About Art

Between sessions of rond de jambe and grand jêté,
five or six girls escape into the plaza. One knows
where a tiny nest holds pigeon eggs. They gather 

on the furthest side of the stone fountain 
that spirals in the center of Bellas Artes. . .
waterless yet a refreshing sight in art school.

Their fearless leader, the taller girl in pink tutu
(the rest wear black leotards, white tights)
dips a slender hand into the dark hedge:

giggles turn to solemnity as they circle
a cup of leaves, observing the fading light, then
drop to the nest below resting on the ground.

Like tendons beneath torn flesh or a bleeding
row of toes learning pointe, they seem to pull
together, shoulder to shoulder and peer.

Their confused little faces transform, disturbed,
eyes wide; all the pale brown skin revealed
where headbands secure dark slippery hair.

Meanwhile, the small alabaster lamb 
atop the fountain, remains speechless: 
it, too, knows sacrifice and the one cracked egg 
that spills a muddied lifeless wingless dove.

©Poem by Jannie M. Dresser,
Berkeley, California
May 2008

A Writing Crime

Never before have I been so aware of the demand for writers: websites seek "content creators," companies want faux bloggers to tout their products and services, online directories seek low-paid scouts to fact-check, write reports and take photos of businesses to make their sites popular (to benefit their advertisers no doubt). And, yes, I've fallen into the trap to some extent, glad that anyone wants to publish my work.

For a year, I've written a regular column on the SF Bay Area poetry scene for Examiner.com, one of those "reportorial" sites that substitute for the few remaining newspapers. Heh, at least they are interested in poetry (our local newspaper rarely prints anything about one of the richest, most active poetry scenes in the country). In 18 months, I've posted almost 90 articles and earned a whopping $90 dollars, roughly a dollar a column.

To prepare each article, I've done background research, read some of the author's work, interviewed my subject(s), gone over the draft with my subject to clear up any errors, and finalized the article. I've taken photographs to post along with it, and that usually involves some "massaging" of the image.

Because I'm given free reign to write about poetry and because I've developed a small readership I feel confident to continue although I have to overlook the fact that I'm essentially doing this work for free.

Today, I had to throw in the towel on a new gig that attracted me with its humungous offer to pay me $12.50 for each listing I wrote about local businesses. After calculating my driving time, the cost of fuel, the photography and sizing of images (a minimum of 5 pictures were required), the time to write the report and post everything, I realized I would hardly earn anything, particularly since the company had the right to refuse any particular listing.

I'm glad for young or unpublished writers that there are so many opportunities to get bylines online, or to be an unpaid intern for the few publishing companies still scrounging to make it through this recession. For myself, I'd almost prefer physical labor at a higher hourly wage than be exploited for my experience and intellectual abilities by industries that do not comprehend the real work involved in writing.

Once upon a time, poets and writers could make something of a living publishing their journalism, including Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and others. If they came back today, they'd be seeing that old come-on: "writers we need you, we want you, we'll give you a byline . . . just don't expect any payment."

I'll stick with my gigs that allow me to engage in the world of poetry, but I'm on the watch for scams that want to use my abilities as a writer to sell their websites to advertisers. I'd rather bag groceries or sell flowers (any jobs out there?). There are just some things your soul and sense of dignity won't let you do.

Budging Out of the Box

The hot pink bubble-bouffant in black tiered lace is really a man selling vintage clothing. The curvy lady in loin-cloth-with-scabbard has places to go. Then there are those dressed monochrome; the orange is particularly eye-catching. It’s the hawker’s fair at Bay Con, the once-a-year Silicon Valley science-fiction festival over Memorial Day weekend. I’m an unlikely participant. I got in the door by helping my friend Ed who has written and published his novel after years of writing and many drafts. So I sit at a dealer’s table and watch the parade, and my optimism about our humanity is restored. This is living poetry.

The booksellers are here too. Peter Beagle is to my right; his books The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place are cult classics. Tee-shirt vendors, chain-mail makers, bolt and leather clothtiers. Men in black with silver ponytails.

“I used to work at Stanford for many years,” someone mentions, walking by. Others work at nearby animation studios or in the virtual world of dot.coms. More than a few are simply secretaries and sales clerks, and it is likely many others are in the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed. Quite a few of the women have hairy legs and arm-pits under their long weighty gowns and corseted bodices; the men tend toward pot bellies and pale complexions. In fact, it would seem zaftig in women and men is more of the aesthetic, though one mustn’t forget the Lara Croft athleticism popular in contemporary culture. But there are more than a few people in wheelchairs scooting along with guidedogs and dexterous turns around booths, and men with canes, the long, knotty mythical ones carved of yew or oak.

It’s been such a down week. I have my personal plights which seem insignificant compared to the millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of New Mexico, poisoning sea life and heading toward shoreline. There’s some asshole head of a “Return the American Family to the Way it Ways” coalition claiming that Hitler was homosexual and used homosexuals to pull off most of his atrocities (what is he drinking?). 

The stock market hit its lowest since 1940 today, or so I was told. Yes, there are reasons to be depressed. But, here at a festival of geeks and wizards, people who want to dress in costumes--whether meticulously handcrafted or quickly assembled from objects long ago lost on the closet floor--, and others who are here just to partay down, there’s an unexpected sweetness born of being part of a strange galactic alliance of book lovers and fantasy afficionados. My weeklong depression is lifting as I watch imagination restored to humanity.

Going Public

I'm feeling squirrelly about two poetry readings I'm scheduled to do this year, one in early May, the other (thankfully) not until the fall. The reason I do it is that I feel the pressure to be a "real" poet sometimes, which means to make myself visible to others, because most of the time, I am just a writing poet and I do it, frankly, for my own enjoyment and to get the stuff out of me that I feel I must express.

When I do a reading, it sometimes seems I've put a notch on the old briar-wood, left a dash of yellow in the snow. There is something unseemly about it; I am not a natural-born performer. And, I am well aware that the poems that are sometimes the ones I love the best are not the ones that others necessarily love or relate to.

I was thinking that Emily Dickinson may have had the right notion about it all, living as hermetically as she possibly could, just reaching out to get some feedback from Mr. Wentworth Higginson. I do like having a writing group and value my fellow poets' opinions, sometimes. But all the fuss and bother that goes into getting published, or "performing" seems very narcissistic to me. (And, bloggin' ain't so, honey? Well, the truth is I doubt many read my blogs, and could actually care less.)

I love the writing and making of things--poems and art and songs--and I do like exploring what other creative types are making out there on the planet. It's all about the "making," which is what a poet is, a maker, not a performer, not a business-woman, not a legislator (sorry Shelley), and certainly not a commercial writer.

Poets are the forgotten and the constantly noting, the sociologists of words.

We are the ones taking in what is said and thinking to ourselves, "well, that's an odd way to look at it," or "that's a curious expression" about even the most cliched statements. We are always learning our language: "elbow grease," "flash in the pan," "chicken-wing arms," "ducks on the pond" (as in baseball), "revenue stream," "roll it out," "down-size," "putting on the breaks," "heart on a sleeve." You get my drift.

But I'll buck up and go do my reading and enjoy myself for the few minutes I'll have being "on," then I'll come home and feel nauseated and drained and it will take a week of mindless crime-shows and nights of making artist-trading cards to get myself back to normal. At least I will feel that I have gone out and explained myself a wee bit to the world.

Historicity

It’s somewhat a legacy of the Beats and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s -- both youth-worshipping cultures -- that reverence for forbears and respect for history were undermined in favor of the code of “living in the moment,” defying authority, and writing spontaneously from the hip.

To some extent, we are still in that zeitgeist. While youth are generally preoccupied with the present and the future, ideas about legacy and tradition are often the obsession of older folks. Perhaps that is why, as I age, I am more and more drawn to poets and works of poetry that examine earlier historical periods.

One of the best books I’ve recently read is Berkeley poet JIM POWELL’S Substrate; in it, he offers a fascinating group of poems written in the voices of (mostly) 19th-century explorers and chroniclers, witnesses to the settlement of the western United States and Pacific coast to Alaska. These persona poems sent me frequently to Google to cull background; aside from being thought-provoking, the poems are like chewy nougat, rich and fun to read.

I’m fascinated by what ALETA GEORGE of Suisun City and SUSAN PARKER of Benicia are doing, excavating the writings of pioneer women of the West. George is writing a biography of Ina Coolbrith (pictured above), California’s first poet laureate, while Parker is ranging old bookstores in search of forgotten poems by 19th- century women poets. I‘m looking forward to reading the collection by early-California poet NORA MAY FRENCH, which MARVIN R. HIEMSTRA brought to my attention in this issue of BAPSR. And I just finished a book of poems written in the voice of George Shannon, the youngest of the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery who tracked across two-thirds of the nascent United States in 1803-1805 to find a water passage to the Pacific. Shannon was written by a Florida poet and professor, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, but the character he brings to life is my 5th great-grandfather who initiated a migration that eventually brought my mother’s family to California.

