My Pendle Hill Presentation

I made an outline and cut the chapters I read to the core—and I liked them so much that I think the originals need this cutting as well.  This was the outline:

ENTER AS Alice
Rd Ch 1 and 2 

Pause for a summary of the major conflicts and events: 

                        —the invitation and losing her job
                        —the laptop and Ricky’ visit

Rd Ch 22, 25, 26 

Discussion:      Helen as linear narrator
                        What’s like me, what’s different
                        Vertical 4-D writing
                        What I learned here
                        What I take home
Tanya

2 weeks before I can write again!

And this was my prayer:  

Many Pendle Hill staff people came and two interns and and two guests!  Let me see if I can walk my way around the table: (From my left) Lloyd, Jesse, Amy, Anne, Laura, John, Amadeus, Ricardo, Helene, Joe, Shirley, Steve, and Angela.  I wish I had taken a picture or asked someone to take one.  And I am not yet able to record the responses except to say they were generally positive, very positive.  Gosh.

I addressed my entire outline with a little prompting from Jesse to talk about the role of prayer in my writing and to talk about the space in which I worked.  

Here is the "discussion" part of the presentation in a much more organized form than my actual talk.  I wrote this earlier in the afternoon while planning what to tell folks about my work as Writer-in-Residence:

I’ve been thinking a lot about how narrative writing grows.  In my novel Alice in Wonder, I started with my own solo performances, making the character I once played be the core persona of the drama in a semi-autobiographical semi-historical novel. 

I made her 10 years older than me and financially independent.  I replaced my life as a teacher with hers as a storyteller.  I replaced my need to reveal what radical feminist community was all about with her reluctance and resistance to returning there—but otherwise we share a lot.  I was involved with women’s communities and did find Quakers first at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.  Alice’s lovers are quilted from my own and those of my friends.  Her experience working on racism and discovery of her own racism are my own.  My own spiritual life has deepened by exploring hers.

Here at Pendle Hill, I continued to write in a linear narrative, letting Alice’s conflicts and catastrophes lead me forward, but as I worshipped more and more I began to write vertically as well as horizontally, as if I were switching to 4-dimensions and exploring the depths and dimensions of single moments.  I hope the chapter I read aloud illustrates that. 

Essential elements of my time here included leaving home and its involvements, joining daily worship and starting daily prayer in three different modes—silent, in writing and in color drawing.  Also the food and its consistent scheduling--including my time with the kitchen crew around the dishwasher-- contributed a lot.   My weekly consultations with Jessie kept me on track, made me aware of creative patterns I can take home with me, and often eased anxiety as well.  She’s careful to meet when she can be fully present.  She’s a good listener and a skilled mentor.  

Finally, the events I participated in and the people they brought me in contact with expanded me—including my lunchtime writing sessions, the three sessions of readings I did before this one, the Monday talks and book signings, the Commencement ceremony of Radical Faithfulness and last weekend’s full conference on Transformative Justice in Community.  Wow.  Without the residence program, I feared there might be too little conversation and dialectic, but in the end it was just right.  I’m so happy that the last event of my residency will be Marcel Martin’s book signing event for Our Life is Love.  That is providential! 

According to Tanya Taylor Rubinstein, the Global Story Coach:

          The world has conditioned us, whether we are coaches, writers, artists, business people or other kinds of creative folks, that we need to always be moving outward.          [But] we don’t.  [We can center and then] from a place of deep abundance, we truly can remain open, and receive what is meant for us. This is the point of attraction and power. It is not a passive path. It is not a hermit’s path either. It’s one of powerful intention and receptivity.  And, it’s one of conscious awareness of being led by something greater than the individual self.

I have been reflecting today on what I take away from Pendle Hill, and Tanya's assertion is one of them.  To have a chance to learn this experimentally is a great blessing. One of the first things that Jesse said to me was that despite what I said I would be doing here, I should see what is on my heart right now and let it lead me. 

I find I stop writing to pray often about both this world and the fictional one.  I thrive in the writing cave and morning schedule I’ve made here and will build those in at home.  I also take back with me the uses of my weekly check-in with Jesse and have begun to gather a spiritual support team to read my work, to ask me questions about both the work and the process of writing, and to worship with me.  I think we’ll meet once a month.  But I would love to hear from others about what they have found supportive.

Finally: It’ll be two weeks before I can return to writing.  Obligations I’ve put off have crowded in—shopping Friday, sessions Saturday, Upper Dublin Sunday, Doctors Monday and Tuesday, and then Wednesday a drive to upstate New York family.  It will be March 28^th before I can become writer-in-residence in my own home!  I have to look into this business and figure out a way to get a well-cooked meal at least once a week back here at Pendle Hill.

