Notes on the OPA Fall 2014 Weekend Retreat at Malabar, SEPT 13-14, 2014

SOME IDEAS from a Poetry Workshop on Place

By Diane Kendig

When possible, I like to plan workshops that fit the moment, so while I have various presentations in sound, meaning, structure, received forms and types, I like to create challenges that fit the particular moment or the place I am presenting. So years ago, when the National Poetry Society asked me to lead a workshop at their national convention, and fresh from the long, difficult death of my sister, I created a workshop on how form helps us to hold our grief, the way, Adrienne Rich first noted, a potholder enables us to hold hot stuff. For the Malabar workshop, I wanted to use the idea and fact of place, an idea that was so central to Bromfield's writing-- Malabar India, where he once lived and set a novel in that became a movie; Paris where he first farmed; New York, where he had studied at Columbia; and too and most of all, Malabar Farm,



I began thinking about the workshop by looking for types of poems about place and found four types, close at hand in my own book and then among favorite poems. While not an exhaustive nor determinative list of categories, it seemed to me that poems used the place in at least four ways.


First, as significant description, as in Daniel Thompson's "Hiroshima Day in Cleveland 1995," or my "Ganaoque."

 
Second, the place name itself is significant in the poem, or the point of the poem, as in Adrienne Rich's "Calle Vision," or my "Ohio Rag" or "Moving into Minimum."

Third, the place in the poem is the setting, as in Seamus Heaney's series, "Clearances," on the death of his mother, and particularly the seventh of these quatorzains, where he places such an emphasis on the place without describing it except in stunning metaphor. In this category, I placed Sylvia Plath's "Suicide Off Egg Rock" and my poem "Mandela Appears in Montreal."

And the fourth included poems that juxtapose places. Here I suggested James Wright's "To a Cicada" (Italy and Ohio) and my "Unearthing a Path" (Findlay and Oberlin--both Ohio).


Looking now at my categories, they seem to overlap, especially the first and the third, but I think that difference that I was going for is (in the first) poems that contained a lot of description of the place and (in the third) poems that did not, that instead of description were setting for a scene. The notion isn't so fuzzy as my choice of examples, which I will be revising. And the types weren't so important as getting lots of ideas into my participants' heads.

The first day, I asked the poets to focus on ONE place, using ONE of the first three techniques. The second day, I asked them to use the fourth type, by juxtaposing their first draft place with a second or by creating a new poem that juxtaposed two places.

I also worked up a multi-level lesson on nesting rhyme, which I have been peddling for years although no one ever seemed much interested in picking up on. Based on an exercise by Susan Mitchell in Twitchell and Behn's The Practice of Poetry, I have both explored and expanded her suggestion to write 10 poems in the form. Cati Porter, that marvelous editor (poet, mother, organizer extraordinaire) published my explanation and two of them poems in her online journal Poemeleon.


In addition, before ever beginning, I brainstormed a list of phrases about places, and I looked up lots of quotes on place. Here's my list. Please add your own in Comments.



A FEW QUOTES/SAYINGS/PHRASES ON PLACE

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
            ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Whether we like it or not, we all come from someplace. And at some point in our lives, we have to make peace with that place.”
            ― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard

“Even places you know well can take on a touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.”
            ― Kate Milford, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader

“You can't love a city if you have no memories buried there.”
            ― Marina Tavares Dias

“One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.”
            ― Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

--Jane Austen (1775-1817)

“Mesta su ljudi.”  (“The places are people.”)  Croatian or Portuguese)
            ― Bernardo Carvalho, Mongólia

“Words transmit the human essence of things… and we need only to hear the word to imagine the kind of place which was given this name.”

            --Unamuno

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 1845
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

            --Shakespeare, Midsummers night Dream V: 1

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.

            --Abraham Lincoln, Farewell address, Springfield, IL

The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places, yea, I have a goodly heritage.

--Psalms 16:6

“You‘ll not find another place, you’ll not find another sea.

This city is going to follow you.”

            --Cafavy

In some cases, the name itself carries layers of history and imagery more apt than any miage the writer could add….Names themselves resonate with the history of the place.

            --Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

***And two quotes which are the epigraphs of my book, The Places We Find Ourselves:

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep….

                                    --Seamus Heaney, from #7 of “Clearances” in The Haw Lantern

The place of the poem is the place of our homelessness, the place of our groundlessness.”

                                    --Heather McHugh, in Broken English: Poetry and Partiality

In short

About place

Going places (and then, its opposite, going nowhere)

Oh the places you’ll go

In place

Know the place

Know your place

Move up (down) a place

No place for…

Place at the table

Place in history

Place in line

Place it/ Can’t place it

Place settings

Placed (located)

Placed (first, second….last)

Placemat

Placement

Place name

Places, everyone

The places we find ourselves

This is (must be) the place

 

WOMPO - What It Is

My next blog will be a report on two get-togethers by members of Wompo, a virtual group of writers I have grown to know and love. The purpose of that blog is  to document the events for the people who were there, but before I go there, here is my personal take on the group.

