Wallet, Phone, Keys, Notebook.

What does a person who writes poems do when they are not writing poems? Do they sink into the Slough of Despond, pretty sure they will never write again? Do they stop carrying the notebook everywhere and hide it in a drawer? Do they slink around hoping nobody will identify them as A Poet, because of course they are not. Not any more. Not since they wrote that one thing six months ago. And that wasn't even very good. So it's probably all over now.

I've gone down all these roads. But ultimately none of them were very scenic, and it all felt really crappy, which detracted somewhat unnecessarily from the sweet heady rush of writing poems. So I quite long ago decided that the way to deal with the not-writing-poetry times was to celebrate them as necessary. I think of them as my mulch time. Whatever is happening in the limbic swamp of my brain, it generally gives rise to some poems that are more formed, more thoughtful, and more full of soul and experience than anything that has gone before. So there's that.

While the notebook sits unopened in the drawer for months, I live my life. As Patrick Watson so wisely sang "Getting tired of wasting worries/I'm gonna let the worries worry for themselves for a change." It's the chewiness of events that affords me the material for the next work. One day, I'll read some old diary, or a great essay or piece of journalism, and the notebook will come out and a few lines will be jotted down and it will all start to feel hopeful and wide open again. Lines will start to come into my head when I'm driving and I'll have to pull over. Or during the night. Notebook by the bed again. Lines building on lines, themes emerging, something new I may never have written about before. All the mulch making good green shoots. Excitement, like Spring.

It so happens that day was today. I was looking in my diary of 1995 for a photo I knew I had stuck there. Started reading about the first days of my first marriage. Scraps of poetry in the entries. Out came the notebook. Now it will be going everywhere with me again. Wallet, phone, keys, poetry notes.

Last night the clocks fell back in the U.S. (Lagging behind Europe, as usual now for the former empire.) About ten years ago, I heard about my mother's diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in early November, and I wrote the poem below. [Note: blogspot keeps inserting a space before the last lines of my poems. I can't prevent it. Why?]

Since it's also the time of year when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, I have included below that a poem I wrote about death. Any old excuse, yeah? I found myself using that phrase about the veil, which I love, and repeat every year with relish, to one of my dying patients the other day. As I said it, I wondered whether she was thinking it was a bit insensitive of me, since we both knew she would be imminently passing through that veil. Or, being the no-nonsense type she was, she may have thought I was full of crap. Either way, she passed through the veil yesterday, just after midnight. I hope she has found what she was looking for.

Fall Back

November again. Isn't this one

always coming around, with its

dead letter days, its footfalls

on wet leaves, its numbed sounds?

There'll be no more laughter now,

and not a lot of happy ever after.

My mother is missing. The stars too,

the stars are not where I left them,

they are not in their constellations.

Through the keyhole of midnight

I have glimpsed the white tiles

of the future, the stark walls

and the uncut shadows. Losing her

to her own life is one thing—

now and then we all take on water,

sink a little lower—but this little

understood, misdiagnosed, neurological

disaster: that this should have

my mother now just seems unsound.

But there it is: the tug of war

between antagonistic muscle groups,

the lost inhibition of wayward

neurons. Paralysis agitans. Eventually,

I am told, every movement

must be voluntarily controlled. Today

our creek is suddenly running wild,

following the season's first storm;

walnut leaves, black locust clog the drain

until our road's awash with rain;

the wind soughs in the thickening black,

last night, we fell back, and the clocks

with their one frail extra hour

snatched us out of the jaws of the dark.

All Souls Passing Over

Today of all days you can almost see through the veil;

due respect to the white bones and the hags

with snakes for hair, one glance at their awful beauty

inviting remorse; the trees in the river's mirror

are almost there, almost on the other side,

their hesitating makes the water shiver

and though you may tell yourself

those are just the forked limbs of willows

reflected in a surface, you also know

that faint splashing to be the oars of some

ferryman who rises out of the mist

with the look of a clock maker you once knew

and takes from his pocket something meaningful

like a key that unlocks the gate you have been

gazing at the garden through since you were little.

Makeover Poems

Sometimes a poem grinds to a halt and I move on. Either I get excited about something new, or the poem just isn't going anywhere, or is too much of a problem child. Often, I go back to these fragments and if the time is right I can take them off in some new direction with renewed enthusiasm. This happened yesterday with a poem I started in Taos in August. I visited a Hindu temple near my cousin Seamus's house and we wandered the grounds and meditated in the tiny, simple meditation room. Sitting still with my eyes closed, something I normally find close to excruciating, came easy at the Hanuman temple. Time seemed to slow and I felt very peaceful. I started to write about it but the poem foundered and I moved on to a different piece about that trip.

Two days ago, faced with the old blank page after finishing my last poem, I came across the Hanuman fragment. I had sort of painted myself into a corner by creating a framework of a single day around the poem: I visited the temple in the morning, sat in a cafe at lunchtime, and hiked down to the Manby Hot Springs in the Rio Grande gorge in the afternoon. But I couldn't figure out how the heck to end it.

