Reflections on National Poetry Month

April is  National Poetry Month and I am delighted how much has been going on in our community to honor poets. On Saturday, I went to a reading by Mary McGinnis, a Sante Fe poet who has been blind since birth. She read some new poems and also from her collection, Listening For Cactus. Her poetry was absolutely beautiful and it was impressive how well her other senses, such as hearing and smell have been so keenly developed. She was a true inspiration, and even those listeners who have never written poetry, might have been motivated to do so. Tomorrow night I am a featured speaker at a Ventura’s Writer’s Club. I will be discussing how you don’t have to be a “poet” to write poetry. I always encourage people to generate poetry originating from their personal experiences. The strongest poems have an interplay with the inner and outer self. When writing narrative poetry (a poem that tells a story about a personal experience), a good way to bring people into your poem is to find a universal link to lure them in.

Why don’t you try writing a narrative poem about an experience you’ve recently had and let the rhythm of the experience help determine both your line breaks and your ending. Good luck!

Journaling Your Heart

I am reading a wonderful book written by a woman I met at AWP. It’s called, Foolsgold by Susan G. Wooldgridge, who also wrote another masterpiece called, Poemcrazy.

She came to my book signing because she was drawn to the title of my poetry book, Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You. She told me she had a letter from Anais and she even quoted it in her recent book. After talking for about half an hour we revealed a deep connection through our mutual friend Anaïs.

 

In the first chapter of her book, Susan mentions how most of her life she ignored her body’s impulses as if they were bothersome, like her physical heart didn’t exist. She began watching for heart shapes and noticed how her heart felt, reacted and how they live in her body and ultimately might have prepared her for her father’s death.[ She encourages her readers to speak to their hearts and shares how scientists say there are brain cells in the heart. She suggests writing a letter beginning with, “Dear Heart,” to see where it leads you. Taking it one step further, she also suggests allowing the heart to write back and offer answers. Just paying attention to your heart, she says, opens it up and allows you to be creative in healing ways.

 

I am now hooked on her way of thinking and can’t wait to read the rest of the book and maybe even incorporate her writing exercises in my classes.

Journaling About Inspiring Moments

 Whenever a writer moves on, I believe we should take a moment to reflect on their work and I have made this my own particular practice. Even if you were not a great admirer of their work, I believe it is important to stop and examine not only their contributions to the literary world, but also what drove them to the page in the first place.

In yesterdays’ newspaper, I learned that the confessional poet, W.D. Snodgrass had died of old age. I had not read a lot of his work, but with the click of my Google finger it was easy to read some of his most popular poems. Even though Snodgrass wrote more than 30 books, the book of poetry which brought him his Pulitzer Prize in 1960 was called Heart’s Needle. This particular book grew from his apparent heartbreak of losing custody of his daughter in a very bitter divorce.

Even though many have credited Snodgrass as the founding member of confessional poetry, he disliked the term, believing it had too many religious connotations and he was not religious. I tend to agree, although the term for me denotes a certain amount of intimacy and an invitation for the reader to enter into the poet’s life.

Most authors are compelled to the page because of an inciting incident, something that may have happened early in their lives. I have always been fascinated by studying these inciting incidents amongst my peers. For me, personally, the incident which drove me to the journal and a lifetime of writing was the suicide of my grandmother.

Reading about Snodgrass’ life inspired me to journal about inciting incidents. What about you Are you able to identify what has drawn you to the written word? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

My Journaling Safari

I am slowly getting over jetlag, as well as sifting through 14 days of unread email. This was the longest I’ve ever gone without access to a computer or the internet. We were truly in the middle of nowhere.

Our first touchdown was Johannesburg and my daughter’s luggage got lost which meant we had to spend two days there awaiting it’s arrival. It turned out to be a blessing since the rest of the trip was in the jungle. We had a chance to see the 2010 Olympic site and visit the Apartheid Museum. Then it was on to small plane rides to Namibia, Botswanna and Zimbabwe. It was other-worldly and impossible to put into a few words.

All I can say is that when you are in the wild like we were and taking game rides each day, your senses are very heightened. We had many amazing sightings– lions, cheetahs, warhogs, baboons, red lechwe, onyx, giraffes, elephants, zebras, cape buffalo, hippopotamus, monkeys, hyenas and an amazing selections of exotic birds were all within arms reach.

I journaled my way through Africa and hope to write a book one day, but I haven’t decided whether it should be a creative non-fiction work or a book of poems. (any recommendations welcome!) My daughter, Rachel is a photographer so we have some fabulous photos, many from the vantage point of jeeps and hot air balloons.

Here is one of the poems gleaned from my journal: 

Bush Solace

When left alone in an African jungle

what snippets of our lives

are captured in the treasure boxes

of our memories?

 

What artifacts

call us to our pasts?

What carries

the comforts of home

and the yearnings of tomorrow?

 

In this darkness

offered by the jungle

on its platter of sounds

where lions growl,

hyenas howl and

vultures wait until its over

 

Home is different to everyone.

 

 

 

 

Journals and Emergency Evacuations

I live in Southern California and last week with only moments warning, we were told we had to evacuate due to fast-moving fires which were within a mile of our house. Having moved to California from Florida four years ago, I understood danger. We had dodged three major hurricanes and the final one flung us across the coast. Maybe it’s the continuous beautiful weather here which makes me feel safe or maybe it’s my perpetual state of denial, but I never thought I would find myself again at the edge of another natural disaster.

Needless to say I wasn’t prepared. My papers were not in order and my manuscripts were scattered on my desk and vital papers filed appropriately in my filing cabinet, but not together. Thank goodness, my husband is quite organized and he had the passports and insurance papers all in one file.

My packing was more sentimentally-motivated. I quickly thought of what was not replaceable. I grabbed my portable laptop. It held all correspondences, manuscripts and contacts. Next, I thought of all the family photos and evidence of raising three children. I piled the albums into a large plastic box. Then I thought of my journal collection spanning more than 40 years and wondered if they should take up valuable trunk space. Surely they were not replaceable, but I or anyone else would care if they got burned? I left them behind.

Now after returning home, I wonder if I made the right decision to leave all my journal musings behind.

Do any of you have any thoughts on this? What would you have packed if you were just given moments to get out of your house?

 

 

 

What Books Nourish You?

Over the years, my attitude has changed. I used to not be a fan of rereading books, proclaiming that there are simply too many books to read.

But now as a seasoned writer and one who studies the works of my favorite authors, I’ve changed my view on this. I believe it’s important for writers to have books near them which provide nourishment and inspiration.

Anaïs Nin believed that the books which nourish us are not books which tell us how things are, but rather books which show us how to change things in our lives. Nourishing books give us a feeling of being pushed into life. They are books which make us smile and stand proud. They are books we don’t want to sell to the used books stores each time we relocate. They are books which travel with us from residence to residence or from town to town.

For me sometimes the most nourishing book is poetry and sometimes it’s fiction and other times it’s memoir. As a teenager, the most nourishing book for me was Salinger’s book, Catcher in The Rye. As a budding writer, I was fascinated by his honesty and candor and wondered how one could write in a way that was easy for everyone to understand. I also loved the writings of the prophet Khalil Gibran and the poetry of Rod McKuen. I admired their simplicity.

These days, the books which follow me from residence to residence are the journals of Anaïs Nin, the novels of Balzac, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s One, Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. On those days when my attention span is shorter, I might gravitate to my favorite quotation books for the fuel for my creations, and the poetry of Billy Collins is always my favorite, no matter my mood. 

What books nourish you?