WOMPO is short for WOMEN'S POETRY LISTSERV, a virtual group that has been around since 1997 and which I joined in 2003, at the invitation of Claire Keyes. For the previous two years, I had been marching, laughing, and crying alongside my sister, whom I accompanied until her death by Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 2002. To say she marched bravely does not begin to describe that journey. Meanwhile I was hanging on to my tenured job in Ohio and supposedly looking for a job in the Boston area, where I finally moved without a job to be with my husband Paul. So I had been what my writer friend Ann Harleman, who moved coast to coast, once called being "the erstwhile wife." Only by then, I was just "the wife," which I had never been identified as before. Never mind I had started a creative writing program at the college I had been at 18 years, that I had run a writers workshop in a medium security prison, gave papers, published three books, advised. The local writers wouldn't even let me into the visiting writers prison program. (They finally did, in 2011, as I was leaving. Whatever you have heard of New Englanders being slow to warm, drop the temperature by 32 degrees, and you have it.)

But every morning, I went to my computer, tuned into the Wompo list serve, and there, waiting was a stack of messages from people all over the world (mostly U.S., but individuals in France, New Zealand, and Iran chime in), all discussing women's poetry-- current, historical, their own, famous, infamous. There were little tiffs and people got huffy and left and came back, but for a year or so, they were my sole poetry community.

A few years later, the group put together a book of WOMPO poems, Letters to the World, totally produced by three editors (and a stable of copyeditors and helpers from the group) and published by Red Hen Press. In the course of a book launch at AWP and promoting the book with readings, many of us who had only met virtually got to meet F2F, as we say, and much as I liked the virtual community, I loved the faces, gestures, the very bodies of the people.

Then in 2010 I came "Home Again" to Ohio, but remained grateful and loyal to Wompo and continue to check in there every morning, even though Wompo is not quite as small and intimate as it once was and some of its old-timers whom I love have left.

So this summer, when I was back  in Massachusetts for a month, I thought it would be great to see some of those faces and bodies again, especially since one of them, Zara Raab, from California, was in the state for the season. I incited two meetings of the group, whose doings I record here for me, for them, for any of you interested in Women's Poetry and poets, whom all of these people are.

If you are interested in the group, check out the link I opened with or their archives, which are here and look for them on Facebook, where you can photos of the two events I now will relate, dear reader.

WOMP! Two great days with Wompos

DAY ONE: Julia Lisella Takes in Wompos*

The intrepid Julia Lisella invited the group of eight to descend on her house on Wednesday, July 9th, for a roundtable of eating and updating on our lives in and out of poetry. I forgot to take notes and later asked everyone to send me the title of what they read, what they were doing and I thought I was joking when I also asked them to report on what they brought for the potluck. However, everyone reported on what they brought to eat, even if she could not recall what she read, which is a reason I love these women so. Here is what they are up to:

RUTH FOLEY

...read a poem titled "Yankee Swop," which did conjure up the Yankee Swop lists in the old Yankee magazine, and then took us beyond, and she handed out copies of her beautiful chapbook, Dear Turquoise (Dancing Girl 2013). She was nearly deliriously happy preparing to go to a poetry conference she co-coordinates in Connecticut. She is back now and in poetry recovery, posting her entertaining pretend quizzes on Facebook.

 
ELLEN GOLDSTEIN
world's greatest copy editor (of Letters to the World  and much more) is also the tersest of the group. She read a poem titled "Runaway," baked a lemon chess pie, and brought a mascot for the group, her sort of bichon-y, poodle-ish dog, Hiro.

JOYCE HEON
...claimed not to remember what she read, but I did since it sparked such a lively conversation among us about recalling our mothers in their younger, or racier days, though her poem was actually on a photo of her mother titled, "And then no longer enjoying herself." The original poem in French as a lai, but she read us an English version. As we commented on her poem and our own mothers, she recalled hearing her mother sing a bawdy song, which start a whole other conversation.

DIANE KENDIG
read her poem, "On Maria Blanchard's Woman with a Fan," because of the connection with Wompo and her growing body of Blanchard poems. ("Maria Blanchard 1914" was published in Wompo's 2008 anthology Letters to the World.) Diane is working on a bilingual chapbook of these poems.

JULIA LISELLA
...read two of her Emily Dickinson inspired poems--"Tattoo In Sophomore Year" and "The Envelope Poem" --stuff she is working on about links to the great gals of poetry! She gave us each a brochure from a spring show called "Rash Vows: Poems and Painting on the Life
of St. Francis", a collaboration of art between Julia and her artist friend Adele Travisano. She's working on scholarship on Genevieve Taggard's prose and poetry and bracing for a fall semester of four courses, four preps, one on "The Long Poem," focusing on Whitman, HD, Mark Doty and Rita Dove.