I’m hoping to finish Alice in Wonder this year, even if writing about her wonder leads me to more books or more wonders and avocations.  I don’t know yet whether writing is the calling or the path to another calling.  

But I thank God and everyone for this stop on the road.  

I will write more as way opens.

The Madiba Poem by 11-year-old Botlhale Boikanyo

Here is one of the three reasons I stick with Facebook: friends spontaneously pass forward what moves them.  This amazing video came to me via poet Kay Davies who blogs at An Unfittie's Guide to Adventurous Travel.  She got it from Femi Oke who I see at Upworthy where she introduces herself: 

I’m an Al Jazeera journalist and broadcaster who’d love to show you around the globe. No passport needed because I’m going to curate the world for you. I’ll even let you keep your shoes on and drink 16 oz. sodas while following me on Facebook and Twitter.

From these social network beginnings, The Madiba Poem arrived here.  Later this year, I will use it for a poem prompt at Poets United where I have recently joined the creative team.  You could begin your poem now, as poet Botlhale Boikanyo or her poem or her performance or Nelson Mandela or any part of it inspires you.

Look at her smile
performing her poem
loving Mandiba's story.
Listen to her voice
turning two languages
into rivers that flow
into the human sea
part of which is me.
I want to rush out the door
with a magic marker
to write everywhere
Witness God Here.
God is Here, where
each of us stands.
Let us greet God here.

Jewish-Pagan-Quaker

Last night I wrote the poem The Month Before Christmas.
This morning I wrote this to my friend Brian:    

[Experience] has changed me over the years since I became a Quaker.  But I didn't realize how much until I wrote this.  I am amazed now by what I wrote.  I woke with a start this morning, feeling the echo of being in the clutch of witch-finders.  As the pagan I was years ago, I would have condemned this lifting beyond reason as part of what enabled the Church to identify and destroy witches, Jews, gays, anyone different and especially spinsters like me.  My experience has changed me, but O, there is still the pagan inside who wants to speak.   And she will,  I wouldn't want to suppress that truth just as I couldn't suppress this one.  But in this last hour she has been questioning me up and down or touching what could be a blessing but has often been the spark for horror.  Do I make sense to you?  I will pray about this today.

Brian responded: you do [make sense] ...a faith based on feeling is a scary thing to me, it lacks substance...and can def be manipulated and twisted...it can also be un-genuine and exclusive...i try to steer clear of it...and am oft skeptical of it...there is no denying the lift...at times i question the authenticity though

I'll be back with more thoughts.

Living an un-divided life

Since writing the poem "Persona Grata" about the strategic use of masks and another--just a few hours ago--I found Parker Palmer's post about "The Undivided Life" on his facebook page.  He posted this video:  

I felt for a moment as if we were in dialogue.  Here is my poem:

What skill to hide under

such cover as face masks

provide and not let them

know our identities

Camouflage to hide and

to stalk successfully

the over-confident,

unwary, gullible

Cover up to hide tears,

grow strong and build allies

for a united front

when time is ripe to act

Cover up to expose

character, to play more

than one part, one gender,

one race, ethnicity

and class, to meet someone

To walk in another’s

shoes,  path, obstacles

To satisfy curi-

osity, to expand

What skill to wear the mask

for survival, what skill

to take it off for love—

pain both ways, always pain—

And gain—empathy and

control, freedom and its

opposite—strategic

choices to be alive

"Persona Grata," Copyright © 2013  S.L.Chast

And here is a bit of Parker Palmer's intro from his Facebook wall:

"Don't wear your heart on your sleeve." "Play your cards close to your vest." "Don't make yourself vulnerable." Sadly, most of us learn early on that it's not safe to be in the world as who we truly are, with what we really value and believe.But when we live "masked," even "armored" lives, the world pays a price.

Parker Palmer reminds us that this price we pay is "at the heart" of his book Healing the Heart of Democracy. This book is support for anyone trying to change their modus operandi in the world.

In the following poem, Paul Laurence Dunbar exposes his undivided self in this confirmation of living a divided life:

We Wear the Mask

BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!

Dunbar's context was the Harlem Renaissance, but his message transcends time. Palmer's context is now.  The closest I have come to undivided is in my back-stage life: rehearsal, classroom, home, journals and my relationship with God.  Now I try to bring that space into my writing.

Where, when, are we safe? or at least safe enough?

