The Forest for the Trees

I recently felt the need to explain myself. As the author of a piece, a poem, a profile of someone for a journalistic forum, an essay, even a journal entry, I have learned how to home in on particulars: the juice is in the details, we have often been instructed. Of course, this leaves so much out.

With poetry it is especially true. A poem is not the life that it may describe. As William Wordsworth defined poetry it is "emotion recollected in tranquility." There is a distillation in the art of creating a poem. For one single effort, much is cast to the side. A lot of young writers, and even those of us who write from the larger lot of words down to the finer choices (as compared to those who craft word by word, carefully over time, with full consciousness--whew, I don't know how they do it!), we have a lot of work to do to winnow and revise.

A poem is never the full story. The poem about the last moments in the hospital with my sister, as we sat with my mother as she was dying, does not describe the full arc of my relationship with my mother--hardly at all.

An acquaintance assumed that the relationship with my mother was beautiful and nurturing. At the moment of her death, there was beauty and even nurturing, in an odd spiritual way. But, my relationship with my mother was complicated, with me more often in the nurturing role.

Mary Webb, a wonderful writing teacher and novelist in Berkeley, California, taught students to discuss the work of others by focusing on the poem itself, or the story, and not the author. We were instucted to talk about how "the narrator seems to be motivated by . . . " or "the speaker in the poem is very . . ." rather than assume the narrator, speaker, voice behind the poem was the person sitting before us in the room.

A writer, even one so subjective and exposed as many poets can be, needs creative distance. The work has to be set aside from personality. In truth, long after the creator passes away, the work may still exist in tangible form, revealing its small truths or exposing the big lies. But it is never the life of the writer herself, never the forest, only a small, struggling and uniquely beautiful pine.

Putting Out

Tonight's an occasion for one of the few readings I do in a year. As the wife of a stage actor, I should have learned how to overcome stage-fright by this point, but I have not. The only way I can cope with the anxiety of reading my poems in front of an audience, even one filled with good friends, is to create a persona who is the performer. Let's call her Zoom Majestic. She is my Bette Midler role model, big, busty, boomy, unafraid of belting out a song or strutting her poet's swaggle. With Zoom to front for me, I can put these poems out there.

The poems I'm reading are all about work, my jobs in the past, jobs I've observed others doing, the nature of work itself. They are from a manuscript I'm completing called "Workers' Compensation: Poems of Labor and the Working Life," nothing fancy about that. It's Labor Day, appropriately enough.

I do this reading in honor of my mother, Deborah Elizabeth Shannon Dresser, who was sole-supporter of my family from the time I was about 12 years old. Mom worked night and day, a day-job in the insurance industry where she eventually rose to become a part-owner of the business but never profited from it they way her male colleagues did, and a nighttime career of doing freelance accounting and income tax work. My most familiar childhood memory of my mother was watching her back as she sat in a secretary chair at an old wooden desk, sharpening her stash of #2 Ticonderoga pencils and leaning over large black ledgers into the wee hours. She did it to keep the wolf from the door--the wolf who could huff and puff and blow our house down with little impunity. The wolf had many names: taxes, cost-of-living, utility bills, back-to-school clothing, groceries, a car that could get her to and from work. But, mostly the wolf was poverty panting and shaking his ratty fur as he circled continually in our front yard. Here's a poem I wrote just as my mother passed away.

FEATHERS
for my sister, Karyn
One by one we remove white feathers.
With each our mother’s head softens,
lowering to the floor of her pillow,
releasing its burden. We make separate
stacks--my sister and --piling them up
from the sand floor of an old cottage.
Two small ladders of feathers
drawn from a snowy goose rising
as the pillow flattens into the quiet
where my mother rests her head,
a pebble of gold that sinks
to the worn tucked sheet.

When she releases her last breath,
another feather swims from her round mouth.
The feathers my sister and I carefully placed
scatter to the corners of the early-morning room,
trace their contours across the walls,
seep as if liquid light through closed window blinds,
finally nudging the hospital door open--
that heavy green hospital door
we will never open again.
-- Jannie M. Dresser 6/18/09

170 to 99

Manuscript pages reduced by that many in two winnowings. Poetry writing is so different than the process of book creation where critical judgment dominates the impulsive moods of the madwoman. In the writing of a poem, I experience complete and almost aggressive freedom. I can go anywhere with my imagination, I can juxtapose any image, I can even make up words.

The crafting/editorial process is putting the reins on the horse and making choices about which trail the poem will take. Then, the final part. Selecting those that make the cut into a "product," a book. I am far less experienced here, and less enamoured of the aspect that has to do with rejection. But, I admire the well-done poetry book: The Blue Iris by Louise Gluck, The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche, Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan, The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, Ariel by Sylvia Plath,the books of Raymond Carver.

This is a process I must learn to love, I suppose, if I want to leave my poems in some viable form. A book is a container and the best books are containers with integrity, they hold together well, everything has its place. In such a way, a book is like a poem: holding just the right words in just the right order. Be brave, lassie, be brave!

The Show Offs

I have given myself the month of July to complete my poetry manuscript, "Workers' Compensation," which mostly means I need to delete about 70 poems that do not hold up as well as the rest. I am attached to all my children, loving the ones who are not as successful as much as I love the ones who come out so bright, shiny and clear that I almost can not believe myself their creator.

Is this how a parent feels? Especially when the reality of a child's life is not as exceptional as the imagination had for so long held it to be? I think about this in regards to my own life and whether or not I have been a disappointment to my own mother (my father has been gone for so long and was, himself, a shadow of what he could have been that the question of my disappointing him is really quite moot). My mother, a businesswoman who broke her own small glass-ceiling in a mail-dominated profession, must be mystified by the direction of my own life: I am more and more embracing myself as an artist, a poet, and doing so much unpaid labor on behalf of my art. The fact that I do not pursue commercial or material success must baffle some. My life instead has almost always been on a spiritual, emotional, thereapeutic track.