ZARA RAAB





EVE RIFKAH
not only is a renowned poet but the woman who managed to navigate our carload from Central Mass into Medford. She read the poem "Scar Tissue" from a chapbook manuscript of the same title, which ends

at the hospital nurses without smiles

without a soft word take over

for days into months

scold skin          rip and patch

glazed over     armor hard 

ROSEMARY STARACE

read from a growing group of sea poems, this one with a working title of Pteropod: thecosomata, a meditation on the sea butterfly, a small swimming sea snail. She reported

that she was almost finished revising her manuscript, which had been in process for a number of years and sent it out!

DAY TWO: Wompos* Take Gloucester

After an invitation to the whole Wompo list and negotiations and concensus building on

where and how, the group agreed to meet at Fort Stage Park in Gloucester, MA and bring sack lunches, which sacks opened to spill out into a lovely feast in a very shady spot.  Claire Keyes opened the conversation with the question, "What poetry journals do you like, read, subscribe to?" and the women took it from there, each also reading a poem and providing information of our lives' work these days.
 
MARY BUCHINGER BODWELL
read a new poem titled "The Mulberry," which sparked a sweet discussion, and she named these journals as the one she subscribes to: POETRY and AGNI; and the online journals The Cortland Review http://www.cortlandreview.com/, Right Hand Pointing http://www.righthandpointing.net/, and Innisfree http://www.authorme.com/innisfree.htm.   She just that day had a poem published on a Gloucester-based journal called  Extracts, way too serendipitious not to share. It's titled, "Passage of Time in Paute, Ecuador:"
http://dailydoseoflit.com/2014/07/29/poem-mary-buchinger/

JENNY DOUGHTY
read a poem titled, The new bride serves her mother-in-law Sunday lunch, a delightful parody of William Carlos Williams' "So much depends." She says she has never sent it anywhere and doubts whether anybody would publish it, but we are sure there is an anthology out there that will be calling for it any time. She named as favorite journals The Aurorean, Naugatuck River Review, and Four Way Review. The last of those has some of her poems online, including this one, "The Printer:"  http://fourwayreview.com/the-printer-by-jenny-doughty/

ELLEN GOLDSTEIN

read "Alien Planet." After a long period of working on a memoir, she has returned to poetry and is working on a chapbook with the working title New Astronomy. ( She says, "I like it because it is new astronomy for me, but I don't think it is a final title.")
The illusive Ellen Goldstein is seen here on the left

JENNIFER JEAN

read an untitled/unpublished poem about teaching poetry to sex-trafficking survivors, to whom Jennifer does indeed teach poetry. For favorite magazines, she named Poetry for its

quality/innovative poems and interesting/provoking prose, as well as

Jennifer Jean

the journal The Mom Egg Review. For Mom Egg, she is editing a special themed issue on "Compassionate Action there.

(Submit to by Sept. 1st: https://themomegg.submittable.com/submit%20).
 She is also leading two upcoming writing retreatsin Gloucester MA Sept. 26th-28th and Oct. 10th-12th: www.mgretreats.weebly.com 

DIANE KENDIG

read "Restoration on Maria Blanchard" and chose Poetry, Field, and JJournal as favorite journals with About Place as a favorite online journal (http://aboutplacejournal.org/). She is the featured poet for the Fall Writers Retreat at Malabar Farm in Mansfield, Ohio September 13 and 14th.

CLAIRE KEYES

read a poem titled "Bracket Fungus" a love poem---or a loss of love poem. The journals she subscribes to are American Poetry Review, Rattle, Poet Lore and Calyx.  And she put in a brief word for Soundings East, the journal of Salem State University.   She urged us all to check it out because it runs a terrific poetry contest. She didn't report that the contest is named the Claire Keyes Prize for Poetry, named after the journal's longtime editor. 

 

ZARA RAAB
read "Hang Gliders" and named The Dark Horse and Stand (both UK) for their rich offerings in formal verse and the different perspectives they offer. 
(Zara and Jenny have been online workshop friends for ages and just met F2F and in this photo, face forward;)
 
ELLIN SAROT
read another poem that, like Mary's, seemed serendipitous for the day: "Good Harbor, Gloucester, Massachusetts," forthcoming from String Poet. She too mentioned The Dark Horse. She also initiated an animated discussion on publishing ekphrastic poetry.

ROSEMARY STARACE
read “Why I Need the Sea” and named Poetry for its wide availability and excellent website and APR because often publishes groups of poems by the same person and has excellent essays and likes its format, large and newspaper-ish, informal and expansive, but hard to store. She also admires the online journal, Yew— "innovative writing and images by women” found here http://yewjournal.com/

L to r: Mary (the arm of) Jenny, Claire, Zara, Ellin, Ellen, Diane, and Rosemary

(Thanks to Jenny and Jennifer for the pics. Regrets that we missed snapping Mary. Next time. Here's to the next time, Womponies!)