Poets are Lovers

A long time ago--almost a year--Ella's Wonder Wednesday #14 Regifting at Poets United asked for favorite poems.  I returned there today for Kim's Verse First ~ Writers are Lovers

using one of my Gift Poems for inspiration.  A pretty great place, Poets United! 

Adrienne Rich (right), with writer Audre Lorde(left) and Meridel Le Sueur (middle) in Austin Texas, 1980

In this photograph, two writers who influence(d) me greatly frame a legendary writer and thinker they helped to rediscover in the 1960s.  I first read their work in the 1970s. Today I focus on Adrienne Rich.  After she died on 27 March 2012, writer and friend Marge Piercy wrote this:

Another obituary

 We were filled with the strong wine

of mutual struggle, one joined loud

and sonorous voice.  We carried

each other along revolting, chanting,

cursing, crafting, making all new.

First Muriel, then Audre and Flo,

now Adrienne.  I feel like a lone

pine remnant of virgin forest

when my peers have met the ax

and I weep ashes.

Yes, young voices are stirring now

the wind is rising, the sea boils

again, yet I feel age sucking

the marrow from my bones,

the loneliness of memory.

Their voices murmur in my inner

ear but never will I hear them

speak new words and no matter

how I cherish what they gave us

I want more, I still want more.

                                                                         

Copyright 2012 Marge Piercy

I do too.  
Listen for one minute and forty seconds:

Poet/lover: Adrienne Rich

Hers is the voice I meditate to, me safely tucked

into the edges of dread while she translates

their calculated disguises, images and sounds

for humans like me who still hug trees and listen

to poems she creates of the unspeakable—

What?

Yes, yes.

She died at age eighty-one back in twenty twelve

but she was so far ahead that

it will take us decades to catch up.

And her voice still purrs out strength from You Tube

So

I will still call her present, invoke her presence,

love her madly and enter her landscapes, listing

her titles as song:

The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck

and The Dream of a Common Language led

me to Twenty-one Love Poems where I bled

and stayed through the radical seventies

A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far

ushered in the studious eighties, when I

reentered the academy and abandoned

her and other lovers until now as I stand

To re-enter the edges, I listen for her voice—

she will talk of trees, doorframes and this difficult world,

speak utter truth from her salvaged skin to

my bag of bones so I will bleed and breathe 
and sigh and love and make love again.

Posted for Kim's Verse First ~ Writers are Lovers at Poets United.  Oh!  Can you believe that The Paris Review just this minute re-posted their interview with Adrienne Rich, "Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’ " on Facebook??  Here's the Facebook post:

“The split in our language between ‘political’ and ‘personal’ has, I think, been a trap.” —Adrienne Rich  

Read our 2011 interview with the American poet here: http://tpr.ly/hK3j0y

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

"Dog Songs," a new book by Mary Oliver

From:   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/books/mary-olivers-dog-songs-finds-poetry-in-friends.html?smid=pl-share

Scratching a Muse’s Ears

Mary Oliver’s ‘Dog Songs’ Finds Poetry in Friends

Angel Valentin for The New York Times

The poet Mary Oliver with Ricky, one comforting presence in her new collection, “Dog Songs.”

By DANA JENNINGS

Published: October 6, 2013

Mary Oliver has spent most of her life with a mind ripe with poems — and with at least one steadfast dog by her side. It seems fitting then that her latest collection revels in the carrying on of dogs. “Dog Songs,” out from Penguin Press on Tuesday, is a sweet golden retriever of a book that curls up with the reader, with 35 poems and one essay about the dogs who have shared Ms. Oliver’s days.

Angel Valentin for The New York Times

The poet Mary Oliver, with Ricky, a Havanese who plays a part in her latest collection, “Dog Songs.”

Ms. Oliver is that rare thing in our culture: a best-selling writer of poems. Her previous collection, “A Thousand Mornings,” was a hardcover best seller last year, and “Dog Songs” has already bounded as high as No. 2 on Amazon’s poetry list (behind a 99-cent Kindle edition of Poe).

Asked about it in a recent phone interview, Ms. Oliver sounded as bewildered as anybody: “Best seller? That part I can’t get. It amazes me.”

She has an inkling, though, about why the ordinary readers who buy her books fasten on her poems. “People want poetry,” she said. “They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.”

At 78, Ms. Oliver, whose first book arrived in 1963, is the kind of old-fashioned poet who walks the woods most days, accompanied by dog and notepad. “Dogs are perfect companions,” she said. “They don’t speak.”

Her poems’ titles make it clear that nature suffuses and sustains her work: “White Heron Rises Over Blackwater,” “Truro, the Blueberry Fields,” “Old Goldenrod at Field’s Edge.” As does this from “Mindful” in the 2004 collection “Why I Wake Early”:

Every day

I see or I hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight.