So I took it to the computer and started fiddling around with it and lo and behold a whole new theme emerged. Right near the end of the poem, my mom's death pops into it: the fact that at her last birthday, she wasn't turning eighty-one, and the bittersweet thought that my daughter, who shared a birthday with her, is now going on without her, turning a new age every June 9th.

Hanuman

The temple garden trembled in the clear

fresh, early morning rain, lush

with hollyhocks, cosmos, leggy and leaning

heavily into the day.

In the meditation room

I sank to my knees, I put all hurt

to one side, there was ease,

the minutes passed like liquid

over the rocky floor, my thoughts were

stones beneath the river, waiting.

At noon in the Taos Cow Café

I lost connection, so I shut down

my machine and I turned

in another direction: scissors,

paper, stone. Hand, pen, page,

the connections that are always wired,

regardless of wi-fi,

no password required.

Early evening in the Manby gorge

I lay in the river, the river didn’t care

what brought me there

it flowed on over me

washing  my clothes, my hair,

moving my memories like river weed.

On her birthday in early June

my mother stayed eighty, she was

not going on this time, she stopped;

but my daughter, born the same day,

she’s going on, without my mum,

on her journeys around the sun.

I put my hands under the river’s stones

so as not to lose my hold

in the flow, so as to feel their weight

on my fragile bones, and the rain

began again, one drop at a time.

All Set

It's the morning after I finish a poem. I write a lot late at night, insomnia's silver lining. First thing after the news and email, I check out the piece in Word where I typed it up last night. How does it look in the cold light of 7am? It looks okay. I make a couple of tweaks: remove a word here, add one there, sizing up the rhythms, and of course read it aloud to see how it sounds. There are two chunks of reported speech in this poem, which I'm not sure what to do with. Quotation marks look clunky. Italics mean a sizeable portion of the poem is italicized. I could just leave it as regular text, but it isn't delineated well enough, and in the end I go with italics. I kind of like the look.

This is a confessional poem: more than most of mine. As an undergrad in Trinity College, I devoured the Confessionals - Lowell, Berryman, Plath. Their raw honesty, their blunt treatment of suicide, mental illness, addiction was intoxicating to me, following a sedate diet of Yeats and Heaney in my grade school years. But it was definitely a phase. I do reread my favorite poems from that time, Skunk Hour, The Bee Box, but in my own work I usually try to temper the directly confessional. I often write lines that I later change to make them less like a diary entry. So this poem is more of a risk for me. For one thing, it is about very recent experience that I'm living right now. Usually, events have to wait a while in the dark before they bubble up in my poems. I think that's a defense mechanism. The present is very raw. There is the concern that I'll put it out there in a poem and then feel I have said too much. But that's assuming it would be widely read. I think I'm safe. This is not going into the New Yorker any time soon. Besides, if you are not taking risks with your work, what's the point?

Let’s Pack All Our Clothes

October’s aflame, and my world too,

my world is on fire, snatches of panic

as the red trucks siren by, the yellows,

the orange haze and bursts of gold

exploding out of the funeral pyre.

Sun on dry leaves and the tinderish wind

wrestling their whispered secrets from them:

Let’s pack all our clothes, they say,

let’s enter another state

until our warm familiar lives

are deeply strange to us, until we barely

recognize our own reflections.

The leaves are falling now,

mere skeletons of their former selves.

I took my clothes off hangers and shelves

and out of drawers. I closed the door

of our home behind me for a final time,

my keys don’t work there any more.

I park my car in the gravel turnout

overlooking the saltmarsh and the wreck

of a boat near the tide line at China Camp

and I look out over the cracked hull

of my life. I came here in the dark

the night our marriage died.

I called out to the wolves

and the hunter moon and its entourage

of stars: Oh strangers with kind hearts,

circle your wagons around me now,

things that spark and flare up into light,

illuminate my way tonight. It’s a long

road from this moment to the dawn

and the map of my future just got erased

and redrawn and erased and redrawn.

It’s cold, and I’m booked into a hotel,

third floor, overlooking the parking lot,

toothbrush in a water glass.

Goddamn last lines

I'm working on a poem. It started out in the Fairfax Parkade where I parked one afternoon in late September among the flaming maple trees, before the first storm. So it started out being about September and fire and fall. Then time moved on, it was October, so I changed September. Now it's a poem about October and fire and fall and big changes. Then it moves to China Camp, a place of great significance to me, to a night I drove there when things were in disarray in my life. So the poem morphs as it goes. It moves from an observation of fall colors to a sea change, the wreck of a boat, a big life event.

As it goes, the form of the poem changes. I try four-line stanzas, but they're too choppy. Slowly, the poem fits itself into 12-line stanzas. Some rhythms assert themselves, some rhymes. Now I have two 12-line stanzas and I'm working on a third. That feels long enough already, like three will be enough. So I'm halfway through the third stanza, and I know there are only 6 lines left. I get four of them, they flow from the previous six, and it's feeling like a thread spooling out, like one long line of thought. The poem is moving fairly effortlessly, with a few brief diversions down dead ends, towards a conclusion.

But as I get closer to the end of a poem, when I know it's nearly done and there are only a couple of lines left to write, if the form is confirming that, the pressure increases. There's not a lot of time left, very little room to say anything more. I can't start a whole new thought. It has to be all finishing now, all wrap-up. But the ending: it has to be spectacularly final. It has to live up to the rest of the poem, maybe refer back to some thought near the beginning so there's a circular feel to the whole. Or it might finish gently, with something soft yet memorable. Or loudly, with triumph. No pressure though! It just has to be heart-stopping, that's all.

Endings are hard. This one moved the poem to an unexpected location. I felt like ending with a stark image, something simple, a little flat even, a little lonesome. I don't know if it has worked well yet. The poem's still wet. I need to leave it overnight, look at it again tomorrow when it's more set. Maybe I'll rewrite. Maybe it's done. Too early to tell.

Anatomy of a Poetry Reading

Like parties, every poetry reading is its own beast. But they have some elements in common. For me, a common element is that as I am driving to one, or sitting outside under some tree beforehand, I berate myself for agreeing to it. Why do I do these? I lament to myself. Nobody will come. People will come but they will be bored. This is the last time I'm doing this. Then the reading goes really well, some stranger tells me I touched them deeply, and I feel on top of the world.

Today I read in the tiny sweet Village Books of Los Gatos. Village Books is so small I wondered where on earth there would be space for people to sit. Then I remembered that it was noon on a Saturday and I don't know anyone in Los Gatos, so there would probably be plenty of room. In the end, about 15 people came. Most of them were South Bay relatives scared up by my sister-in-law Jan, but as a rule of thumb poets are happy if they do not outnumber their audience, so all was well.

As I got up to read, I noticed a small yellow paperback on the shelf behind the podium titled How to Lose Weight Before, During, and After Sex. I told the audience if they didn't fancy my poetry, they could always purchase the diminutive yellow book and their time would not have been wasted.

Another common element of readings, and I've been reading since I was 16, is that once I get up there all nervousness leaves me. I always prepare. I think about the order of poems to read, and general things I want to say about them. I make a set list with page numbers so I'm not leafing through the book under scrutiny. Poems have a way of leaving the book during a reading if you don't write down their page numbers. Sometimes I deviate from my set list because I catch sight of a poem in the table of contents that I suddenly want to read. Invariably, it's not where I left it and I have to flip through the book a couple of times to find it.

I try to make a lot of eye contact during a reading. I want people to feel I'm talking and reading to them. And I try to avoid the specially serious singsong sort of voice that some poets adopt to read their poetry aloud. I take the temperature of the audience periodically to gauge how many more poems I should read. Sometimes I have understudy poems that I substitute for the ones on the set list. Sometimes I skip a couple if it feels like it's going too long. Occasionally it goes faster than I thought and I add a couple. I have one poem I can recite from memory. I'd like to have more.

After today's reading, with money in my pocket from book sales, I started feeling optimistic about my next reading on January 13th at Open Secret, San Rafael. It won't be until about ten to seven that night that I start to seriously regret having agreed to it.

Wait, where are my books?

So now I have moved. My books have too, but not to the same place. They currently reside in boxes in a friend's garage. Why is it that my books have been within arms' reach for years and I barely seemed to need any of them, but now that they reside in boxes in the garage of friends, I'm suddenly missing them terribly?

First, I finished my current book (The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo, well worth a read) in the middle of the night and realized I failed to pack a single emergency book for my move. There are at least eighty-seven books in those boxes that I've been wanting to read for years. Thank goodness for Benjamin Franklin and his 1731 Library Company of Philadelphia.

Secondly, I have discovered a sudden need to quote from poets whose collections are now, well, you know where they are. I never realized that I sought out random quotes from obscure poems quite so frequently in my life. Do I need to get out more?

This Saturday, I will be reading from What Just Happened at the Los Gatos Listowel Writers' Festival. Apparently, Los Gatos is a sister city of Listowel. Who knew? Not to be outdone by their Irish sister, they have decided to put on their own Writers' Week. I'm reading at Village Books at noon on Saturday. Check out the festival program here, it looks like a lot of fun: http://writersweeklosgatos.com/

Here's a poem I will be reading.

What We Seek

We were dancing when the ground opened up,

the sky opened up, the world was cold space,

the sun slipped into the sea.

We were singing when the wind came up

and with it the trees—they rose in the air,

there were limbs down everywhere.

Halfway across the distance between me and you

a wall came up. You searched for a door,

a way through.

On my side I rallied, I found joy,

sparked it up from two sticks.

I discovered my words were words of burning

they caught from one another

the fire of longing, of despair,

they sent their flames far up into the air.

I risked their spreading, I let them,

it was heady, crossing early and quickly

from silent fear to conflagration.

Thus was I deep into oration when the wall

fell. Suddenly tired of all the conjuring

I watched the flames get sucked into the sand.

It was dark when I began to climb,

hand over hand,

the sea below, pacing back and forth.

A blue moon barely lit my path,

the birds wheeled, ready,

salt stung my eyes.

I reached the peak,

insatiable hunger, unquenchable thirst.

Knowing I was not the first

to consider launching myself

from such a height

I closed my eyes, felt for true north

the secret heart of all things,

and willed the red glimmer

of dawn to the tips of my wings.

Have poems, will travel.

I'm about to move house. Of course, this means moving all my books. Some people when they move pack all their kitchen utensils lovingly in bubble wrap. Some people focus on boxing up all their framed art and wedding gift china/pottery/asian carvings. I turn first to the books. It always takes a lot more boxes than I plan for. I throw books out, I really do. I'm ruthless. I am Book Culling Queen.

But at the end of the day, I can't bear to be without a significant dictionary between hard covers. My Websters has always doubled as a great flower presser for my daughter. Nor can I forego David Shipman's "The Story of Cinema," Peter Ackroyd's biography of T.S. Eliot, or my plastic-film-covered copy of Godel Escher Bach that both you and I know I will never actually read unless I am one day bedridden for 6 months with a mysterious ailment that allows only for eye movement.

While packing my books, it came to my attention that I had a ridiculous number of slender poetry volumes. Many of these were amassed in the 1980s and 90s in Dublin when the rise of small presses allowed young, urban poets to get their voices heard by the poetry-loving Irish public. Recently I heard from an Irish woman now living in Canada who had bought my early books and told me how she read them with her husband and continued to enjoy them over the years.

It struck me how I have done the same with my favorite volumes: carried them with me on planes, to the beach, to dentist waiting rooms. My Dylan Thomas Collected Poems has completely fallen apart from use. My Complete Shakespeare was once run over by a bus. Duct tape came to the rescue. It's an odd thought that someone else might have one of my collections in their bag while they wait for the train or sit at the boarding gate. My books have emigrated with people, traveled to places I have never been, made ripples in the lives of strangers I will never know about. Right on, slender volumes!

Ok, back to packing. But first, a recent poem from my trip to Taos, New Mexico.

New Mexico Sixty Eight

On the road to Santa Fe from Taos

the sky went slowly wild with dawn pinks

and blues, I felt loose in my life, rattled.

Orange rain in the far South,

the Rio Grande riding by on its own time

with its own secret set of expectations.

Some nights before, we had driven out

beyond the last of the mobile homes

to the end of the road; the Milky Way

wrapped her cool scarf round the moon’s throat,

coyotes yipped and yowled

and the mesa dogs joined them.

I stood by the car, cold, a little jarred,

and I wished someone would hug me

but nobody did. I’m glad.

Every evening after that we headed

to the Guadalajara Bar and Grill

and in the parking lot among the flatbed trucks

we watched the sky unfold and unfold

and unfold, and it felt good

to know just why I was afraid;

that sometimes it takes driving out

to where there’s no more road,

to listen to the dark, and pick apart

the winking plane lights from the satellites,

hum a lullaby if humming is all you can come by

and let it burn away, the surface layer

the jewelry, till you are down to something

more raw, more elemental, to where fear

lies quietly side by side with sadness

anger, joy, whatever else you need in life

just to get by, to get you on that road to Santa Fe

and the airport and the plane and the home alone.

When I am not making vast sums of money as a poet, I work full time as a hospice nurse. Before that I nursed in neuro rehab, with folks who had sustained traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries, or had conditions like ALS and Huntington's.

Naturally, nursing has informed my poetry and now that I work with the dying, I have the perfect excuse to write about one of my favorite subjects. I wrote about death long before I was a hospice nurse, but now I feel I have a solid reason for my fascination with the topic.

Strangely, though, the nursing poems come slowly. This is partly due to the constraints of HIPAA, the health information privacy act that prohibits health workers from sharing the private health information of their patients. And partly because their stories just take a long time to settle with me in such a way that they directly influence my work. They influence my daily life profoundly, but seem to take a long time to bubble up in the poems. I've read books by nurses and doctors about real-life patients. I wonder how they change the material enough to satisfy HIPAA without losing the essence of the story.

This poem from What Just Happened fuses my curiosity about what happens when we die with my love of driving. It also explores how the spirits of the dead can be felt by the living. I have experienced this myself and through others too many times to dismiss it as fancy. Just the other day, the daughter of my dying patient told me she felt her dead brother visit the room several times while she sat at her mom's bedside. He was here, she told me, I felt him, and then he left. Later he was here again. I can't explain how I knew this, but I just knew. Her mom, well into her dying process and beyond any speech to her living children, had been speaking aloud to her dead son. A pragmatic woman, she had asked him What are you doing here?

Gone Driving

Fall now, no escaping.

First rain broke the spell,

the hot dry promise

broken by the downpour

and the next day’s damp loamy smell.

The storm was brewing for at least a day,

call it a change in barometric pressure

but I sensed the ghost of the guy in 4A

we lost in June. He was in his old room.

The other nurse felt him too.

Happier now, this man.

Kingdom come. Gone home

one way people euphemize for dead.

Crossed over, they will say, or passed on.

I think of it more as simply gone.

But perhaps we get to revisit lost loves,

favorite rooms, best afternoons

when we are gone.

A picnic lunch on Hampstead Heath

in 1991, a night out on Camden Town.

That 2 a.m. proposal over a Chianti bottle,

the stolen kiss with a boy I barely knew.

Paris,  the spread out jewelry of her light -

or maybe the spirit gets to do

whatever feels completely right.

Mine will be taking a grand tour

of the United States

in an ivory 1956 Coup de Ville.

No need for gas, rest stop, motel,

just driving, top down, music blowing back

all day and all night: San Francisco

to New York, south to Key West,

through New Orleans and along the gulf coast,

the livid dawns, the dusks,

through every shade of white

that the southwest desert glare burns

and the sky turns as I head

inevitably for the Pacific Rim,

the breakers, and the high plunge off the cliffs

to the wild ocean, calling me home to drown.

Poems.

Some people have been asking how they can read my poems online. "On my blog," I reply, secretly feeling enormous pressure to blog more, post poems, and generally do things recently published writers are supposed to do.
So here are some poems from my new book. The first one is about taking my 13-year-old daughter driving on beach roads in Point Reyes.

South Beach

I let her drive

on the narrow road down to the beach

between the dunes with their russet ice-plant hair;

she was thirteen, piloting the car with infinite care.

The sea was boiling mad

climbing the beach,

ice-green at the curled-over tops of the waves,

then darker green and churned-up sandy foam.

She stood at the edge

taking video with her phone,

blond hair blown across her sea-green eyes.

In an instant, the gods could decide to snatch her back

I could no more hold her

than the fine sand,

I could no more keep her safe

than the wind or salty air;

but we stood together there

at the ragged edge of the land

and the churn and rush of the waves merged in a rising choir,

a melody, not sweet, but urgent, uncontrolled;

it sang of me and her,

of the earth that arose, bold,

from the featureless ocean, the hill of the world,

and of all mothers and their wild unpredictable girls;

and the sun god, a phoenix,

alit on the hill where we stood

with her filming the waves, and me

holding on to her in my mind, in my imagination

so it felt like

I would always have her near.

And then we walked back up the sandy path to the car

and we got in, and smiled at each other, and I put her in gear. 

***

This next one comes out of my experiences as a neuro rehab nurse, working in a small hospital with patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, and conditions like ALS and stroke.

Sailing

I’m in a place where much hurt comes to rest,

a confluence of pain and rapture,

laughter and despair.

Hunger is acknowledged here,

loss hangs in the air,

grief is recognized, renewed.

The broken come here, endure

blinding light, engulfing dark.

This is a house of ill luck

built upon hope, layer above layer;

in this house, let the heart

incline toward kindness.

The people who stay here

sleep the sleep of those

who go on losing and losing;

they come empty-handed, wounded,

flung out of the orbit of their lives,

wrung free of ego,

flushed of the insatiable self love.

I witness the ills that they endure

and when I mourn for them

all the old sorrows rise like water,

a cello joins the piano solo

in the house of their tomorrows.

Midday, I sit out on the hot bridge,

the frogs are in concert in the creek,

at ease; small miracles of heat

rise off the wood,

the planet runs on and on

with her disease

but I feel that something good

has been promised here,

something bigger than anybody

planned. After work I sit a while

in my car before I put it

into gear and drive out

beyond the daycare center

and community church, far

past the tidal pull of all my patients’

sorrow, tugging at the ropes

of the small vessel I will sail

back to them tomorrow.

***

And this is a new poem, as yet unpublished. If you are still reading, mazel tov!

Morning Number One

I’m alone in our room,

it’s raining, lovely dove grey,

the forecast is for accumulating sadness

over the latter part of the day.

Let me be done with the business of doing

and the work of love, let me go down

to the lake with a pen, some champagne,

climb to the loft above the straight yellow bales,

let me free myself from all incarceration;

the sky will keep giving and giving

in a rage of sunset,

the night will move up the mountain

towards a color no-one can name

left over by the last of the sun, and at the lake,

I’ll see a landscape that shouldn’t be there,

the low water mark from a famished year;

yellow moon will rise over wasteland,

illuminating nothing;

I will string lights around the dark

and I will say my few words into that same dark

because night is the only vessel  that can hold them,

small as they are, too big for the light,

coming out fully formed, quiet and right;

and after the moon lays its shadow

over the forest of firs and the coastal scrub,

along the sand where the mole crabs

tickle my feet beneath the broken surf

I will make my promise into the waves,

the ocean as witness, a promise

that will lead me to the dawn,

and this: morning number one,

which is where the boy soprano comes in,

grief of innocence,

single violin.

3...2...1...we have liftoff!

 If you have never been to Open Secret Bookstore in San Rafael, here's what greets you when you first walk in: 

Apart from serving the planet's best chai and housing an astonishing collection of books and spiritual items, Open Secret is a richly welcoming venue for events such as...poetry book launches! Imagine my delight to find myself launching my new collection there last Friday night in front of an audience of friends and friendly strangers. The room was not this full or tidy, but here's what it kind of looked like:

There were poems. There were slides to accompany them. There was wine, cheese, fruit, and weird coconutty snack things. I read for nearly an hour, phenomenally long for me. I sold many more books than usual. You could say the evening was a big success, but that would be an understatement for me. 

This was the culmination of about ten years of planning between me and my friend Connie Shaw. She owns and runs Sentient Publications, Boulder. Now she is my U.S. editor/publisher (I still publish in Ireland with The Gallery Press). We have fun with this. I call her Ed, she suggests outrageous places we could fly to for readings. We planned this book on beaches, on planes, in bars and ice-cream parlors and Russian tea houses. And now we have done it, launched it, celebrated it, and even started selling it. This is beyond fun!

Below is the first poem I read on Friday night. It's about the government shutdown of October 2013. I've added a couple of the slides I projected as I read it.

Shutdown

The day the government shut down

the ocean showed up for work.

They put some barricades up

but waves kept coming in, unfazed.

The toilets were locked

and the barricades went up

to stop the people coming in to the park

but we went early, before they closed

the National Seashore, and I can attest

that the seals and the pelicans

and the small fish and the birds that eat them

kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,

rending the heart of the beach in two,

throwing their violent weight around

while Congress ran aground;

the rush of foam and fuming toil

of the wind blowing spume back

from the crests as loud as the silence

along the corridors of power,

the sand hot beneath our feet,

the water silvery gold, the gulls

laughing and crying as we were

laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared

we reckoned they hadn't heard

that the government was hung -

hoist by its own petard -

that they'd put some wooden barriers up

to stop the tourist cars

from visiting the National Seashore

while well beneath the roar of the breakers

tearing up the shale

and the keening wail of the gulls

the day was a good day, ungoverned,

lovely, full of miracles.

A book in the hand

My book arrived! A box of them from FedEx on the front doorstep when I got home from work. It's hard to describe what it's like, opening a box and taking out your own book, the slight heft of it in your hand, the shiny cover, the pristine pages with all those strangely familiar poems. Years of scribbling in notebooks, and then this...

I just got back from doing my first readings in Taos, New Mexico. Read at the SOMOS in town, and at my cousin Seamus's art studio, where we did a joint Painting/Poetry event on Saturday to celebrate What Just Happened and Seamus being back in Taos to stay. Taos is a rich community of artists, writers, and musicians. Everyone I met was welcoming and inclusive. "Come and live here!" they exclaimed when I told them how much I loved the place, its pace, adobe tones, and spectacular surrounding landscape of mountain, sage desert, and the Rio Grande gorge. 

Every book has a poem I like to read last at a reading. A 'chewy' one with an air of finality. In this book, it's Coyotes.

Coyotes

                                “Gravity cannot account for falling in love.”

-          Albert Einstein

2a.m. and the coyotes start

with their howls of victory and despair.

I’m seeing it everywhere: the keys in their jar,

the bird that flew up unhurt this morning

from beneath the car, an insect’s gauzy wings

against the lamp – we live as though these things

and how the day went

constitute the only way things are.

When I make these journeys

back to the country of my birth

it feels like flying into the old

territory of my roadless self, my history;

days before I board the plane

I start to shed the layers of it all

like parchment wrappings, then I step

into empty time in the departures hall.

They board the infants, then first class,

then the rest of us. Rush of takeoff,

the brilliant sky and the clouds;

because of the uncertainty principle

space is never empty; because of supergravity

and supersymmetry we have unified theories

of everything, including the seven unplanned

curled up other dimensions I can’t fully understand.

But I have formed my own slender theory

of quantum uncertainty, cradled up here

in the stratosphere by the laws of nature

and the four forces: if all of existence

is just patterns of vibrations without width or height,

end or start, then what connects us

must be the wildness that runs riot

in the clamorous chambers of the heart.

In the big past, it’s understood

that stars burned through their hydrogen till they collapsed,

beryllium fused with helium before it could decay

to form a stable carbon isotope

which is how I’m sitting here today,

unruly conduit from heart to page

for all the sudden joy, the human hurt

and sorrow, laughter, love, and rage

that makes us undertake

these solo expeditions into the territory.

There isn’t any map.

You have to be the architect of your life,

the poet of it, hunger for what the future holds,

face the inevitable, the unknown, and like the coyotes,

pound down the double doors of the night and come out

fires blazing, eyes wide open, heart alight.

Poems Bidden and Unbidden

I made the decision early on not to make writing my career, partly because I didn’t want to have to write to commission. But I have done so many times, mostly because it’s hard to resist. A poem for a show where poets respond to visual art? Fun!Thoughts on the 50^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I have many!

The down side of writing to commission is the phenomenon of the deadline. It’s no coincidence that the word contains death. There’s a sense of doom as they approach. I have a habit of waiting nonchalantly until deadlines are so close I can see their eyeballs. At that point, panic and inspiration are indistinguishable. I’m not a natural procrastinator. There’s just something addictive about the rush of meeting a deadline by the skin of my teeth. And since I seem to meet them every time, I’ve come to accept that this is just how I do things.