LETTERS FROM MY SISTER, 1968-2002

SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For thus, friends absent speak.
                                    --John Donne 

I have been reading the letters my sister Daun and I wrote to each other from 1968, when I headed off to college, until 2002, when she died at age 49 of cancer. In these pages, her voice comes through so clearly to me, more clearly really than in the few audio and video recordings we have of her, and she had a gorgeous voice, an attribute my husband Paul mentioned in his eulogy for her.

As I read the letters, she makes me laugh all over again, as she does in this one, at age 17, reporting on being called into the office of our truly lame-brained high school principal her senior year, along with her friend Tom Bantz, over a national protest against the Vietnam War that they had planned to launch on the homeroom period radio show, “Update,” that fall of 1969:

Tom and I spent an hour there while he [the principal] censored our program and asked questions. If he could only stay on track! Would you believe that while talking about the moratorium, he went everywhere from candy sales to prostitutes? The program is canceled, and I am sending it to you—don’t lose it ‘cause we only got one copy.

The script is still attached, a very trenchant statement for that time and place, and it’s a shame the student body didn’t get to hear it.

Each paragraph of that twelve-page, pencil-written letter brings back a million details, for example, this one:

You’ll never guess what happened last Thursday. For the first time in ninety million years we needed our English books, so I got my little stool out and started rooting through the junk in my locker. [The detail here is that “little stool.” At our high school, each pair of lockers had two long doors, each barely wide enough for a coat, topped by two square-ish cabinets for books, one above the other. She had gotten the “upper” and for some reason, couldn’t get her locker mate to trade with her. Daun was almost as short as I, around five foot, and somebody—probably an adoring fan in Shop class—had built her a tiny, skinny stool that fit in the narrow door section, and she would pull it out to rifle the shelf above for books and papers].  I found my English book and went to lunch… I noticed a paper sticking out and just as I was opening it to see what it was, Linda Define said, “Hey Daun, I finished typing Gone for the Wind for you and I made a carbon copy in case you lose it again.”----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I now have three copies of Gone with the Wind.

I was puzzled over what the long line meant but even more puzzled about the typing of Gone with the Wind. Daun was the kind of person people wanted to do things for (witness the stool), and Linda Define (who remained Daun’s lifelong friend to the very end) would be just the woman to help Daun replace the work she’d reported losing, but somehow I couldn’t see Linda retyping a 500+page novel. Then I flipped the page and saw Daun had also enclosed a second document, a copy of a two-page manually-typed passage from the childbirthing scenes of Gone with the Wind (“I don’t know nuthin’ about birthing babies”), which she was probably going to use for a class or a National Forensic League presentation. At the point she had three copies, courtesy of Ms. Define, may as well send one to me, along with the censored protest piece.

Twelve pages in that missive, and that was nothing unusual for a letter circulating in my family. “You people write notes to each other the length of short books,” a friend once said to me, in bewilderment at the note I left on the kitchen table for the rest of the Kendig clan to peruse.

I’m pretty sure her friend Bob Littmann would smile, too, reading her high school account of Sue Young and her leaving a roll of toilet paper with a note on his front porch the Halloween weekend that his parents were gone. The note read, “Do it yourself House TP Kit.” And then he might outright laugh at this characterization of himself years later, “Bob Littman has written me that he’s finally in love. Actually, what he said was that he was in a stable relationship.”

There’s a homemade valentine I sent to her, a red heart-shaped doily, with these lines in black in the center:

And we can love by letters so and gifts,

And thoughts and dreams.—Donne

 

So it must be from the winter of 1971, when I was taking a Donne seminar. There are many cards, actually, and in one letter, she suggests that I need to get my master’s thesis finished because she has purchased the perfect card to send me to celebrate its completion. She could stand at a card counter for ages, elbowing strangers there and handing them a card. “Read this one,” she’d say. “It’s hilarious.” 

*** 

I actually perused the letters today because I woke at 4 a.m., thinking of Daun and my whole family, how distant we have become with both Daun and my mother dead, and we three the main letter writers of us six. My mother actually wrote me a letter every weekday my first year away at college, when I was nearly dying of homesickness, about which I have written elsewhere. I’ve been reading Cheryl Strayed on the scattering of her family during her mother’s illness and death by cancer. Would I find answers in our correspondence as to what bound us, what separates us?

 

I have been thinking of handwriting, too, how much I did then, how very little I do now. Recent brain research seems to be telling us that nothing registers in the brain like a handwritten note. They’ve had people observe, trace, type, and freewrite a word while hooked up to brain scans, and nothing sets off connections in the brain like freewriting. I have to say that none of the manymanymany emails I have written this week can hold a candle that burns at both ends to any one of my handwritten letters to my sister. I do have to note that while our first letters to each other were handwritten, you can also see how they then became typed on typewriters, then on electric typewriters, then word processed. You can see the invention of liquid paper (THANK you Mrs. Nesmith Graham) and correction tape and then those glorious IBM Selectrics in offices we could use that licked the mistake off the page for a redo. 