The poet David Rivard, who teaches at the University of New Hampshire, said he believes that Ms. Oliver’s popularity dovetails with the fact she writes about the outdoors. “As a nature poet, Oliver feeds people’s love of a certain pastoral tradition in poetry,” Mr. Rivard, whose latest collection is “Otherwise Elsewhere,” wrote in an e-mail.

Besides nature, Ms. Oliver’s muses include the poets Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov and Pablo Neruda, and, of course, dogs — a mob of dogs — many of them coursing and chorusing through “Dog Songs”: Bear and Ben, Ricky and Lucy, Luke and Percy.

And the book transcends its dogginess. It’s also about love, impermanence and the tears in things. As Ms. Oliver asks in “School,” “How many summers does a little dog have?”

But why write a book of dog poems? Enough canine lit has come out in recent years that a shelter should be built for those tomes that have been neutered and remaindered. Ms. Oliver sheepishly admits that the idea for “Dog Songs” came from her publisher and agent.

Still, she addresses the dog-poetry question in her essay “Dog Talk”: “They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.” That Ms. Oliver has a book of dog poems will surely make the poets and critics who sneer at her work howl. Though she has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, her verse splits the poetic microcosm — a world in which a best-selling poet is always below suspicion.

Typical of the howlers is the poet and critic David Orr, who once wrote of Ms. Oliver’s work in The New York Times Book Review, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” When asked about those allergic to her work, one could almost hear Ms. Oliver shrug over the phone: “It’s a kind of eliteness among academics.”

Mr. Rivard wrote, “There are some people who believe that plain-spoken language is always a sign of simple-mindedness, or worse, of a middlebrow, uncool character.” He added: “At her best, she’s a fine poet, one whose work I admire. When she’s not on her game, the work feels too easy.”

The California poet R. M. Ryan, whose latest book is “Vaudeville in the Dark,” said: “So many poets obscure the world. Mary Oliver clarifies it.”

In a sense, her poems, with their charity and lyric clarity, can provide the kind of solace that dogs give. ”I think they are companions in a way that people aren’t,” Ms. Oliver said. “They’ll lie next to you when you’re sad. And they remind us that we’re animals, too.”

Most of her tail-shaking companions got to spend their splendid ephemeral summers in Provincetown, Mass., where Ms. Oliver lived for 50 years, though she has just migrated to a town on the southeastern coast of Florida. She declined to be more specific because she’s a poet — in another cultural rarity — whose starry-eyed fans show up uninvited on her doorstep like strays.

“One time a stranger came to the house and asked if I was Mary Oliver,” she said, laughing. “And I said, ‘No, I’m not Mary Oliver.’ “

She grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, near Cleveland, and even as a child she had a dog with whom she tripped and tramped the woods. “Her name was Tippy, and she had white at the tip of her tail,” Ms. Oliver said. “She was a puppy who showed up at my great-aunt’s door, and she made a gift of her to me.”

Then there was the dog whom Ms. Oliver once gave as a gift. Before her partner of 40 years, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, died in 2005, she told Ms. Oliver, “I want a little dog that I can hold in my arms.” She craved what Ms. Oliver calls “a bundle of longing” to see her through. That bundle was Percy, a frisky bichon frisé named for the poet Shelley.

She and Ms. Cook once had as many as four dogs, a couple of cats and a rabbit, but these days Ms. Oliver is down to Ricky, a plucky Havanese who punctuated our call with his friendly racket. “Ricky loves me,” she said. “And the Havanese have such a wonderful sense of life.”

But love does have its needs. When Ricky’s charm couldn’t get his mistress’s attention, his need escalated. As our talk ended, Ms. Oliver exclaimed: “Good lord! This dog is ripping up something!” Then she laughed.

Ms. Oliver’s pleasure in Ricky’s antics again evoked “Dog Talk”: “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scratching a Muse’s Ears.

What I Learned This Week

Acknowledgement:  In dVerse Poets Pub's Pretzels&Bullfights this week, poet Brian Miller asked us to speak to these questions:  "What did you learn this week? What is rocking your world? What pissed you off—or made your day?” His own poignant story is there.  Mine follows:

     This week I learned the kinds of questions writers ask editors and agents.  I participated in the Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections one-day Conference in Philadelphia, my first time attending a gathering as a writer.  While there I also took one of my poems to speed date with an editor.  What an eye-opener!  I wasn't the only oldie-newbie, but many more attendees were from MFA creative writing programs near and far.  All were so puppy-like and hopeful.  I hope I seemed more simply curious. The eagerness was both scary and beautiful.  So many people for so few "jobs."  How to survive as a drop in this ocean?  

