My class in the SMU Theatre program

When I left theatre and began writing as my main creative focus, one of the things I missed was having a stage manager. When you’re in a play, the stage manager makes sure rehearsals (and then the show) start on time. As an actor, I knew when I was supposed to arrive. Even if I was cranky or distracted, I got to rehearsal and started working because people were counting on me to be there. But more importantly, I was in a collaborative environment–we’d work together to bring the play to life, and my ideas were augmented by everyone else’s.

Even though I typically write alone, I’ve found various ways to recreate that sense of collaboration. I’m teaching a couple of workshops in February where we’ll experiment with writing in response to others’ poems as a form of collaboration.

Poems from Poems: Call and Response

February 4, from 1 to 5 p.m. at Richard Hugo House  $96/$86.40 for Hugo House members

“Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers,” writes Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook. This workshop explores ways to let others’ poems not only teach you, but lead to new poems of your own. We’ll experiment with po-jacking, sonic translation, echo translation and other ways to use one poem as a jumping off point for another. Come prepared to write and stretch your craft – participants will leave the workshop with fresh drafts of new poems.

Registration is open online or via phone at (206) 322-7030.

I’ll teach a shorter, free version of this workshop on February 26, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Lopez Island Library.

Let me know if you’d like more information about either class–I’d love to see you there.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time).

I’m going to print the whole piece out and post it in my office, to remind me that I can find stillness and quiet simply by choosing to turn off the gadgets that keep me connected. Don’t get me wrong–I love the advantages of a fast Internet connection, cellphones, etc. But I often feel exhausted by needing to “keep up” with email, Facebook, blogs, etc. Iyer’s article reminds me that a different perspective–one that feels more authentic to me–is always available.

Read Pico Iyer on The Joy of Quiet.

I wish you a peaceful, healthy and occasionally completely unplugged new year.  Turning off the computer now. Bye-bye.

Czech poet Jiri Orten

Then I discovered that the translator, Lyn Coffin, lives here in Seattle. And I was delighted to find out earlier this year that after 40 years of translating Orten, with the poems in and out of print, Night Publishing has brought out a full-length collection of her emotionally resonant translations. It’s called White Picture, and this week on KUOW I feature Lyn reading  “A Small Elegy,” as well as a conversation with Lyn about the art of translation and about why she thinks Orten is such an important poet of the 20th century.

Listen to Lyn read “A Small Elegy,” then listen to our conversation.

Here’s a wonderful blog post from Lyn about her connection with Orten, and finally getting this collection in print. And here’s Ed Hirsch on “A Small Elegy.”

More info is available at the Skagit River Poetry Project website.

Here’s the full list:

alurista

Elizabeth Austen

Ellen Bass

Linda Bierds

Jericho Brown

Lorna Crozier

Tony Curtis

Chris Dombrowski

Lorraine Ferra

Karen Finneyfrock

Carolyn Forché

Matt Gano

Samuel Green

Lorraine Healy

Bob Hicok

Tony Hoagland

Christopher Howell

Will Hornyak

Marie Howe

Kurtis Lamkin

Patrick Lane

Tim McNulty

Simon Ortiz

Red Pine

Rachel Rose

Mark Schafer

M.L. Smoker

Dick Warwick

Jeremy Voigt

This is how old I feel when I hold my cello.

First cello lesson today. First EVER. I am not picking up an instrument I studied years ago. I am starting at square one at 46 1/2. Why am I doing this? Because I have loved the sound of the cello my whole life, but until last year, assumed it was too late for me to learn.

I was talking with someone* a couple of weeks ago about starting to play the cello at this stage in life, and he or she suggested I think of it as learning to speak all over again, and to remember how long it takes children to learn to talk.  This feels like incredibly sound, helpful advice. I think it will help me tolerate the years of baby talk, mispronunciation, truncated phrasing and (let’s be honest) incoherent tantrums ahead of me.

This timing is not accidental. Since Every Dress a Decision came out this past May, I’ve been casting around for my next project, very aware that I want to write in a different way than I have so far. My poetic vocabulary feels stilted and tired. I want to shake up my perspective, revise my frames of reference, learn a new language.

I’ll let you know how it goes. If you have advice for my new adventure, please share!

*It’s not lost on me that I already have an appallingly bad memory. I’m hoping for improved brain function as a fringe benefit…

Big thanks to Kristen Young for catching Every Dress a Decision on an end cap at Elliott Bay Books (and to EBB for putting it there!)

If memory serves, I first encountered Rilke’s advice many years ago, before I considered myself a writer. I was taking acting classes at Freehold with Robin Lynn Smith, one of the most transformative teachers I’ve ever worked with. She gave us several quotes from Rilke, including this one from the Letters:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

That idea of living the questions was completely foreign to me. Until then, I had navigated my life by wrapping a choke hold on my ideas of right and wrong, by trying to think my way toward the next, smartest step. The practice of acting, among other things, involves learning to be present and to respond to what is happening. It’s a matter of learning to welcome–however terrifying, and believe me, at first it was terrifying–the sensation of not knowing where a situation or choice is leading. Over time, the conscious decision to tolerate ambiguity, to live the questions, transformed me. The navigational center of my life expanded to include my emotional, intuitive and imaginative capacities.

I know, I know–that Rilke quote, “live the questions,” appears on so many coffee mugs and greeting cards it’s verging on a cliche. But that doesn’t make its advice any less radical.

As a writer, the willingness to accept not knowing the answer is crucial. How else could I welcome a seemingly nonsensical image and let it carry me to the page, to discover something I didn’t know I needed to say?

Hedgebrook was created in the late 1980s by Nancy Nordhoff, a visionary and generous woman who wanted to create a place to support and encourage women writers.  It’s on 40+ gorgeous acres on Whidbey Island, a short walk from Useless Bay.  Six women are in residence at a time, women from all of the world, working in all genres. We meet for dinner in the farmhouse at the end of the day, for a meal prepared largely from Hedgebrook’s organic garden.

If this sounds like writer heaven, it is. I’ve been lucky enough to be in residence at Hedgebrook twice before, and I tell you there is something transformative about the place. The first time I went, in 2001, I was still in grad school, hadn’t published a thing, and didn’t consider myself a “real” writer (whatever that means). Being invited to a place where the whole staff is devoted to making it possible for you to work can be a little overwhelming. I wrote and wrote, poems that departed in important ways from everything I’d written up until then. The other writers’ life stories and projects moved and inspired me, kept me pushing myself to risk, to reach further.

The next residency, in 2008, was equally powerful but in a very different way. Again, I wrote and wrote, but almost nothing that seemed like a poem. I entered into a different kind of conversation with myself, asking questions like why do I write? What am I not yet saying? Who am I writing for? In the months and years following, as I would occasionally revisit what I’d drafted at Hedgebrook (I think of it as turning the compost heap), I kept finding poems that I hadn’t seen at the time. Images from the landscape around Hedgebrook permeate my collection, Every Dress a Decision–the detritus left by the outgoing tide at Useless Bay, stacks of kindling, stones.

I have no idea how Hedgebrook will change me this time. I’m a different person, a different writer now. But I know I need the deep receptivity that Hedgebrook provokes. I’ll let you know what happens.

In the meantime, Hedgebrook applications for the coming year are due by Sept. 8, 2011.

Read the Hedgebrook blog.

Today, Susan gives us an introduction to this complex, compelling subject. She says that the first challenge when teaching the poetry of social change is to define the topic:

Certain luminaries jumped immediately to mind: Carolyn Forche, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Audrey Lourde, Adrienne Rich and Naomi Shihab Nye, for example. That was the easy part. But how to teach how to write a poetry of social change? What does it encompass and why does it matter? Are Brian Turner, Sherman Alexie, and Yusef Komunyakaa also social change poets because of who they are and the specific themes of their work?

1. Poetry of social change provides access to a location or cultural concern that is underrepresented not only in poetry, but in the culture at large. Before Carolyn Forche wrote about El Salvador in the 1980’s, there was no American poetry that allowed us access into that experience. Brian Turner’s Here Bullet has sold thousands of copies. People want to know more about Iraq through the first hand account of a soldier than what they can garner from TV news flashes and sound bites.

2. As poet and YA author, Ann Teplick says, poetry of social change includes “poems that invite us to re-examine our own attitudes, inspire us to be more proactive, to risk more, wake us/shake us up a little.” In other words, the poems intended to make us uncomfortable, to implicate the reader. “Hey you over there, yeah you. What you going to do about this?”

3. The poetry of social change oftentimes arises from lived experience: a woman in a war zone, a gay man in a straight culture, a Palestinian living between worlds. The experience is one of extremity. Poems may be raw and hard-edged, or they may be surreal and beautiful. In either case, the authenticity of the author is paramount.

4. The writer may implicate herself in the poem. I’ve written a good deal about the war in Bosnia and its aftermath. However, I don’t pretend that I am Bosnian or that I was there during the seige of Sarajevo. However, the poems I write are concerning people who were. Bosnia is a country I’ve worked in on three different occasions and I fully expect to be returning again. Still, my perspective is that of an outsider.

5. Poetry can change the world. I learned about drag queens and gay culture from the poetry of Mark Doty in the 1980’s. I learned of the feminist movement from the work of Adrienne Rich. I learned that poetry’s power is beyond apple brown betty and blue herons on the beach. Naomi Shihab Nye taught me about the life of everyday Palestinians and William Stafford taught me what it meant to be a Conscientious Objector during World War II. All of these writers contributed to my understanding of a larger world view.

6. Writing poetry of social change requires an added dimension of risk over that of a more personal poetry. When I wrote about my friend Yve-Roses’s flight from Haiti after her father’s assassination under the regime of Baby Doc Duvalier, more was at stake than a poem about the color blue. I wanted to document something that had never been documented before. I wanted to write a poem that told the truth about the Haitian boat people that at the time, were being turned back from US waters to certain death.

7. You don’t have to be oppressed to write poetry of social change. So start a poem about something you think needs more attention right now. Did you that the United States executes people in your name? You’re implicated. And if that’s not okay with you, perhaps that’s a place to start now. There are injustices all around us. Get to work.

Try this: Choose a poem you admire (but not love too much or you may not be able to begin) that deals with social issues. Think “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakka or “The Man Who Makes Brooms” by Naomi Shihab Nye and po-jack the opening line or perhaps the form of the poem. Po-jack [a term invented by poet Tim Seibles] means to hijack some aspect of another poet’s work in order to provide you a springboard or scaffolding with which to build your own work. It’s not illegal as long as you give credit to the original poet in some simple way. For example, “Poem that Begins with a Line from Komunayakka” might do it. Most importantly, own the experience – risk something you care about.

What do you think? What poets and poems of social change have provoked and awakened you?

You’ll find more inspiring posts about poetry and the writer’s life at Susan’s blog, The Alchemist’s Kitchen.