But it makes me wonder about inspiration. My commissioned work always feels different to me, faintly inferior, like a clever knockoff. There’s an artificiality about the inspiration that produced it. I keep my commissioned poems separate from the body of my ‘real’ work. So what does that say about the muse out of which unbidden poems arise?

Saul Bellow said: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” He was so right! Samuel Beckett said that a poem is never finished. He kept endlessly tinkering with his. He was so wrong! I feel it is a crucial part of my craft to know when a poem is finished, just as it must be for an oil painter. You can keep slathering words like more paint on the poem, or changing a word here or there until you drive yourself crazy. I tried to train myself early on to recognize the subtle settling that occurs with a poem, like something finally fitting perfectly the space that has been carved out for it. You make that final change and the thing is done. Time to move on.

Sort of like blog posts….

Mentors

When I was sixteen, I sent a sheaf of poems to Dermot Bolger, a 24-year-old whom I had heard was running a poetry press out of Drumcondra, a suburb of north Dublin. This was amazing on several fronts: one, that he was so young (he founded it when he was 18), but more importantly that it was publishing inner city Dublin poets, young poets, people who had never had a voice. It was without budget and an early book of Dermot’s own poems were sold by word of mouth in the factories and pubs of north Dublin. The poetry establishment in Ireland at the time was firmly rooted in Heaney, Mahon, poets of the North, of the stony grey soil, and of history. Dermot was publishing Raven Introductions, a series that published ten or so poems by a handful of newcomers and gave a forum to a whole generation of young, mostly urban poets coming up in working class Dublin.

“The way I try to defend it,
this demeaned spirit and country,
is by naming its constituents…
picking their hindered, wary steps
through concrete wastelands, refuseheaps,
tax offices, supermarkets,
dole queues, hospital clinics,
army checkpoints…”

                Philip Casey: Ordinary Mortals

In 1983, Raven Introductions 3 included a clutch of my poems. The year after, Raven Arts Press published an anthology called After the War is Over, in response to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit to Ireland. It was not what you would call a warm and fuzzy welcome for the President, and it included a poem of mine. While I was still a teenager, Dermot made it possible for me to feel that I was taking my place among real poets writing about things that mattered.

It was a very exciting time to be a fledgling writer in Ireland. New presses were springing up everywhere and when a book came out, we would read in pubs (what better to attract seasoned Guinness drinkers than a bit of a poetry reading…or was it the other way round?). One early Raven Arts “book tour” involved about 6 highly suspect characters, including myself, driving round the country in a battered old minivan. Venues sometimes had fewer audience members than readers, but since the tour also featured the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, any disappointment was well drowned. By this time, I was reading English at Trinity College, but in my secret double life, I was reading my poems at the International Pub and county council libraries across the country.

Dermot was my mentor. Over the next few years I sent him every poem I wrote and, since it was long before personal computers entered the Irish household, we exchanged frequent letters. His were typed on tissuey paper, and they contained both encouragement and editorial advice, some of which has stuck in my head to this day. He published my first two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. In 1992, he shut Raven down and founded New Island Books, which published my first novel. He has gone on to be a highly respected novelist, poet, and playwright himself.

I sometimes wish we lived in an age of art patrons. Some wealthy dude could pay me to sit at my desk and write poems. But I think of Michelangelo, many of whose early commissions made him miserable because they were someone else’s vision and holding him back from his real work. I have never had any limits on my freedom to write, except the rigors of my full time job and the million details of being a working mom. But they are all just excuses. I started writing poems when I was nine, but the real work of it began for me the day I got Dermot Bolger’s first response to the poems I had sent him. Send more, he wrote, send more.

The Awful Truth About Editing

Honestly, I don’t know which awful truth about editing to begin with: that it’s entirely necessary? that it has no natural conclusion? that it can make a poem worse?

A propos of my previous post, Iris Murdoch would only write in a certain brand of notebook, longhand, preferably with a Montblanc fountain pen. Late in her career, she discovered that the notebook line was due to be discontinued. Panicked, she bought up every one she could find, sufficient for the remainder of her 26 novels.

The longhand piece resonates strongly with me. Not just for the tactile reasons I mentioned in the last post, but because it makes editing a much richer experience. You can see everything you’ve deleted. You can see what you have added and changed. You witness the evolution of the piece as it unfolds, the work of it, the cutting, planing, and sanding.

Below are two sets of my notes, one inchoate, one closer to the end of a poem. In the first, stray words; aeronautical definitions and terms from the book I was reading; the beginning of a verse. In the second, the work of a stanza coming together; the repetition and re-transcription of the few lines, trying to get them right. When a poem reaches a certain strength, I sometimes number the lines so I can keep track of where I am if I’m reworking a section.  If there’s a stanza format, numbering helps me hold to the line count and stay with the rhythm, the shape, and the relative line lengths.

I guess when I start numbering the lines, it means it’s all coming together.