My poems are my wee ones. Some are well-formed and near perfect. So many are flawed and requiring further editing, but I care for them all and remember the moment in which each of them arrived on my page, whether in a workshop setting or sitting alone on a mountainside.

To complete the book, then, is a challenge, because I have to leave so many of these children out of the manuscript. Perhaps they will never be worthy of publication, and I must accept that each is what it is: an expression, a sallying forth that never quite made its destination. Others will be my show-offs, the ones who stand by the side of the pool about to dive into the clear blue as they shout "look at me look at me." And those children, as acrobatic and ready as they are do not make me love them any more. So there is a little sorry in giving them pride of place, but do it I must because I cannot expect others to love them nearly as well.

Death Poems Book

This week I am presenting my "Death Poems Book" of illustrated poetry to a group concerned with comforting the dying. It's an exciting chance to share my love of both poetry and drawing/painting. These are poetry illuminations I began a number of years ago when I realized that poetry was too important to me that I didn't want to leave it too much to chance when I was in my deathbed, that I had certain wonderful poems I've returned to again and again in my life and wanted those to be read to me as I succumb to the dying of the light.

(Can't) Beat a Retreat!

It's called "The Haven," a medium-size room at the Quaker Retreat Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I and my friend took ourselves for a (very) short retreat, to write and do art. What we gained, a break from time itself, a stepping away from worries and woes. I wrote a good 12 pages and did some drawing; my friend put in some good time toward her manuscript about death and dying. We remembered why we are so grateful to be alive.

Anne Sexton was indeed a pretty poet but very wise under all that beauty

Cut, Cut, Expand, Expand

Anne Sexton said that the way she wrote a poem was to "cut, cut, expand, expand" and I completely understand this. I tend to over-write, dumping out whatever comes into my head as I enter the poemtrance. Then I must edit to see what possible shape is buried under all that raw material. Next, I have to decipher and usually narrow down what I want the poem to say: one of the biggest problems poets have is trying to say too much in one small lyric poem (that's why the ancients used the epic form, something we moderns have barely enough patience for). Knowing what it is I'm trying, or wanting to say, is the most difficult part of the poetry-writing process for me. Each word stands in front of a door full of historic, cultural, regional meanings; there are so many choices, yet only the one right choice for any particular poem.

Colleagues and Accomplices

Allow me to introduce you to my dear friend, who has become my writing colleague and my spiritual accomplice. We all need someone like this in our lives, more so as we age, I think, although it was far easier to sustain close friendships when I was in my twenties. We meet weekly or every other week, and have recently started using our 2 hours together to articulate what it is we are trying to accomplish with our writing and our creative lives. Then we report on what we will do in the next week. Beyond this, we talk and go to places that feed our souls; since she works with the dying and I work with whomever I can get to pay me, we have much to share about making every day a significant journey. I am grateful for this babushka buddy, and fortunate to have many friends who are so imaginative, funny, and so piercingly brilliant I can hardly stand it!

Rainy Days on Sundays

We're experiencing a squall of winter storms, thank Goodness, as the Gubernator has just called for emergency draught conditions which means we'll all be putting bricks in our toiddies and capturing dirty bath water for the spring bulbs. But for poets and artists, it means it's legit to be indoors and be creative to heart's content. I'm working on a new series of Artist Trading Cards featuring Pretty Poets in response to rudeness experienced trying to be a Poetry Examiner for the SF Examiner (they want knowledge and computer/internet savvy to boot and if you reveal any ignorance, expect the snot-nosed kid at the other end to let you know it). Anyway, it's a gentler and more rewarding thing to do art and let the whole "content provider" world go suck its big toe. Artists and Writers beware: the move to everything online means they want your goods, don't want to pay for it, and will expect that you do all the labor of producing their publications, including HTML coding, picture taking and uploading, and and and . . . Another way the corporate world profits off our backs.

French Fried: Giving Arthur Rimbaud A Second Dip

I first tried to read French symbolist/surrealist poet Arthur Rimbaud in my early 20s when I was closer in age to the age he wrote "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," "Illuminations," and other poems, and at that time I struggled to comprehend Rimbaud's verse (read in English translations).

Older and more patient with dislocation, dissociation, disintegration, and dissatisfaction with one's society, I appreciate Rimbaud more now.

Just finished "A Season in Hell," full of anguish and obvious youthful rebellion against a very constricted life. His mother sounds like a bat out of hell; he was obviously haunted by his Catholicism and its intolerance of the dark side which poets often need to confront (devils, witches, sin): the boy was ready to blow rural France. He quit writing early in his career, lived an adventurous life running guns and doing other bad things in Africa, and having mad affairs. Yet, the poet's life must become superfluous to the poems themselves, and "A Season in Hell" is worth reading for its raw energetic "yawp," especially if you need a vessel to contain your own dissatisfactions and disappointments. Here is poet as exorcist.

Friday's for Fish

Sitting here with poet Judy, trying to share my excitement about doing a blog and new website. All too much to remember and running into glitches, but shan't be turned away! Thankfully, I share Celtic enthusiasm with fellow bard and together we will conquer the mad web world. Someday, I may even have something interesting to post.

Welcome

If you have arrived here, greetings fair traveler. My world is one comprised of equal parts imagination and reality. Literature, history, theater, music and art, and those who create the vital moments and work in our world are my enjoyment. I hope to share my enthusiasms and get turned on to some of your own. I invite visitors near and far to exchange with me. A community of philosophes and aesthetes grounding in the day to day.