Many of us avoid “historical” books because we fear we lack sufficient knowledge to grasp allusions and references. For that reason, I had avoided John Milton‘s “Paradise Lost” most of my life until recently; with a group of fearless friends, we tackled reading the English epic out loud. What an amazing work of poetry it is; Milton is a poet’s poet! Our efforts have been rewarded with trance-inducing moments steeped in the glorious beauty of Milton‘s imagination and word textures, and is images and poetic rhythms. 

Many of us -- young and old--long to find ourselves in history’s mirror; poets hold up the most polished and emotionally truthful mirrors to help us identify who we are: as a people, as speakers of a particular language with all of its history, and as modern-day men and women struggling through the challenges of daily life.

Poets have a responsibility to re-view what we are conventionally taught.

The bias toward subjectivity and personal history in  much modern poetry often lacks larger historical context. It sometimes leaves me feeling a bit claustrophobic. I appreciate writers who reach for a bigger picture even when it means research and examination of our own ancestors and their roles in our more intimate histories. Whether or not we concern ourselves with legacy and tradition, we are still standing on the shoulders of those who came before: we all write out of traditions. Unacknowledged, we repeat timeworn clichés and unimaginative figurative tropes. Acknowledged and embraced, we can break-forward into the past, with the refreshing insights, the kind for which the greatest poets are known.                 

Shannon by Florida poet Campbell McGrath (Harper Collins Publishers, New York: 2009) tells the story of George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery (1803-1805). Shannon had a habit of getting lost (well, he was a scout . . .) and nearly starved to death during a two-week separation from the corps. McGrath imagines what he might have been experiencing, thinking and feeling during this gap of time, including a possible mental dissociation that would have been the natural result of hunger, isolation, and fear.

Organizing Poetry, Like Herding House Finches

If there were one certain method for keeping track of the poems I write, I would be following it by now, but after 40 years of writing poems, I still do it the stupid way: first, I write poems in my journal; eventually, sometimes as long as three or four years later, I type them into the computer and put them in a Chronological File; then, when I get around to it, I re-organize the poems into thematic folders on the computer and tackle revision. By then, of course, I've written many more new poems, and my new babies often interest me more.

My lack of enthusiasm for the pursuit of publication has been to my detriment as regards "earning" a reputation as a respectable poet or building up publications that could lead to teaching assignments or whatever other few rewards there are for doing this work. We don't live in a culture that places value on poetry--and some poets go so far as to complain that just too many people are writing and publishing poetry, a problem that seems so minuscule compared to the problem that poetry just doesn't count for much, whether written by the greatly accomplished or the little-known.

I've never had a problem writing poems, except during one fallow period following the death of a dear friend when I couldn't find the words to express my grief--it was the first meaningful death I had known up close and personal. But, I'm a failure at "getting my work out there." I know real "go-getters" in the poetry scene, people who have only been writing a few years who are quite pro-active about publishing, and have a tolerance for sending out pieces and getting rejections, and then sending them out again, that I truly envy. It's just not what I'm good at.

I'm trying to change this, and so the first task is getting the damn things into some kind of workable order, selecting a few to send out, and then matching them to publications and contests where they stand a bit of a chance of being published. Why bother, I sometimes wonder, when I'd much rather focus on the act of expression that gives me so much pleasure and meaning in the writing of new work. Why bother attempting to publish?

Moving On

Move date is set and movers hired: November 2. What we leave behind: a lot of recycled papers, superfluous kitchenwares, battered and abused electronics. What we take: our books, our cats, our small comforts.

It's now or when I'm much older that I must dispense with so much of life's little extras, and, my, how they compound! When my mother passed away in July, we were relieved of having to dispose of all her life's material since she had done most of it when she had her last move into my brother and sister-in-law's home. We had very little to dispose of or to find new owners for. This has become my model. Each move should be a paring down.

What's left: what's important: books, cats, plants, cleaning supplies, clothing, music CDs, and only the minimum of the files and papers I have lugged for years from place to place, thinking that certain parts of my life would be revisited: teaching, business plans, financial plans, plans, plans. Dealing with them now means confronting the plans I won't fulfill, that I have had to abandon, or want to let go of. This is not easy. Some of the things I am leaving or throwing away represent missed opportunities, failures, incomplete forms, calls I couldn't make; they represent years of depression when I didn't know that's what it was but thought I was simply lazy or a failure.

To release so much now feels like a true liberation. The truth is I am going forward and letting the past take care of itself. It will revisit me, of that I am sure, in my dreams and poems.
Photos: two views, from the window of one house to the window of the new one.

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.