Several folders I opened and stuffed right back into the file, one with notes and pictures from her five year old daughter while she was hospitalized during the last two years of her life, pages and pages and pages between her and her first husband during their long wrenching break-up and divorce. The hundreds of emails she wrote to friends during her illness. Too much. I just carried up and out and read the ones between her and me. Some of them. To read them all would take another lifetime.

Suddenly, in the delirium of 4 a.m., I thought too what a great publication these letters between us might make, what a great read for others. As someone who has read all the letters of Virginia Woolf (as I read all her diaries) and a lot of Keats, Van Gogh, and other artists and many anthologies on letter-writing and many exchanges of letters between authors (Stafford and Bell) and lovers and others, famous and not, I saw a collection between Daun and I with all the national events from Vietnam to 911 running in our background: that KSU week I took the bus home, the Challenger exploding, and a decade later, all our students recalling it, the Tiananmen Square summer she joined me in July in Berkeley....

Still our family life was fairly tame. No drugs or abuse, no arrests (though I have spent four months in medium security, spread across 18 years). Not even a whole lot of alcohol, unless you count the time Daun had one too many Harvey Wallbangers in college and danced on the table at a bar, or the time our family went to tasting room of a Wisconsin Winerie, and still the amount of apricot wine we seven ingested would be less than two bottles.  I know that James Frey’s parking ticket in Columbus morphed into a tale of incarceration for a drug habit which morphed into a best-seller, but while my family complains of my tendency to hyperbole, I have seldom been accused of making stuff up, one of many reasons I have produced so very little fiction.
 

After an afternoon of reading four folders of our letters that I had opened and arranged in alphabetical order years ago, then left, exhausted at the idea—with hundreds more still stacked in the attic like Gail Godwin’s cold pancakes,­­­­ I had found no causes for the disintegration of our family bonds, except the thought that perhaps words had held my family together, and that two of the three word weavers are gone. Most of all I realized --and much as I hate to admit it--that I doubt that strangers would want to read the letters. Unlike famous people’s correspondence, these letters weren’t written with an eye to posterity, as for example, Anne Sexton’s were. Sexton actually prepared a carbon copy of the letters she wrote, her editor notes. (And how much easier today to save letters on the computer, on the hard drive and a back-up drive. And in the clouds.) 

No, Daun and mine were written solely with a wink to a sister. She’s been winking at me and twinkling to herself all this afternoon, as have I, showing off our reading lists and our dogs’ antics, wondering about our parents, arguing about money, describing menus and performances, griping against wars and injustice.  

They go on and on, those letters, as emails do not, as Facebook posts do not, and lord knows, as tweets cannot. They contain pressed flowers and cartoons from The Far Side, and Doonesbury. They go on and on even as later, when we had adult paychecks, we used to talk on the phone for hours and hours on Saturdays, then hang up and call back for the one thing we’d forgotten to tell, still sending letters to each other, too, during the week or after the calls.  

So many of our letters end with P.S.’s and P.P.S’s, as though we couldn’t bear to let the correspondence end. Sometimes the P.S.’s were as long as the letters that began, “This is a short note until we talk Saturday….” Our P.S.’s could be letters in and of themselves. One particular P.S., a one-liner of a P.S., just leapt out at me as I was trying to close the folder yesterday afternoon. At the end of a three-page, single-space typed letter, Daun had neatly half-written, half-printed this P.S. in bright green ink after her black signature. It was so definitely her voice, that April morning, this dark June afternoon: 

There are lilac bushes all up and down the street and it’s all you can smell. Heaven.

Wrapping up National Poetry Month

BIG POETRY GIVEAWAY & Wick

It's a wrap! And a wrap-up! And a send-off!!

So, what a wonderful National Poetry Month it's been! For the second year in a row, I was one of the 32 hosts for the fifth annual  "Big Poetry Giveaway." (To see how this program is run, what promises made, see here.)

Although I promised three books, thanks to some po-work I got and the great Wick Poetry series, I am able to give 5 books, 1 broadside, and 11 poem postcards.

The winners are:

(Winners, please send mailing addresses to
dianekendig [at] yahoo [dot] com)

Anonymous 2 (the second anonymous in comments, added 4/30)
for Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, ed.by Holman & Muske-Dukes: 

Mystical Marianne (Merseau)
for The Places We Find Ourselves by Diane Kendig

Brian Wong
for Trouble Ball by Martin Espada, signed by Espada: "To the Winner of the Great Poetry Giveaway! April 24, 2014" (see story, below)

Ruth Foley
for Fugitive Blues by Debra Kang Dean, winner of the 2013 Blue Moon Chapbook Contest

Jessica Goodfellow
for Appetite by Aaron Smith, U of Pittsburgh Press

Karen Weyant
for the poster, "Soldiers in the Garden" by Martin Espada designed for Traveling Stanzas

Anonymous (first anonymous in comments)
for the postcard, "A Winter Sunset" by Ted Kooser, designed for Traveling Stanzas

Renee, Mary Jensen, Allison Whipple, Lissa Clouser, Katrina, R Wilder Jr., Lynn Pedersen, Andrea Beltran, Margo Roby, Robin Sams
for 10 postcards of "Soldiers in the Garden" by Martin Espada for Traveling Stanzas

Kent State Wick Poetry Series and Traveling Stanzas

While I was attending Espada's reading at Kent State University on April 24th, I also purchased to give away, a broadside of Espada's "The Soldier's in the Garden." He opened his reading with this poem, a fitting connection to the K.S.U. shootings that we commemorate this time of year. As usual and so impressively, The Kent State Wick Poetry Series, in collaboration with the university design studio, produces a broadside in poster and

Sarah from KSU

postcard size from a poem by the visiting poet.

The KSU Wick Poetry Center publishes books, hosts visiting authors, does community outreach with young people and other groups. Since returning to Ohio, I have attended at least two readings a year at the main campus and feel our poetic lives in Northeast Ohio, especially my life, is made much richer for having the Wick. Check them out.

For national poetry month, the center hosted both Ted Kooser and Martin Espada. For each reading, as part of the "Traveling Stanzas" project, they produce these wonderful broadsides which sell for $3 (posters) and $1 (postcards). You can order them on the site, and for free, you can download them and send them as postcards. 

SUZANNE BYERLEY: A Memorial Service and a Remembrance

Coming home again in my 60s means coming home to a lot of funerals: funerals of relatives, of friends' parents...and of my friends themselves, many of whom I have written about. This weekend, I was privileged to memorialize the life and death of a friend who was a writer, in the company of a writers group I had to leave when I left in 1984. 

Suzanne Byerley, surely the youngest 75-year old I have ever known, died about a year ago in an early morning car crash, and this weekend, the members of the Cleveland "Butcher's Shop" writing group, of which Suzanne was a member, met on the hillside at Foxfield Preserve near the Wilmot Wilderness Center, to plant a tree and read poems to her and to each other and to ourselves. 




(Right, Foxwood guide Sarah Brink)

Bob Lawry was first at the Wilderness Center, meeting the other 9 of us as we waited for our guide, Sarah Brink: Rob Farmer and his wife Clare, Bob McDonough, Evelyn Mavromichalis, Genevieve Jencson, Keith Seher, and me, along with Toledoans Judith and Bill Crandall. When Sarah arrived, she led us in our cars. We passed the big red barn of an Amish family, whose son waved to Sarah and travelled up to the top of a hill at Foxfield, which was the first nature preserve cemetery in Ohio. Instead of a manicured lawn, the cemetery is in rolling hills of bleak, blond prairie grass, where bodies are buried without being embalmed or entombed in huge metal caskets. The mound at Suzanne's site had leveled under the weight of this heavy winter, but at its head stood the dogwood tree and big stones and a shell the family had left marked where the small marker will eventually stand. We paused to look out over the hills. Sarah took questions while her son played in the dirt, then she left us alone to our ceremony.

Bob Lawry started the reading with a poem by Suzanne titled, "Distance." He then read Mary Elizabeth Frye's 1932 poem, "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep" and John Updike's "Perfection Wasted" with its opening line that sounds like we have just walked in on a conversation, "And another regrettable thing about death...."                      

Judith Crandell followed with a passage of T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" from The Four Quartets, ending with: "All manner of thing shall be well...and the fire and the rose are one" as she placed a red rose at the head of the grave. 

 

Keith Seher next told a story about Suzanne's bringing a four-leaf clover she had just found to a workshop but accidentally dropped it. Everyone looked and looked, till Suzanne stopped them, saying, "It's only a four-leaf clover; I'll find another." Keith had begun looking for one to replace it. (Here, I held my breath, hoping he was not going to tell us he found one on the day Suzanne died, but no, he is a better story-teller than that.) He couldn't find one. He looked up four-leaf clovers to find they surface about one in 1,000 clovers. He continued looking till his young son asked him what he was doing, and he explained. Now his son looks. They look together. They are still looking. He wanted to tell Suzanne that he and his son were now sharing the activity of four-leaf clover hunting because of her. He told us for her. And for us. And for him.

 

D.H. Lawrence's poem, "Bavarian Gentians" was read by Bob McDonough, and 

Bavarian Gentian

Rob Farmer, accompanied by his wife Clare, read two stanzas of a long poem by Cleveland poet Terry Provost, a poem read last month at the funeral for another Clevelander. Genevieve Jencson read Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day," which ends with the question for us all, "...what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?" I had planned to read Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge without Music" but decided at the last minute to read Louise Bogan's "Epitaph for a Romantic Woman," as being more about Suzanne and less about my own grief. Evelyn Mavromichalis  ended the memorial by asking us all to send copies of the poems for the group to present to the family.

We stood on the hill for awhile. We took a photo of us all, for the record and for member Jane Richmond, who is away in Minnesota and asked for pictures.

 

(L to R:  Clare and Rob Farmer, Genevieve Jenscson, Bob McDonough, Diane
Kendig, Bob Lawry, Evelyn Mavromichalis, Keith Seher, Judith and Bill Crandell)

 

We drove back down the hill. Some had to get off to engagements back in Cleveland, while some of us stopped at the Amish farm stand, which was rich with homemade pies, jams, cookies, candies, and soap, then went back to the Wilderness Center to walk, to visit the plant sale and gift shop. Four of us stopped at the Zoar Canal Tavern for dinner and wine, and lingered long gossiping about poets and writers, talking about our families, eating big plates of lamb and fish and sausage and lingering longer for dessert, every one of us ordering bread pudding, which we ate all of.

 

I imagine Suzanne would have preferred to hang out shopping and buying a pie. If she had been able to hang out, I know she would have also ordered dessert. On the other hand, she might have had to get back to Andy and the grandchildren or to an evening workshop. But wherever we were that day, her distance was with us as we each headed to our cars, down the road, home again.

 

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Remembering Suzanne

I first met Suzanne in the late 1970s through my friend Judith Crandell, who always referred to her as "my friend, Suzanne," as though "Friend" were her first name and "Suzanne" her surname, and in fact, that's what Suzanne seemed like, everyone's friend first, then teacher, mentor, model, mother, partner, whatever.

She is the only person I ever took a creative writing class from, and it was an amazing class of six people who met in her living room to learn about making fiction, a genre that up till that point remained a magical mystery to me. It still does, but once I took Suzanne's class, it was also a genre I could write and revise and teach, all a good thing because a few years later, I was hired to be the only creative writer at a small college which definitely expected me to teach fiction writing. The day that the two versions of Raymond Carver's "The Bath" (the second being, "A Small Good Thing") came out in some brand new journal or anthology, the class met, and Suzanne brought the two stories to the group. We read them, discussed the differences, the huge gigantic differences, applauded Carver for managing to expand it into a much better story, not knowing then what we know now, that the second was the original, edited down by Gordon Lish. (Even today, if you google the two, you will find a lot of people on Yahoo-- and yahoos elsewhere-- think that "The Bath" was the original.) At the time, the time of each didn't matter so much as the difference, what we learned of it about writing and revision and revising writing and revising one's life. When I taught my first creative writing class, those two stories became a key part of my course, ages before Janet Burroway could work them into her textbook, Writing Fiction.

Suzanne was always that innovative at exercises and assignments, whether she was teaching at a prestigious college and a famous summer workshop or at senior centers and her local branch library. In addition to being a terrific creative writing teacher, she was everyone's closest reader and most insightful editor.

In the early-1980s, I left Cleveland for western Ohio, and much later, for the Boston area, while Suzanne headed for California, and Judith was off to New York and then Washington D.C. And then one by one throughout the new millenium, first Suzanne, then I, then Judith all ended up back in Ohio. By then, Suzanne was in the Butcher Shop and coaxed me to attend.

The Butcher Shop  is a private poetry workshop, founded by the Case Western Reserve University poet Robert Wallace, who was long gone from the group when I joined in 1980. They have the looniest method of workshopping I have ever known. Everyone brings copies of a poem to be workshopped, with no name on it. Each participant takes one set of a poem, and then in silence for about 10 minutes, each participant prepares a critique of their randomly chosen poem, which s/he delivers, in turn, after passing out a copy to everyone. The idea, I believe, was that the anonymity gave everyone permission to be ruthless in their criticisms-- thus the name, "The Butcher Shop"-- but in the process of meeting each month, poets' styles and topics became pretty clear, and for example, by Peg Lolly's second Julianna poem (from her 1988 book, Julianna's Room), it was pretty clear whose poem was the one about the giantess. And though the method seemed misguided to me,  you couldn't have asked for a sharper group of critics: Alberta Turner, Dave Evett, Leonard Trawick, Bonnie Jacobson, Lolette Kuby, P K Saha, Bob McDonough. Suzanne was not yet in the group.

When I returned home in 2009, the only two of that group were McDonough and Saha, but there was Suzanne and other people I had known in my previous Cleveland life. Getting to the Butcher Shop was a hike from Canton, and I only managed it twice in two years, both times since it was at Suzanne's house, and she harassed me sweetly and mercilessly to come. One time after the butchering was done, she made Crepes Suzette for the whole group, serving one at a time as they came hot out of the pan.