The KN105 and the Poet

Sometimes I envy graphic artists the accessibility of their art, its tactile nature. You paint a painting and there it is, on the wall. You make it with your hands. You don’t have to read it aloud to people, and nobody has to decipher it if they don’t want to. They can just look, soak it up wordlessly. There is direct access from the eye to the primitive brain.

However, when I start to feel too sorry for myself, having to rely on the intermediary of words and such, I sternly remind myself that I can practice my art pretty much anywhere. All I need is a writing implement and a piece of paper. If I were less neurotic about my tools, I could even dictate into my phone as I sat in traffic. This is never going to happen, for three excellent reasons, upon which I am about to elaborate in a bulleted list ( in a former life I was a tech writer, more on that later):

• To be able to work at all, I need not only pen and paper, but my actual poetry notebook.

• My pen has to be the right pen. Not a 0.38 nib and good grief certainly not a 0.7. I’m talking 0.5. Hybrid Technica KN105. Or a Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine.

• My notebook has to be the right notebook. Nothing with garish lines and cutesy designs on every page. Nothing with eco-friendly but ink-unfriendly absorbent paper. Nothing too largely spiral bound, I’m left-handed. Creamy pages better than bright white.

I could go on, but you get my drift. I really care about my tools. What the heck: poets don’t have much overhead. I don’t have to shell out for tyrian purple or gold leaf. So I may as well really enjoy the equipment. Until my late 20s, I wrote with nothing but fountain pens, which I diligently filled with Parker black ink. I preferred the reservoirs that sucked up the ink to those that sucked  it in the side. I was constantly wearing nibs down with all the scribbling, and my fingers were perennially smudged. Then Pilot and Pentel started coming out with gems like the Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball, and I entered the 21^st century, somewhat ruefully putting my Dickensian nibs away in a box. I still take them out and touch them sometimes.

Paper is ubiquitous in the first world. I’m lucky that way, and yet except for jotting down fragments of thought, which I can do on a stick-it or a restaurant napkin, I really need my notebook. My writing process means that without all the scribblings of the last few weeks, I cannot get started. Unless a poem comes to me in one fluid session (it happens), I usually need a jump start. I’ll read over my recent notes, and if that doesn’t do it, flip further back in the book until something catches my eye, a phrase, a list of words, a fragment of unfinished poem I can build on.

This makes starting new poetry notebooks alarming, like being faced with the proverbial blank canvas. I miss the vital reassurance of everything I’ve been working on in the past few months, even the poems that are signed, sealed, and delivered. I need their comforting presence to inform the new work. I need to see the evidence of their evolution to remind me that every time I have ever been without inspiration, I have worked through it, started again, picked up and something new and sometimes better has emerged.

The physical act of transcribing fragments in my notebook often triggers new ideas. I don’t know the neuroscience behind it, but something in the act of writing inspires my creativity. Maybe it’s the speed at which the pen moves, maybe the sound of it – a faint scratching, so much more soothing than the clacking of a keyboard – or maybe it’s the feel of it, the paper under my hand, the heft of the pen. Writing is immensely tactile for me. Turns out that after all is said and done, I make poems with my hands. 

The Hello Bit

Welcome to my blog about the craft and sullen art of writing poems. I know, the blog title doesn't really scream poetry. It's a quote from my daughter when she was about three. We were taking a walk, she was in her umbrella stroller. An elderly neighbor passed and said Hello. She responded without missing a beat, and as though it was a time-honored greeting, "HelloGoodbyeOneDayTheEnd."

John Hewitt once said: "If you write poetry, it's your own fault." I've been writing poems since I was nine, and for many of those years I have not given it a second thought. But with my 6th collection coming out this August, I started wondering why for four decades poetry has occupied such a secret place in my life when it is so central to it. It's as though I was reluctant to admit that I ate food. When pressed at a party, I might confess "well yes, actually I eat. I do, I eat food."

I think it's partly because as a published poet, people somehow assume that this means I am qualified to hold forth on poetry in general, to expound on famous poets, if not quote them at length; or - horror! - to judge their own sheaf of verses. Or because poetry is generally considered such an odd thing to do, sort of like literary trainspotting. Or they assume that I am about to ask them what they think of poetry, forcing them to admit that while they know there is wonderful poetry out there, they have never actually been able to find any; that they just don't understand it.

It's this last point that has stood out most over the years. A majority of people seem to feel that while they know poetry has worth, they have never been able to figure out what the hell poets are saying. And when I pick up Poetry magazine, I am inclined to agree with them. My love of poetry is fervent but very selective. I know what I love, I know what my life would have been immeasurably poorer without. But how to define what is good poetry? How to explain what some poems mean? How to describe that rush of joy, that feeling of rightness when I read a poem I love?

If you are thinking this blog will explain poetry to you, I'll be sorry to disappoint. All I can do is to describe what it means to me to write a poem, how I do it, the mechanics of the thing, the place poetry occupies in my life. Maybe in describing that I will be able to shed some light on my forty years of  entirely solitary and mostly secretive scribbling.

Most poets eventually break down and write a poem about writing poetry. My favorite has always been the first stanza of Dylan Thomas's In My Craft Or Sullen Art. 

"In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labor by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart."