Labor Day

It is Labor Day, the first Monday morning of September 2012, at 10 AM.   

This is the day I had promised myself that I would pull out the unfinished pages of my novel to add a short chapter 8.  And I want to, very much.   But I am not surprised that I am procrastinating today.  Traditionally, work starts for me the day after Labor Day when I return to school along with every other student and teacher I know.  During the last several years I spent this day showing up at a labor march and then putting some thought into transporting plants, plans, and decor into my high school English classroom in the center of  Philadelphia.  

But this year, the unfinished novel--along with this blog, my poetry blog and continued healing--is my work.  I am not going to school for the first time in 55 years.  My relatively stress-free home is my new work environment.  I am not driving into "the city" and may actually add a few years on the life of my car by using it much less frequently.  I am not smoking cigarettes either--not since February--which may add a few years onto my own life. I had to completely cut the expense of cigarettes--more than $100 a month--in order to retire early on disability compensation.  I have gained weight, but the increased self-confidence I feel is worth it.  I figure that if I can break an addiction after 43 years, I can do many more things than I dreamed of in my philosophy.       

This weekend I attended a Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center workshop called "What is Your Story?" about finding and expressing personal truths through oral and written story.  There--in addition to completing the joyous tasks of each day--I took notes on Alice in Wonder, the working title of my novel.  I need a new beginning place so I will not get bogged down reading over and over what I have already written.  I've changed in the 2 years since I wrote the original 5 chapters and in the one year since I wrote chapters 6 and 7.   Last year I discovered I still enjoyed the story.  This year I realized--during an interview of me on the Poets United blog--that I would finish it come Hell or high water. 

It's 10:50 AM on Labor Day, and I am writing while skimming my weekend notes!  Here are the notes--in sequential order--that I took about Alice in Wonder (working Title):

1. Retain physical sensations various thoughts bring to mind: including where different parts of my story reside in Chakras and, for example, twitch the left shoulder, restrict breath, cramp the fingers on my right hand and begin a burning in my stomach.  What is that?  What brings tears?
2. Remember that I have permission to write anything I want.  Look even where I tell myself I cannot go.  (Next to this I wrote: Can I?  I am trembling.)
3. What stories would Alice not want people to know about herself?  What stories would she tell? 
4. What's in the way of my writing today?  What's in the way of Alice's thinking--according to me?  

Notes #5-40 have been removed to protect the author. I think they reveal too much about the novel; I sure do have a sense of accomplishment!  It is now 11:58-12 noon on Labor Day, and I am ready to put this away until tomorrow.  

A documentary and a movie

Sometimes at evening there's a face        
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.   
Art must be that sort of mirror,               
disclosing to each of us his face.            

     ~from "The Art of Poetry" by Jorge Louis Borges

 

Two great pieces of art just showed myself to me, and neither of them are my own art.  The first is the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) and the other is the film Pariah (2011).  Both feel like truth to me.

Celebrating Borges' Birthday

 I have to thank Maria Popova today for her 113th birthday remembrance of Jorge Louis Borges "Borges on Love and Loss" in The Atlantic and also in her blog post at Brain Pickings.**  I had intended to discuss the poem she published today in his honor, but stumbled into the middle of controversy:  Is the poem "You Learn" by Jorge Louis Borges or is it "After a While" by Veronica A. Shoffstall?

My online research would have it both ways: Shoffstall published it in 1971; his dates are not clear.  One online version lists Shoffstall as translator.  One blog gives Borge's Spanish version with this reference "texts recovered, 1919-1929. by Jorge Luis Borges, Sara Luisa del Carril.  Published by Barcelona: Emece, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003"--but I have not verified this.  I found no evidence of the existence of any publication on-line, and the question is not important enough to me to take on the footwork of going to the libraries and publishing houses that might have the answer.  I agree with two commentators that the poem doesn't have the rich allusions, images, and surrealism that are customary in Borges' style. Yet, I know he had a life beyond his writing that was more practical than surreal.

Hmm.  I am bemused by my lazy refusal of the detective role in this case.  I love research that finds sources of streams.  Along with other PhDs, I was trained as a "history detective" before the television show existed.  I am bemused, also, by being bemused!  It is a much more pleasant experience than my normal shame at doing less than possible, and more pleasant too than the perfectionism of actually doing it.  HA!  I have fallen right into Borges' "what if" world in which time is not reliable and change and changelessness co-exist.  He recognizes issues like perfectionism, and his characters could easily get caught in a loop of impassible passion.  

I see that I am celebrating Borges without the poem in question, an irony that I suspect Borges would like.  I will end by including a poem that is definitely one of the masters. 

The Art Of Poetry 

by Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing. 

 

Note: I borrowed this poem from "Famous Poets and Poems."  If you wish to quote it in any way, please refer to my source.  I have no copyright for this poem.  I just enjoy it.  And I thank Maria Popova for her reminder of this birthday and for her commitment to creativity.

** I removed the links to Maria's article because it has been removed.  You may find Brain Pickings here.

Connections and poetry

Last I wrote here, my holy experiment was to read one of my poems aloud.  Since then I have continued writing so that now, 14 poems later, I am ready to reflect on how interconnections abound.  

I had my first publication of sorts on-line a few days ago when Third Sunday Blog Carnival linked my blog to theirs and featured my poem “Pushed.” This poem about buttons was a response to an open challenge at dVerse PoetsPub.  Through responding to that challenge and others, I roamed many poetry workshops to interact with poets and ideas.  Eventually one of them, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, asked me to become a member. I joined with delight as the poems and comments from poets there lived up to its mission, which reads in part:
    

The purpose of this writing community is to ensure an intimate and supportive environment and an improvement of our writing skills. We are always open for change and knowledge.

The name of the blog reflects its purpose.  It is a fragment of a line from Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry.”  The first line of the poem—“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle”—leads to her list of poetic crimes until she says:

. . . nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "maginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. . . . 

“Real toads” are to me the details that bring truth to senses.   
This is the perfect workshop for me as I practice my art.

Connections help me extend my own holy experiment to see where it leads and take opportunities as they appear.  Thus, a few days ago I completed an interview for the Poets United series “TheLife of a Poet” which should air soon. I didn’t refuse because it was too soon or I wasn’t published yet or any of the other ways I hide.  All I have to do is continue doing what I am doing while listening to the still small voice guide me on the path.

One thing is clear: being a poet is not about making money. Poet Charles Simic speaks to this in “Poets and Money,” today’s post in the NYR blog at The New York Review of Books:

We never got rich in the past and won’t see a dime in the future. Despite copyright laws, most of our poems are already freely available to millions of people on the Internet and in this age of short attention spans, poetry may end up by being the only literature people will read. With no bookstores left and libraries shut down, lovers in need of additional romantic stimulus will have to reach for their iPhones and find a poem suitable for the occasion to read to each other. Poetry’s strength comes from such practical uses. Everyone has heard of poems being read at marriage ceremonies and funerals, but I suspect nobody has ever tried to inflict a chapter of a novel or a short story on that kind of gathering. No wonder writers and intellectuals by and large disdain poetry.  “Poets work for nothing . . . .”

Simic goes on to describe the one occasion when he thought it might be about money. His anecdote is farcical in the extreme, until: 

. . . one bright sunny morning I rose before anyone else, sat at my desk and read what I’d been working on, and realized that everything about them was totally fake. I tore the poems up with great hurry and embarrassment and went out to take a long walk with my dog.

He couldn’t market what working-to-order did to his poem.  He, like me and the poets I am meeting now, writes with a different kind of urgency.   The toads we reveal in our poems are very definitely real.

Rambling about speaking or not

I've been acting my Quaker self for a couple of weeks: a retreat, a yearly meeting (PYM) full of sessions and queries and friends and Friends and new and renewed connections.  I think I made a commitment to rejoining Quakers in the Arts today.  I also "anchored" the afternoon session in which PYM passed the yearly meeting budget.  To anchor means 'to hold in the Light," so I did not so much attend the meeting as I did feel the spirit of the session, put prayer around its attendees, their ways of testifying, and the smooth moving forward of the agenda.  In previous years I felt the strong affect of a few people sitting aside to tend to the overall meeting, so I was glad to take on the role.  I will pay physically for sitting so long, but I am full of smiles for doing it.  

Before dinner I attended a "Telling our Stories" Holy Experiment (workshop) in which the leader talked a great deal about the importance of word choice and gesture and we told stories of our experiences with the nonverbal aspects of communication and how--despite commonalities across cultures--we can make some big bloopers.  My story was about being in Italy with the members of a theatre company I was studying.  We were praising the food in our effusive American way--and even broader--because most of us did not speak Italian and so we were gesturing and pointing, etc.  Later I discovered that our hosts assumed we were overacting and not only being stupid, but also lying.  They thought we disliked their food and trusted us less after that interaction.

Words.   As a stage director, I called non-verbal run-throughs as well as normal dress rehearsals because I wanted to be sure that body language communicated even if my viewers were not English speakers.  I'm not talking about overacting or "indicating" but I am talking about being theatrical.  Fun theatrical moments can be made of an opposite meaning between what the body is doing/saying and what the words/tone are saying. 

What's the equivalent for poetry?  I think, like in music, it is the meter, rhyme and vocal emotion that reach beyond the words.  Also sound choices like onomatopoeia and alliteration contribute a lot to mood and meaning.  And PERFORMANCE!  On the blogs, sound clouds allow the poet's voice to carry the poem and pictures add meaning just as they do in children story book.

I read my poem "Making Theatre" at the workshop because I thought it addressed the workshop leader's points, and now I realize that was MY holy experiment--to speak my art here.  I do not know how the rest of the workshop went, because--believe it or not--I am an introvert who has to recover a bit from public speaking my OWN things (teaching is not a problem).  It felt wonderful.  It was a little story, a tiny piece of a life, but it took our talk of words and non-verbals in a slightly different direction and I felt great.  Remember what poet Audre Lorde said?  "It is better to speak."  And to act.

 Making theatre

The theatre director has to expose his uncertainties to the cast, 

but in reward he has a medium which evolves as it responds:

a sculptor says that the choice of material continually 

amends his creation: the living material of actors 

is talking, feeling and exploring all the time — 

 rehearsing is a visible thinking-aloud.

-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

I wrote it.

I speak it.

I listen to an actor speak it

A wonder!  it has more than I thought.

Where is she from and where is she going?  

I ask, and starting here, the actor creates

the character's movement for me 

with the actor’s added motivation, 

always asking "what would I do if?"

what would I mean if?

and who am I doing it to?

and why?  Why?

Wanting something is key

(at least in the Western world)

without desire there is no drive 

and without drive, there is no show.  

Even words are empty gestures 

when they should be strategies.

Use s t i l l n e s s until you must 

speak until you must move.  

What would you 

do if . . . ?

You must speak 

these words

called a script, 

but this script 

is mayhaps only 7%

of what I mean.

  

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Inspiring Truth in Art

 

As I say on top of my poetry blog almost everything inspires me to write these days.  This video from 2009 is one of the visuals that I return to again and again to see the small strokes details sounds senses . . . how so little makes so much.  In her sand animation, Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova tells a story of the Ukraine's involvement in WWII so powerfully and sensually that it is also a poem and a dance.   It is truth in art.

 

 

Today Mrsupole's post on Theme Thursday convinced me that I should blog occasionally on the videos that inspire me.  You may want to visit his too!  And we'll meet back here to talk.

 

 

Tell all the truth, but cook it first*

Today a poetic blog buddy wrote in a comment on one of my poems that he thinks "truth plays out best in the tales we tell each other....as opposed to raw truth..."  which made me want to chart my poems and commentaries on a scale of truth.   However,  I can't conceive the dimensions of such a chart and therefore, instead, place all my poems at one point: the point of "how the truth appears to me now in a moment after time."  I wrote a poem about this "moment after" in the lines of Shakespeare's sonnet #18:

Shall I compare my Truth to that of a summer day?

Mine is much more lovely and more temperate.

Rough truths shake us, the limbs of raw truth sway,

And summer's truth hath all too harsh a gait.

Sometimes too bright the truth of heaven shines,

And often is its too solid purpose dimmed;

And every truth with Truth sometimes rhymes

By chance, or Nature's changing course, untrimmed;

But Truth's eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of the greatest Light it caught

Nor shall life brag Truth is of a grey shade,

When in eternal lines to Time Truth is wrought.

     So long as humans can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives my Truth, and this Truth shines on thee.

*reference to Emily Dickinson's poem "Tell all the Truth but tell It Slant."

Truth and Poetry Part Three: Commenting on others' best efforts

perhaps truth is even more varied than I have asserted before
when it comes to comments

let's think about this together

Which comments do we find the most useful?
Which comments do we want from everyone?
Which do we want from only a few?
 I don't know.  I have been basking in encouragement lately, although I get little detailed information from the very short comments.  I like when people give me back a detail and interpret it.  That gives me part of them too.  Sometimes I can tell that way whether I need to do more to get my ideas across.

Which comments can we most easily make?
(Most readily and truthfully make without guilt that is)
Are we commenting to encourage?
Are we commenting to improve?
Are we commenting to give back parts of ourselves? 
I find that I can always give back a detail whether or not I love a poem or see its structure.  I can say when I don't understand--but I cannot say outright if I dislike or see major errors in facts or see overused . . . Indeed, I find that I do not trust others to tell me the truth in these areas either.  There is more going on here than insecurity.  When I obscure part of my response, I assume others do too.

And what if we are wrong?
And what if we disagree?
We have a lot to talk about here.  
I am not afraid to learn I am wrong, and I have a limited amount of tolerance for disagreement.
I don't like either feeling, but so what?


What can I do to be braver and more helpful than I am with all these thoughts about what I and others need and like as inhibitors?

Bring on the theories about stages in creativity.

Bring on the truth about human nature!

On my 61st birthday

I should be vacuuming and completing the little things I do when my parents are coming to visit, but here I am instead capturing these thoughts while they are ripe.  Just an instant ago, I wrote this poem on a theme that has been with me these past few months:  

Hitting the top

I am at the ceiling, I shall want

the days when sky was the limit--

nor is the ceiling made of glass.

I rub my eyes as if clearer vision

will assist me to rise above

like eyeglasses help me to hear.

I have roof tiles in my hands

tar between my teeth,  and grit

in my hair as I bat my head up.

Is the sky still blue?  And clouds?

Are they puffy? sketchy? still?

When did I become color blind?

When bound? What eagle eats

my bloody heart as I relish—

or try to—gifts I once gave?

I resist plucking feathers as past

you zoom and I try again to rise

in the tail of your gravity.

I am exaggerating, of course, but I feel this occasionally in the Halls of the Poets I have been visiting who have not even yet reached the peak of their knowledge or abilities in science, music, mathematics, probability, statistics, philosophy and chance.   I want to crack codes to hear the truths poets share.  Conversely, I want to stand in my own truths and admire the parade as it goes on by, proud that I used to be part of it.  

Amazingly (or not), I find many of them enjoy reading me, too—not as a relic but as a participant in their emerging culture.  It is a daily joy to walk with them as we nudge each other toward our bests. Something true is happening here and the poem above is part of it.   I have tears in my eyes, which I now know is a sign of more to come. 

Truth and Poetry, Part Two

In my poetry and fiction I fabricate stories, narrate from perspectives I could not possibly experience directly, and even--when using my exact experience--distance it from myself in some way so that the reader can not assume that I am the "I" that is the voice in the poem.  I seem to use these devices at random--and though there is always a  purpose to my strategy--I am not sure I can always articulate the reasons behind my choices.  Are my poems untruths, then?  

This question came to me because of new experience I am having workshopping my poems in two on-line groups.  The posted poems are exceedingly  good, and the comments range from helpful to outright praise.  But those who comment often speak to the writers as if they were the voice and as if they experienced the emotions and actions they present in their poems.  And the writers' responses often second that impression.  Except in the allegorical types of poetry, then, I feel out of step.  Should I change my ways, or frame my poetry in a fictional contest?  

I think, if I am not telling the truth, I am also not lying.   I write what I know, following the advice Audre Lorde gave me long ago.  But I remember also what Aristotle insisted was the difference between poetry and history: They are two different kinds of truth.  He even implied that poetry's truth was superior.  Here are his words--and yes, I am trusting the translation:  

. . . . [I]t is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.

       Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

      By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. 

      The particular is- for example- what Alcibiades did or suffered. . . .

Aristotle is one dead white male that I don't mind referring to because I believe that he was trying to save education and literature and art back in his day just as many are trying to do now.   His teacher, Plato, and his time were trying to banish art and poetry and theatrical expression from political authority.  The evidence of this is in Plato's Republic, which preceded a new stress on military and local authority and seemed necessary for the obedience required in a more fascist state.  In The Poetics, to which I refer above, Aristotle is trying to establish the necessity of poetry by showing that it too has formal rules that could be quantified and then obeyed.  The Classical Age and its Ideals, according to Aristotle, had to embrace poetry as well as what actually was more controllable.

Two types of truth exist: poetry and history--maybe even more.  And many kinds of lying exist.  Adrienne Rich describes two in her essay "On Lying."  One is lying directly and the other is lying by omission. Plato (and my contemporary faith) show another kind of lying: saying words and taking perspectives that are not our own, IE acting and "playing at" as one does on the stage or when quoting another's truth.  And that is another subject for another time.  In the meantime, I console myself that my poetry fulfills some kind of ministry, even if as yet I do not know what that is.

(I'll be back to provide the links.)

Truth and Poetry, Part One

Truth has been troubling me lately.  

By "troubling," I mean that it insists on being considered from more than one perspective, and it will give me no peace until I do that.   

By "Truth," I mean truth itself in as much as I experience it.  

As a Quaker, I am a Friend of Truth, which means that I do not have a double standard that lets me lie if I have not taken an oath.   Telling the truth got me in lots of hot water when I was a child, but I could not even lie to avoid punishment.   I laugh about that now although I would live it the same way again.  But I did not discover Friends of Truth until I was fully 30 years old and working alongside them to create the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.   

Early Quakerism (1660-1760) believed so much in truth and individual experience that it warned against the art of theatre.  Theatre encourages people to act, speak, show things that are not themselves, and deliberately participate in untruths.  It was seen in the same light as gambling and horse racing.  

Things change.  In my 1980s political activism, I had experienced theatre as an essential tool.  It (1) communicates to and convinces audiences of hard truths and (2) re-energizes those who already believe its message.  And when I discerned that my ministry would be in theater, members of the Friends Meeting in Albany, NY helped me season the decision that moved me across the country and earned me a PhD in Dramatic Arts.  

When I moved to Philadelphia 20 years later, I planned to research and write about the late addition of theatre departments at Quaker Colleges—not until the 1960s.  I had just been part of a controversial staging of a “gay” play; and I wanted to examine religious strictures on theatre, dance, and certain populations.   Instead my ministry took me to inner-city public school teaching for the next eleven years. 

Now I am a retired teacher and a poet.  Truth has been troubling me again.  In my poetry I make up persona and experience; I invent situations rather than always tell my own.  Indeed, I distance myself deliberately at times when I seem to be spilling my guts.  It doesn’t always interest me to be plain and simple and straight forward; and if it doesn’t interest me I do not think it will interest my reader.   I use devices to get at a Kind of Truth, but not the one I was talking about earlier.  This behavior borders on equivocation.  "But everyone does it."

Two nights ago, however, I found myself playing the poetry game in front of a Meeting for Worship.  I entertained instead of telling the truth.  I wanted to get a laugh and I did.  Does everyone do that? I wanted to hide that I was in physical pain (chronic condition, long story), and so I talked about going to graduation at my old high school.  This was not a lie, but it was an omission of truth that could ultimately mean I did not ask for help.  Does everyone do that too?  And who cares?

I do.  I told the truth before worship ended, and the corrected lies became a ministry in our silent meeting.

But I believe now that there is a place for a Poetic and Literary Truth that is both different from  and more inclusive than Day to Day Truth.  It doesn't belong in between God and I, but it is part of a God-given ministry of some importance.  

(to be continued) 

The Gift

Yesterday I went to the Last Poetry Cafe of the 2012 high school seniors at my old place of employment to hear poems from and to read poems to those I abandoned by retiring back in March.  I was surprised and moved when they gave me a little sculpture of 2 white geese, mother and child.  I immediately associated to the fairy tale about the Golden Goose and imagined myself as a guide into a marvelous world.  An instant later I associated this with an undergraduate memory from my sophomore year of college in 1970 when I gathered a tiny contingent of friends for a follow-the-leader to a bar.  The drinking age was 18, not 21 as it is now.  

The way led through a snow and ice encrusted park--according to Worcester, Massachusetts legend, the oldest public park in the USA.  One image stands out in my mind even without a photograph:  Walking single file across a wooden fence rail, I looked back and laughed at the line of "baby ducks" imprinted on me as if a Mom.  I won't tell you about the awful end of the tale where two of us incited a bar fight by pretending we were native Americans (Indians, then).  I don't remember how I got home.  What I remember from the chilled park is the laughter and clouds forming in our breath and lack of fear and delight in being alive.  I remember that I couldn't lead them had they not wanted to follow.  