Another time, she, Judith, and I met in Cleveland for a day of art museum-hopping, reading aloud, attending a reading by George Bilgere at CWRU, and then meeting up with McDonough and Lawry to eat in Little Italy. It was such a good day, so filled with poetry and old friends and coming home, like the good old days. She was so curious as we bombarded the café counter guy at the Museum of Contemporary Art (where we ate) about how he liked his job selling salads and wine. (He loved it, had clearly seen harder times with harder people and got a kick out of her.) She was so present as we sat in the new atrium of the Cleveland Art Museum and drank tea and ate cookies and read our poems out loud to each other until we were almost late and ran into Guilford Hall just as the reading began. She was positively tickled with Bilgere's reading and ran up after to talk to him about his stint on A Prairie Home Companion. And then, of course, there was the marvelous Italian dinner. So we ate three times that day. Not counting breakfast. I will always associate Suzanne, as I do most of the poets in Cleveland, with great eating and great writing.

That was the last time I saw her. I am not resigned, I can say now, since I didn't get to read that line earlier, but if it had to be the last time, I am glad the last time I saw her was filled, like this one, with the company of other writers who loved her too, just as the memorial service was, and with good food and art and reading and running around in University Circle, or anywhere in Cleveland, that city we had in common.

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You can find Suzanne Byerly's obituary here, and account of her Kingsville Library writing group's reading for her here

Happy Earth Day: REMEMBERING DANIEL THOMPSON

For the National Poetry Month project at the Cuyahoga County Public Library, I researched eight Forepoets, that is, Northeast Ohio poets who have died but whose poems and lives go on in our heads and hearts. That feature had to be cut, but I am posting the eight forepoets here on my blog.

DANIEL THOMPSON was very much on my mind for this Earth Day as I thought of his book titled, Even the Broken Letters of the Earth Spell Heart.

Northeast Ohio Forepoet Poet 

Daniel Thompson, 1935-2004

 

five facts you may not know about Thompson: 



·       A street named after Thompson is in downtown Cleveland (photo here at Wikipedia)

 

·       Junkstock, his poetry reading event held in a junkyard, was a summer high point for many poetry lovers
 

·       An inveterate activist, he campaigned against the use of Chief Wahoo through protest and poems. See one of his protests in this YouTube video  

 

·     His life and death were formally recognized in the U.S. House of Representatives. Read the tribute given by Dennis Kucinich on May 11th, 2004 here. 

 

·       He authored seven books of poetry, including the posthumous, The Big Book of Daniel edited by Maj Ragain and available at Bottom Dog
 

Finally, I have not a fact but a poem of mine about the last time I saw Daniel, spending two days with him. As a matter of fact, I took him to prison:

 

TAKING DANIEL THOMPSON TO PRISON

by Diane Kendig

For years, he wanted to go to prison with me. “Prison, Daniel,” I said, “is not jail,” where he had done some time. Given his tendency to pranks, I thought he’d be the last writer I’d ever take into prison. Then at the end, during what inmates would call my “short time,” I decided he was the last writer I wanted to take into prison. I called and he came and could have been a chaplain, so piously he submitted to the strict entry procedures. We made the half-mile walk to the cavernous shift room, and he read to a crowd of  eighty or so—though if you know him, you know he said, not read: he chanted and cooed, beginning with Those in power always want/ those in poverty to live on poetry…. The room got quieter and hotter, and Daniel’s voice got louder.

 

The guards began to gather in the back, first a gray shirt, then several, then several white shirts—“How can there be this many white shirts left this late?” I thought nervously, thought we'd be ousted for the passion he was raising in the place—until I noticed that the guards were applauding, that they loved Daniel’s hymn to the veterans in the marketplace: crew-toothed, blue, open flies, eyes of salt and humor surviving/Wars and rumors and they nodded to his complaint about justice as a railroad. One took exception to Daniel’s Dillinger poem and shouted, “But he did shoot the deputy.” This was the old Lima Correctional Facility, the L.C.I. and in Lima, they know their Dillinger.

I have to tell you, that I have never heard Daniel so loud and clear, despite his age and weariness, about 6 months before the first cancer diagnosis, all the reverberations off metal doors and concrete floors and walls. He gathered up everything he had on injustice and hurt, all those broken letters of the earth, love’s new light he still held out for, and man, he sang them off. In that hard room Daniel took us all into the purpose of his poetry, which as another Ohioan said, is the purpose of all poetry: to break our hearts. Some men wept.

Taking Daniel out of prison would have been harder, except he was tired and even he did not want to sleep there. I drove, he rode shot gun, his right arm along the open window as he chuckled and repeated, “but he did shoot the deputy” on the long ride home that exceptionally warm and starry autumn Friday night that Daniel took the prison.