     Answer: We gotta be ourselves--and I mean BE REAL and become real: Find our topics and voice and put teeth in our lines.  Gotta love the industry fiercely or/and hone in on the home team and relax.  That's the beautiful part.

     Here's the scary part: I know I cannot compete.  I cannot send out hundreds of submissions, thousands of inquiry letters, millions of copies and keep track of who's got what.  But I cannot quit either.  So I will not try to compete.  Paradox?

     Even the agents at the conference said to stay focused on the writing and don't worry about the rest until we have to.  The writing is the work, and the agent--should we ever acquire one--will do the rest.  But neither the agent nor the editor can write truths from our perspective.  Of course, we heard helpful tips in finding agents, editors, publishers and etc.  But the biggest tip for me was to go home and write, taking all the risks I am afraid to take, including not knowing whether or not I will succeed. 

     Writers, Poets, Artists et al.:  What did you learn this week?

a plague of plagiarism.

• I allude to songs, hymns, psalms, and other writers through using their words in contexts of my own, but do not believe I am plagiarizing.  And in the 20-teens, with mashups as a factor of creativity,  it is hard to teach high school students and draw the definitive line around what plagiarism is and isn't.  Here's an article from The Australian that got me rethinking this entire mess. 

  
  

  Comment?

  
  

  Plagiarism scandal exposes toxic undercurrents in poetry scene  by STEPHEN ROMEI

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• SEPTEMBER 21, 2013   12:00AM

DAILY readers of this newspaper may have seen a story I wrote on September 13 (a Black Friday for some) about a plagiarism scandal involving Newcastle-based poet Andrew Slattery.  [The original story is here.]

The award-winning poet admitted he had been inserting lines from other poets - including famous ones such as Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski and Seamus Heaney - into his own work. (He also "borrowed" from prose writers, including Romanian Emil Cioran, which I mention in passing because I have such fond memories of my younger self reading On the Heights of Despair.)

Slattery said he was striving for a cento format, where the works of other writers are inserted into new poems, but I suspect this was a half-hearted defence, and certainly it was one no one was buying. Ultimately, he admitted he had done the wrong thing.

The story sparked a vigorous debate in poetry circles and the wider literary community. In a long and stimulating article on the Overland website, Justin Clemens makes many good points, including one that immediately occurred to me: how did Slattery's deception go undetected for so long? How did prize judges, often poets themselves, not spot lines from Heaney, say, in Slattery's work? " ... all the judges and editors and aesthetes ... have been left with poetic egg on their faces," Clemens writes.

Slattery was widely published, including in this newspaper. "The victims," Clemens observes, "have come from all colours of the political and aesthetic spectrums. It seems Slattery has taken in almost everybody, from internationally famous poets ... through academic specialists and journal editors and media hacks, not to mention a more general and diffuse readership."

The continuing fallout from this affair has exposed some toxic undercurrents in the Australian poetry scene. You can bet your bottom dollar the work of a lot of poets has been run through online search engines since Black Friday, being checked for plagiarism.

You can also wager with confidence that some of the people doing the checking are fellow poets. How many poets this makes nervous is something I do not know. If you missed my original story, you can find it, and also Clemens's piece, on my professional Facebook page, which I've been meaning to mention for a while. This is a public page so you don't have to be my "friend" to look at it.www.facebook.com/stephenromei

Three Minutes

From ABC News:

House Honors Birmingham Church Bombing Victims

@GoldmanRussell

By Russell Goldman

Apr 25, 2013 4:49pm

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted unanimously to honor four young Alabama girls, killed in a 1963 church bombing. Martin Luther King Jr. had called them  ”martyrs” of the civil rights movement.

The girls, all black members of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, will be posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, created by an act of Congress.

Addie Mae Collins, 14; Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley; 14, were killed on Sept 15, 1963,  in the attack that struck the packed church on a Sunday morning. Twenty-two others were injured.

The bomb, composed of dynamite and a timer, was planted beneath the front steps of the church,  outside a basement room in which 26 children attended a Sunday school sermon.

FIND MORE OF THIS STORY HERE: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/congress-honors-birmingham-bomb-victims/

Three Minutes

Four young ones

died yesterday

and yesterday

and yesterday

Seems like yesterday

when four girls died

and four more

and four more

Today, too, death

more died today

while praising and

singing and walking

Bombing children anywhere 

is bombing children 

here in this 

safe heart.

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast