On opening a new journal

A fan of blank pages

waiting for words

the way a lover

waits for her beloved

each word a caress

each line a whisper

a promise

of what's to come. 

Each morning

Each morning you take a pen and hope it's filled with words that will make their way to the page as you move your hand from left to right, a motion so familiar to you that it feels as natural as breathing, as miraculous as opening your eyes to see the world for the first time. 

You take a pen and suddenly the world becomes clearer, as if someone has removed a veil that had covered your eyes, as if someone has lifted a curtain so you can see simultaneously outside yourself and inside yourself, an exterior view and interior vision of thoughts and feelings.

You take a pen in your hand each morning and it's like a magic wand that casts a spell allowing you to remember years past and imagine years in the future, as if it's a Time Machine that gives you the ability to travel to wherever your imagination takes you.

You take a pen and suddenly it's as if ink flows through your veins and what you write on the page, each word, each letter of the alphabet, makes its way straight from your heart up your arm onto the page.

Today

Today.

Just sitting.

Waiting for words.

Listening to the silence.

Inhaling.

Feeling my shoulders relax.

Wondering if words will ever come.

If the page will stay blank forever.

Telling myself it's okay.

Not every day needs words.

Some days require silence.

A chance to rest.

To listen.

To sit with the emptiness.

Some days it's enough to hold a pen in my hand.

To close my eyes instead of staring at the blank page.

To wonder if my hand will ever move.

If the ink will dry before then.

If the well will ever fill up.

If the muse guiding my hand will remember me.

If I'll ever have that feeling again of swimming in words.

Splashing the page with words.

Diving for words.

Finding the treasures at the bottom of the sea 

that lure me back to the page again and again.

 

Why poetry?

Wandering through a local bookstore the other day, I came across Dorianne Laux’s Finger Exercises for Poets (Norton, 2024) on the poetry shelf, and, intrigued by the title, read a few pages and couldn’t resist buying the book and taking it home.

Laux, a poet whose work includes Only as the Day is Long, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, teaches in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. Her book is filled with the kind of wisdom about writing and poetry that will inspire you to rush to your desk and begin writing. 

“This is what I think all poetic narratives seek to do,” writes Laux, “create stories within stories, layer upon layer of feeling and meaning, spinning it out like a spider, weaving this delicate net that holds time and space, image and language, clarity and mystery.”

Have you ever wondered what happens when we write a poem? 

Here’s Laux’s response to that question: 

“When we write a poem, we dissolve into the universe, and wake up refreshed and alive.”

“Each poem,” according to Laux, “is a thank-you note to that miracle. To each day we have been given as a gift.”

And if you’ve ever wondered why we write or read poetry, you might enjoy what Laux has to say in the section of her book, “Why Poetry?”:

You may as well ask, Why sunsets? Why bicycles? Why gnats and human beings? Why trees? Why the small and larger things that make up this world? Why stars? Why dust? We swirl around and inside of chaos. The word we’re born into is a noisy, messy, confusing place full of moments of boredom and surprise. We are in the center of our lives always, and yet there are times we feel on the outside looking in, a question on our lips, unable to formulate it, or if we do manage to find words, speak them, we can only hope they can capture some of what that chaotic world inside feels like. And if we do, if we are able, for a moment, the world both without and within simultaneously stills, sits motionless between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world. We feel a semblance of satisfaction and achievement, something like joy.

And she shares what Tu Fu, who is considered one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, has to say about poetry: “Poetry is like being alive, twice.”

In Laux’s words, “poetry is a place set aside in the imagination, in the soul, for pure making, pure being. Most of our lives are spent in prescribed fashion, where to go, what to wear, who to meet when, to what purpose? Our thoughts are taken mostly with questions of preparation, execution, completion.”

“This is why poetry: to carve a moment out of the chaos,” writes Laux, “to live the moments we are most alive into what we are built to be, sense-making and nonsense-making machines, all our powers working together: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, fully being in this world we’ve been given as a gift, making it ours through art, and then giving it away.”

For more information about Dorianne Laux and her work, visit: https://www.doriannelaux.net/

Waiting for your heart to open

You sit waiting 

for your heart to open,

to reveal the words 

you need to write,

like waiting for a blossom 

to push its green shoots up 

out of the earth

and unfold its petals.

You close your eyes 

and listen to your breath,

your pen motionless 

above the blank page,

waiting,

like waiting for 

a starter's gun to go off,

like waiting for birds 

to arrive at the bird feeder,

like waiting 

for a fish to bite

and the line to grow taut.

You sit listening to the clock on your desk 

ticking away the minutes

wondering if words 

will ever come

or if you'll sit here

wrapped in silence

forever

waiting for your heart 

to open a crack,

for the first word

to slip out

onto the page,

then the next word, 

and the next.

Patience, you whisper.

Trust, you tell yourself.

The words will come.

Just touch the paper with your pen 

and begin...

Between the lines: Nadia Colburn’s "I Say The Sky"

A good friend who knows how much I love reading (and writing) poems mailed me a copy of Nadia Colburn’s collection of poems, I Say The Sky (University Press of Kentucky), which contains the kind of poems that help open a reader’s eyes to the wonders and beauty of our world.

In one of the poems, “March,” I love the way Colburn explores the passing of winter and the coming spring and how she draws parallels to what might be melting in us.

“What in you needs melting?” she writes.

“What do you do with your anger and your hope?”

And I love the way she begins the poem:

All winter, we walked on the fallen sky,

walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth.

How do you make sense of the line “All winter, we walked on the fallen sky”?

What image does “the fallen sky” bring to mind?

When I read the next line… “walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth”… I felt as if the clouds themselves had fallen to earth.

And that image of walking on clouds, as if the sky has fallen, led me to wonder how and why Colburn was comparing the clouds to snow, or snow to clouds.

It’s as if the snow itself is made of clouds, and, to carry the image further, as if we ourselves are made of the same stuff as the clouds— the condensation that forms the clouds— so that it’s as if we ourselves have fallen to earth.

And listen to how she takes the image of clouds further in the next stanza:

Now the clouds are running down the side of the mountain

in small hidden rivers.

Isn’t that just how spring comes?

Snowmelt runs swiftly down mountainsides in small, almost hidden rivers?

Clouds turn to snow that turns to streams… in the way that each spring the world transforms itself, changing again from one form of being to another.

Just like humans, who, like the earth, change and awaken in hidden places that we cannot see until growth occurs.

Colburn alludes to these hidden changes:

All night, down the side of the mountain,

Waters run together where we cannot see.

And again: “Underneath, the earth is awakening.”

And spring comes again each March:

Once more the tips of bare branches

put out new buds.

And in a final stroke of brilliance, she writes:

Again they clasp

their small palms together in prayer.

It’s this final line that brings together heaven and earth in such a powerful way, a moment of new buds clasping one another like palms brought together in prayer.

In making this connection, Colburn takes her readers into an annual rite of passage, the transformation of the earth (and of us), a moment when human and divine seem to come together.

“March” is a poem that contains these gem-like miracles, just as the other poems in this collection contain similar gems.

Thanks to Colburn for bringing such a wonderful collection of poems into the world, and thanks to my good friend for sharing Colburn’s work with me.

If you’d like to read more about Nadia Colburn, visit: 

https://nadiacolburn.com/

You can read her poem, “March,” and other poems here: https://nadiacolburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Ten-Poems-revised-2.pdf

Hide and seek

Where do you look 

for poems, for stories,

where do you find the words 

you need to write,

where are they hiding, waiting 

for you to discover them?

It's like playing a game 

of hide-and-seek, isn't it?

You search inside your journal, between 

the blank pages, hoping to find them there,

or you look inside the barrel of your pen

wondering if they're concealed there,

or you examine the book you're reading

to see if they might have gotten lost in its pages,

or you look outside your office window on the chance

they might be floating like clouds in the air

and all you need to do is

reach out and grab them,

or maybe they went for a ride on the wings

of the crows cawing above the roof

and you just have to wait

for them to return,

or maybe they're like beads on a string

wrapped around your wrist

only you can't see them until

you reach for your pen and open your journal 

and begin moving your hand across the page 

like this.

Waiting for as long as it takes

No matter how many poems you’ve read or
how many pages you’ve turned,

no matter how many rhymes and
line breaks you’ve heard,

no matter how much you want to add your voice
to the poems already in the world,

no matter how long you hold your pen
over the page,

you still have to wait for the words to come,
still have to learn patience

and how to surrender
to the mystery of silence,

still have to admit you don’t know anything,
still have no idea where the words come from

or how they make their way from their source
onto the page (through you),

still need to close your eyes and pray
words will appear on the page,

that your hand will welcome
whatever comes,

still need to promise you’ll wait
for as long as it takes

because it’s what you do
for what you love.
—

On the power of poetry

Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the US, shares her thoughts on writing and the power of poetry in a slim volume, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry (Scribner). 

When she begins writing, Limón notes, she wants to make something true and asks herself questions: 

"Do I want to break something, or do I want to mend something? Or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe?"

And if she's lucky, she says, "if I'm quiet enough, lines of poems I love start to move through me. They come to me as if through a necessary beckoning."

Limón suggests that one of the secret powers of poetry is the way a poem connects us to other voices. 

"This is the secret power of poetry. Little engines of sound urging us on, telling us we are not alone, because we can't be; we are  connected to the readers and writers of poetry."

Is any poem ever a failure, she asks, because it goes unpublished or unshared?

"No, because didn't it make you pay attention, the act of writing? Didn't you, even briefly, feel as if you inhabited the world? Didn't it, for a moment, make you feel connected to language? Didn't you find a container for your heart?"

Is there a way to learn how to write a poem?

"While there are ways to teach poetry," Limón says, "mostly we learn by reading and writing, writing and reading, and then going out into the terrifying world and feeling so much that those feelings threaten to collapse us onto the concrete, facedown and forever ruined by human cruelty or even love. And then something happens; there's some moment when you think, a little gravel on your cheek, 'This suffering might make for a good poem.' Or, 'This wonder might make for a good poem.'"

One of the other secret powers of poetry, she writes, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make money writing poems, which allows poetry to remain subversive. "Poetry has the benefit of being outside economic systems."

"Is that a fancy way of saying that poetry doesn't make money? Yes. But it's more than that: Poetry is meant to be free, it's meant to be given, it's meant to travel one poem at a time, like pollen from a tree floating through the air to make more trees. Poems travel that same way. And because of that, they remain sacred, unbothered by trappings of the usual oppressive systems."

Another reason why poetry is powerful, according to Limón, is because of its existence in questions without forcing answers. 

"It's the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it's an interrogation of the world and one's place within it. That said, even though it doesn't hold answers, perhaps it is an answer."

Why write or read poetry? 

"At this very moment we need to gather strength and resilience and compassion in any way that we can," Limón writes. "Perhaps poetry, for you, is the secret place where you can get to be as free and as safe as you can; perhaps you can make that blank page a place where you can lay down everything you need to lay down. Maybe it's where you go to get stronger; maybe it's where you go to become softer. But know there is a place that you can make on the page that no one controls but you. In that, right there, is a mighty power."

To learn more about Ada Limón and her work, visit: https://adalimon.com/

Out of thin air

Waiting for words

to appear on the page

my pen poised

above a blank

sheet of paper

like a heron

patiently watching

the water as smooth

as the surface of glass

for a sign of life--

the slightest ripple--

waiting for the perfect

moment to strike

and catch a surprised fish

in its beak.

My pen, too,

waiting for

the perfect moment

to strike

and catch

a word, surprised,

as it leaps

out of thin air

onto the page.

Between the lines: Jody Gladding's "Blue Willow"

 I found Gladding’s poem, “Blue Willow,” in Poetry 108, an anthology of poems that Billy Collins selected, and immediately felt as if her words cast a magic spell, pulling me into the poem so strongly that I wasn’t just reading the words on the page, I felt as if I was inside the poem, somehow inhabiting the space she had created with the words on the page. 

How did she do that?

Reading between the lines, there’s a mystery contained in the poem’s first line:

A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate

There’s the image of a pond that she brings to mind, not just any pond but one that “deepens toward the center,” and you can almost see the pond getting darker in the middle where the water is deepest, in the center. 

And then she compares the pond to a plate—and that comparison helps you to see the pond even more clearly because we’ve all seen how plates have that slightly deeper area in the center.

And it’s not only that she’s showing you the pond, she’s raising the question: who is giving this description of the pond? And why?

And she gives us the answer to these questions in the next two lines:

We trace its shallow rim my mother steering

my inner tube past the rushes where I looked

This is where I think she’s pulled me fully into the poem by adding to the vision of the pond. Now we’re in the shallow edge along the rim, and we discover the narrator is a child floating in an inner tube, being pushed/steered by her mother. And I feel as if I’m in the inner tube with her, part of this memory she’s sharing, and, like her, trying to see past the rushes. What’s there? What’s she looking at? What comes next?

And the answer is revealed in the next line: 

for Moses we said it was a trip around the world

How I love the way the rushes remind the narrator of a memory, a story that she’s read (or been told or heard) about Moses, the baby, placed for safety in the rushes… 

And I also love how the mother and child say their joint venture—the mother steering the inner tube with her child in it—is a trip around the world, and the child imagines sailing around the world. 

And we become part of their imaginary game, wondering where we’ll go next. 

I’m fully inside the poem here, inside the child’s imagination, inside the adult poet’s memory of this precious time, this scene of childhood unfolding, this time without punctuation, a time when moments and imaginings flow one into the next, as if time is an endless river that will never end. 

And the poem goes on, taking the reader on an imaginary voyage to China, pushing through willow branches overhanging the shallow rim of the pond that tickle her neck, seeing swallows overhead that later the child dreams about joining. 

This is a poem about childhood and feeling safe within a mother’s grasp yet curious about exploring the world around her and in her imagination. And it’s a poem about how time feels to a child like it will last forever, and how the adult poet (in the last line) knows it can’t last… 

If you’d like to read the poem, visit: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-146/blue-willow/

And if you’d like to know more about Jody Gladding, visit: 

https://www.jodygladding.org

A space of your own

When you’re trying to write, it’s critical to set aside a space of your own that has no distractions, a place where you can let your imagination roam free and take flight without fear of falling.

It’s a place where you can play without fearing criticism or judgment, a place where you can fail as many times as you need to fail without feeing embarrassment or shame.

It’s a place where you can simply sit, if you so choose, and watch clouds float by or listen to the gurgling of a stream or shut your eyes and dream or sleep, if that’s what you need to do.

It’s a place where there are no rules, where there’s nothing you have to do and nowhere you have to go, as my yoga teacher likes to remind us when we step on the mat to begin our class.

It’s a place where you can laugh or cry, open a door to the past and let memories flood the room without worrying about where you’re going or when you have to return home.

It’s a place where you can savor the sight of a blank page waiting for words.

It’s a place where you can sprout wings and fly from the present to the past or into the future, a place where your pen is like a magic key that can open the door to a world that you’ve never seen before.

All of us need to set aside time so we can spend a few minutes each day in these spaces to create the work that we need to create.

May you find the space you need today and in the days ahead to create the work you’re meant to bring into the world. 

Letter Box: The geometry of loss

It's excruciatingly hard to describe the pain of losing a young mother, to return to the moment when she took her last breath and then, filled with grief and anger and pain, to try and move on.

But that's what award-winning poet Rick Black has done in his newest book, Letter Box: the geometry of loss, as visualized by illustrator Warren Lehrer. 

For years Black (full disclosure: he's my brother) searched for a way to write about his grief, anger, and pain. 

Only after years of mourning was he able to find the balance between silence and the words that would help him heal from the loss that he suffered as a young man.

His haiku-like vision of grief probes the very essence of what it means to confront death and suffer loss, while in the process he reveals the discovery that led him over time to a place of acceptance, a place where he could begin to understand the pain he felt as part of life and which, ultimately, led to healing.

Letter Box reads like an intense graphic poem thanks to the powerful illustrations that Lehrer has created to interpret Black's words. 

Some pages have only a word: "Why?"

Others have multiple combinations of words: "We all live between parentheses."

He asks questions like "How do I turn the page?"

And he makes statements like "Grief isn't about understanding."

In the end, he provides an Afterword offering some background to how he came to write the book.

I confronted a dilemma. I was looking for a new way to write, a way for words to carry the full weight of their meaning. Neither established forms of poetry nor prose but something different. Was there a way to write about my grief, to remember, but also to let go, too?

For more than 40 years, I had been trying to tell the story of my mother's death, her painful last months and our family's struggle to deal with it. Words always piled up inside; they got in my way or in the way of each other. What would come first? Or second? How to describe what she had endured? How to convey the depth of emotions inside me? 

If you get a chance to read a copy, you'll find that Black gives readers a remarkably fearless and honest account of the toll that mourning can take. 

And he gives readers hope, too, that in time one can overcome grief and find a way to heal.

For more info about Letter Box, visit: https://www.turtlelightpress.com/products/letter-box-the-geometry-of-loss/

And for more info about Rick Black, visit: https://www.turtlelightpress.com/about-us/rick-black-owner-founding-editor/

To learn more about Warren Lehrer, visit: https://warrenlehrer.com/

Revise, revise, revise

If you want your words

to sing on the page

you need to keep harmonizing, 

keep testing different notes, trying

different combinations of words

arranging and rearranging,

then rearranging again

until the words on the page

find the order they are meant to appear in 

as if the final draft 

is a lock’s combination

that you can only discover

through multiple turnings

as if the words themselves

choose their positions on the page,

as if set there

by some divine hand

some muse with the voice

of an angel 

whose voice 

becomes your voice,

her song, your song.

—

Not knowing how or why

A morning of starts and stops

of false beginnings

of missteps

trying to find my footing

on a path I can’t see

working through silence

hoping to hear a voice 

deleting more words

crossing out full sentences

beginning again

stopping

starting over

all futile efforts to find

a path leading

somewhere—

but where?

trusting the process

that I’ll find what

I need if I keep writing 

keep my pen moving

across the page

keep collecting words

not yet knowing which I’ll save

and which I’ll discard

waiting for the light to go on

for a path to appear

not knowing how or why

but persisting

through doubts, uncertainty

through not knowing

until the end suddenly appears

and there’s the light at the end of the tunnel—

shimmering, growing brighter—

the beacon I was searching for

there all along

waiting for me to find it

A writer’s prayer of gratitude

Thanks to the Divine Source of words where all words begin their journey into the world.

Thanks for the desire to write and for the imagination that reveals what I can’t see with my eyes alone.

Thanks for the curiosity to explore the world and the courage to embark on a journey into the unknown each time I pick up a pen.

Thanks for the strength to keep going even when I feel lost, and for the support of friends and family when things appear hopeless.

Thanks for words that find their way onto the page, and for the pen in my hand and the ink that fixes the words to paper.

Thanks for the paper and for the pages that I’ve filled with words over the years, never knowing what will come next or if anything will come at all.

Thanks for the new understanding that comes with each word, and for the thrill of discovering something I didn’t known before I began writing.

Thanks for the patience to sit with silence and for the determination to keep going.

Thanks for the hope that words can help us heal and bring us closer together.

Thanks for the pure joy of feeling my hand moving across the page and the sight of words that didn’t exist a moment ago.

Thanks for the proof that I am here each day, ink flowing from my pen, gratitude flowing from my heart.

Thanks for each word that brings me closer to the Divine Source of words where all words begin their journey into the world.