so little, actually, that tapping into these other experiences of knowledge, wisdom, insight, intuitiveness feels crucial to me as we continue our wayward path towards ecological and cultural collapses of various kinds.

Something has gone so wrong with the whole human project on this planet, enormous miscalculations about who we are and our place within life and the universe.

A poet? Really?

I find this terrifying - and moving. Poems published?

I remember being young and falling in love with Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, and wondering if I could ever be a poet. I scribbled horrible poetry when young (except for one brief verse in my teen years that I hope will be an intro page for a collection some day). Now in these later years, something in life turned me back to poetry like a thirsty wanderer in the desert of this world - you know, I can't possibly drink enough.

Opening the Gates...

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield's remarkable book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She is one of my favorite poets and the Buddhist spirituality that lies beneath so much of her work really resonates for me right now.

I don't claim to be a poet, and yet I have written poetry mostly to help open some of my own gates, to make me a better writer. There is something writing poetry does to you, if you are willing to plumb the depths, go to the depths fearlessly, or, if with fear, bravely, to see what you find there. The poetry that changes everything is the poetry that does what Buddhism invites us to do: it looks deeply. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh has written, "Looking deeply requires courage."

The poet must have courage.

Truth sometimes comes hard...

Being truthful, having a voice that can be trusted - tried and true advice for the writer. But it don't come easy, as they say.

What I call my more-than-memoir doesn't come easy right now. You break open old stories, old narratives, and find them still laden with the intensity of the time in which they were composed. You realize why some of these 'truths' get buried in some deep dark place, those places where we try to make the pain, the fear, the embarrassment inaccessible.

Now you have to access them - in order to be truthful.

And yet you still play around with all that truth, because not all truth should be told to the world. One gets tired of some of that confessional stuff that can be rather indulgent or mean (or sometimes simply made up) that so often accounts for memoir these days.We are a self-indulgent culture in the extreme, and not all stories merit that space on our shelves or in our e-readers or in our psyches.