And that is what I felt yesterday in the school library setting of the cafe, a feeling reminding me of what work had been like a few years back before my actual pinched nerves worsened under the terror of metaphorically pinched ones.  What a gift!  

Teaching had been my ministry and I had loved waking up in the morning to go in, revising long laid plans in my head as I drove: what had worked and what hadn't, which students needed more practice etc.  Driving was for planning and centered prayer, noticing what was new, grinning at yesterday, being friends with Jesus.  Each day I remembered and smiled at my Grandmother's admonition to "be kind."  She had been my art teacher in high school, and she was not kind to me.  In an attempt to avoid favoritism, she had aimed her sharpest comments at me.  Now I wonder if she just wanted me to be excellent, but she was decidedly not kind and I often fought back tears while trying to meet the goal just out of reach by time or by talent.  

As a teacher in love with learning, I think I was kind.  To my own surprise, I was also very conservative in demanding students learn basic skills and formats as well as the creative writing and inquiry that I so loved releasing. Hard that, to want to follow them into the future but to demand observant attention to their artifacts, a kind of meta-learning.  They always "got it" by the end of the year when they put together portfolios of their work along with self-evaluation essays.  These were the real gifts to me and to themselves.  Not everyone cared (understatement) and some hated the classes I taught, but I hope that some will remember how it felt to know they were good because they knew what to look for--to know they were good because they applied this skill to things that mattered to them, not to me or anyone else.  I hope someday when raising children or singing to fans or studying or pumping gas, they will see that as a gift.  Meanwhile, the gift I gave myself is that I did not compromise what education is to me.  I did not cave in to the conformity forced around me.  

I think that same strength is motivating me now as I keep writing and practicing both revision and talking to a public that so far is on-line and very small.  I need the practice.  Yesterday, again, students and a faculty member urged me to publish. I will break through that stay-back-stage, ride-in-the-back-seat mentality with practice.

And the public schools--in the midst of the financial crisis and the unbearable number of pink slips and lost programs--have been re-valuing creativity.  The younger teachers have that covered.  I don't have to be there because, in fact, they are better than I could be with my hit-and-miss methods of finding what works.  If anyone can help students overcome the "I-know-better" mentality they have developed over the last few years, it will be these brave new ones.  I shift my focus to re-directing me, to refuse to compromise on the move toward publishing.  I will try to remember not to aim at perfection, but to get on with it, to finish, just as I told my students.  Honing skills comes with practice.  Meanwhile, do not hide thy light under a bushel.  No more standing behind and pushing others forward without moving myself however small my steps are at first.

I thank my poets for this reflection, for this gift.

About my poetry

This one is about me, sitting here and getting more and more excited about the number of public demonstrations against the latest proposals--travesties all!-- for school reform. I listen and watch from a side-balcony, the bay window desktop connection to the world that I have in this second-story apartment in the suburbs.  Can you picture it?  I used to be out in the crowds.  Now I write poetry every day and must decide a path for it.  Publish for real?  Make available on the web?  Save for something?  Read in public?  Give them to Alice? 

Let me explain.

I have an intent to open my closet door and go through the hidden and crumbling boxes to (1) find the poems that I have written most of my life, and (2) rediscover the experience that shaped Alice's thinking.  Alice is the character in my novel.  As yet mostly unwritten, Alice is the novel itself waiting, as Pirandello said, for an author.  I think the author is in the boxes with my selected history of partings.  History of the passion before leaving and of the partings themselves. And about today's wonder: Can I rebuild the burnt bridges to those who peopled my past?

Which brings me back to the poems.  Today I noticed a common theme in what I had thought was random responses to prompts, considered explorations of how I might play with poetic devices if I followed my instincts.  And if I deliberately tried to play.  The theme is separation and return.  Separation and the impossibility of return, snippets of joy in the most vivid of memories until I try to live them backwards and then what?  The poems are grieving though they are not all sad.  They are the painting and the frame of "thinks" to store or to hang, of "thinks" like irrational impressions of something past and let go of, and also present journeys into the past. 

They are not current in a political sense, which surprises me, knowing myself pretty well.  They are surprisingly self-indulgent despite the fact that I have "invited strangers" to narrate.  Why am I surprised?  Read a person's journal and see how they lie.  Read a person's poems and fiction, and learn her deeper secrets and truths.  I have seen that in others and now open to myself.

Just saying.  I thought it was time to let my reader know where I disappeared to.  And that I am happy.