Where the poem comes from: Ingrid Wendt

I’m part of a new Facebook group made up of authors with books out from Word Tech, the publisher who did my second book, Container Gardening. I invited the poets I’ve met there online to send me a poem and a “where the poem comes from” background on it. This one is from Ingrid Wendt, the author of several award-winning books of poetry, including “Singing the Mozart Requiem” (Oregon Book Award), “Surgeonfish” (Editions Prize), and “The Angle of Sharpest Ascending” (Yellowglen Award). Ingrid’s first book, Moving the House, was chosen for BOA Editions by William Stafford, who also wrote the introduction. Her newest book , Evensong, a finalist in the T.S. Eliot Award, was published in 2011 by Truman State University Press. Wendt is the co-editor of From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts. Her teaching guide, Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Writing Poetry in the Classroom, is in its sixth printing. She lives with her husband, poet and writer Ralph Salisbury in Eugene, Oregon.

Here is Ingrid’s poem, from her collection “Surgeonfish,” and her story of how it came to be written:

The Thing to Do

Though what I did that day was right,

reporting the rattlesnakes coiled tightly

together B diamond-backed lovers

blind to my step within a breath of

leaves crackling under the bush;

Though he did what he had to,

hacking them dead with his long-handled

garden hoe, flinging the still-

convulsing whips of their passion into

the bed of his pickup B that scene,

bright vulture of memory, stays;

picks this conscience that won’t

come clean: this wasn’t

the way the story would go

those times I wondered if ever

I’d see my own rattlesnake out in the wild,

having listened through years of summer

hikes, in the likeliest places, without

once hearing that glittering warning

said to be unmistakable; knowing

since childhood, the thing to do is not

flicker a muscle, to stare the face of danger

down as though it didn’t exist.

No rattlesnake ever had eyes for another.

And menace never multiplied, one season to next.

“The setting of this poem is the D.H. Lawrence Ranch 20 miles north of Taos, New Mexico, elevation 8600 ft. above sea level, where I spent a summer as the recipient of the annual D.H. Lawrence Award, living at the edge of a ponderosa pine forest, next to a meadow full of wildflowers, all alone except for the birds and wind, wild turkeys, coyotes, and the bear whose track I found one day on the road but never saw. On the other side of the meadow, far off and hidden in trees, were cabins where families from the University of New Mexico came for vacations and conferences. I never saw a soul, though I sometimes heard the far-off voices of children playing.

“Born and raised in Aurora, Illinois, I was captivated throughout childhood by tales of the "Far West," especially by stories of dangerous wildlife --bears, wolves, rattlesnakes – none of which had lived anywhere near. So when I finally saw a rattlesnake outside of a zoo, I saw not just one, but two snakes, copulating. (Which they must do, of course, but who ever thought about that, or just how they do it? Not me!) I heard them before I saw them, and when I saw them, not far from the cabin, I felt no danger to myself, but reasoned that where there are two rattlesnakes, soon there will be more, and I didn’t want them going into the meadow and beyond, where the children played.

“So, being a responsible adult, I quickly jogged down the road and told the caretaker of the ranch, a crusty old guy named Al, about the snakes, expecting him to somehow trap them and cart them off to another location, far removed. What he did shocked and disturbed me, impressing itself on my memory, surfacing off and on for years, until I finally decided to bring some “closure” to my guilty conscience.

“The actual writing of the poem was something like putting together a quilt. I’ve long kept a notebook of “saved lines”: those necessarily cut from other poems, as well as “good lines” and images that come to mind totally on their own, waiting for a poem to put them in. One of those that never had a home was “bright vulture of memory, picks these bones that won’t come clean,” and intuiting that the vulture image fit the setting of the poem perfectly, I copied this line (by hand) onto a blank sheet of paper, somewhere near the middle, intuiting that’s where it belonged. The challenge then was what to put before and after.

“Many writers talk about writing as “the act of discovery,” which I used to think meant starting with one line or sentence and following the “golden thread,” as William Stafford used to say, letting the words come one after another, down the page, and seeing where they’d lead. For me, the discovery is often is in finding the exact words to shape the context in which some new perception or inner “moment of knowing” occurred: to let the reader step into the scene and live that experience with me.

“Rhythm has a lot to do with setting tone. At some point, early in the poem, maybe after the first two lines, I realized I was working in an accentual pattern of 4 beats per line, and I decided to “go with it” for the rest of the poem. This helped 1) to create a somewhat “heavy” tone, a deliberate tone, a regularity, and 2) to rein me in, to tighten the language, to avoid the maudlin. I wanted the weight of the poem to reflect the weight of the issue. I’m hoping it’s worked that way for readers.”

Where the poem comes from: Catherine Morocco

Catherine Morocco and I met because she is a close friend of a close friend who decided we should get to know each other since we are both writers of poetry. Meeting both Cathy and her poetry was a great pleasure. We also share the coincidence of being former students of Ottone Riccio (“Ricky”) and having poems that are part of the book, " Unlocking the Poem," by him and Ellen Beth Siegel.

In addition to studying with Ricky at the Boston Center for Adult Education, Cathy has also studied with some other poets and teachers I admire, including Afaa Michael Weaver, Tom Daley, and Kathleen Spivack.

Cathy teaches an introductory and an advanced poetry writing course, has seen her poems appear in some well-respected journals, and recently completed a collection of poems that grew out of an experience of illness. This is a poem from that collection:

Son’s Story

I’m shaking scarves over my mother’s bed,

where there’s no evidence of thought.

In one of seven silken scarves, lithe women

sway around a mandala. Their skirts are painted

amber, apricot, and blue. Each sylph is named

after a continent: Antarctica’s fur headdress flames,

blue dolphins leap, swim at her feet.

My mother’s eyes are closed, while Oceana’s

teasing head is crowned in grass and leaves.

She holds a plate of purple fish. I spread

Toros Magnifico around my mother’s feet. A picador

thrusts his pic to pierce the bull into the ring.

In corners, matadors and bull horns’ swelling.

Velvet ladies hurtle roses to the bloody kill.

Just lying here, my mother is a dreamless spot

without a nerve. I cannot stir her. Is she struggling

with shades? Will she open up her eyes to see the golds,

smell fish, flowers, blood? I tie a corner

of the bull fight to a corner of the dance, join seven

scarves into one rope, lands billowing. If I throw it,

she must cling. I’ll pull her to her body, knot by knot.

In talking about how “Son’s Story” came to be written, Cathy says:

“This poem is part of a larger collection of poems, “Brain Storm. Poems of Injury and Recovery.” The poems draw on a diary I kept in the hospital, full of questions, observations, and "to do" lists to help me cope with fear and uncertainty. The diary, as well as memories, observations, hallucinations, and stories from my family members, became subjects for poetry. That material included moments of intense beauty and humor. "Son's Story" appears in The Spoon River Poetry Review and recently won the Dana Foundation prize for poetry about the brain.

“Son's Story was triggered by an experience with my son, who visited me in the hospital when I was recovering from surgery for a hematoma (bleeding around the brain). I was comatose part of the time. My son brought me presents of face cream and feather butterflies from Vogue, where he was working at the time. He also brought seven silk scarves from the Vogue clothes closet that is full of shoes and dresses for photo shoots. The scarves have colorful prints of bullfights, mythology, and the Statue of Liberty. Although the scarves are real and I treasure them, much of the poem is from my imagination--the son lays the scarves over the sleeping mother, he joins the scarves to pull the mother out of her deep sleep. Later, when I asked my son what my illness was like for him, he said, ‘I didn't understand any of the medical stuff. I thought I could help your metaphysical self’.”

Where the poem comes from: David Surette

Continuing my very sporadic feature that feeds my curiosity--maybe yours, too?--about how a poem comes to be written, here’s one by David Surette from his new collection, “The Immaculate Conception Mothers’ Club.” I’ve had the great pleasure of reading with David once and of hearing him several times.

David lives in South Easton and is a frequent feature in and around the Boston area. His two previous collections are “Young Gentlemen’s School” and “Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In,” which was named a "must-read" at the Massachusetts Book Awards. His poems have been published in literary journals including Peregrine, Off the Coast, and Salamander and appear in the anthologies French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets and Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. He has been a co-host of Poetribe, a contributing editor at Salamander, an instructor at the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference, and a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writing Conference.

Bookmaking

One of the Sisters of Notre Dame,

my mother's second grade teacher, was telling

the school kids about the value of books.

They were to be loved, covered, and cared for.

My mother saw her opportunity

and bragged, "My father is a bookmaker!"

He was, and he figured the odds

on happiness with a woman

who struggled with happy

and sad, and he left her, and

my mother and her brother

(who wasn’t his)

to be split up,

passed through

foster homes and relatives’ arms.

He died at 95, good news for my genes.

He hadn't seen my mother since she

was 24 and appeared at his bar to show

him how well she turned out,

pictures of my brother and me as proof.

He had already cashed out.

We didn't go to the wake or funeral,

and we go to everyone's.

We figured the over and under of whether

it would make my mother happy or sad

and skipped it.

In describing how this poem came to be, David says, “The poem was inspired by one of my mother’s many stories. She is a great story teller because she uses humor and language to reveal the sadness and poignancy of moments in her life. The humor is in the word bookmaker which she, as a grade schooler, took as meaning an author or publisher of books when, in reality, her father was a bookie.

“It became a poem when I decided to use the language of gambling to tell the rest of the story, suggesting we live by figuring the odds, the over and under, when to stick and when to fold and cash out. We also have to admit there is chance. Why else did my grandfather do what he did, abandoned my mother and her mother, closed off his life from her and his grandchildren, finally dying never reconciling?

“Gambling is seductive because it combines the rational and irrational so by using its language I want the reader to feel what my mother may have felt and later figured out about her father. The poem is set in the Irish-Boston-Catholic world that I mine for much of my poetry and so far is rich in inspiration, imagery and poetry. I also am aware that the poet is a book maker too.”

Remembering Ricky: Ottone Riccio 1921-2011

My poetry teacher died on September 23. Since then I’ve been thinking about him and wondering what I could say that could give some sense of him to someone who didn’t know him.

My meeting him was a serendipitous thing, a fluke. I was living in New York, about to move to Boston, and, after many years, renewing my interest in writing poetry. In trying to figure out what I was doing I came across a book, “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry.” Just the thing I needed--a small gem filled with practical information of poetic form, sensible advice on writing and publishing, and soaring inspiration for anyone who, as Ricky did, thought, lived, breathed, and slept poetry.

I bought the book and then discovered he taught a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, just a few blocks away from my new home. Lucky me! He taught me how to write poetry. Or maybe I should say he helped me learn how to write poetry.

His technique of teaching was always respectful, always made with the understanding that “this is your poem, not mine, but if it were mine, this is what I would do.” That said, though, he could be shocking in all the “darlings” he wanted us to murder. Cut to the bone, include no word that was not absolutely necessary--that was his approach. There is an apocryphal story that he once told a student with a three-page poem, “This would make a good haiku.”

When he turned 80 “Ricky’s people”--basically anyone who had ever studied with him--compiled a tribute anthology, “Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken.” This was the poem I wrote for him:

Generation

Receive

the secrets.

Trace

the path.

Apprentice

yourself to magic

and the skill

of making fire.

On moonless nights

reweave the stories

thread by thread:

begin to sing

In 2009, with Ellen Beth Siegel, he wrote “Unlocking the Poem,” a guide to writing that included some of his poem-provoking assignments (“Write a 32-line poem in quatrains, 10 syllables per line, using a linked mirror-rhyme scheme as follows: abab bcbc cdcd dede eded dcdc cbcb baba, any subject”)

As Ricky said in his introduction to “Unlocking the Poem,” “Anything less than total commitment, total involvement, is going to make the work of the poet more difficult if not impossible.” Ricky believed poetry was magic. Not some kind of facile conjuring, but something deep and mysterious, a life force. I will always miss him and be grateful to him. He was my teacher.

The puzzle of poetry

The phone rang and Cameron, age 8, wanted to know if I could tell him the name of a specific type of poem. Oh, the pressure. He described the poem: four lines, one word per line, one letter changed in each word, and all the words somehow related. I had no idea. “Umm .....puzzle poem?” I tried. "No," he said, “every poem is a puzzle.”

So true and how wonderful that he already knows this. Mention poetry in any random group and you can see people’s tension levels rise like boat-lifting tides. The truth is, even the savviest people can be nervous around poetry. But I’m thinking that Cameron is on the right track. A poem is a puzzle. It should be. It shouldn’t give itself away too easily. It should hold something in reserve for a second, a fifth, a fiftieth reading. And the reader shouldn’t approach it as a fence to scale--or worse, to be shut out by. It should, instead, be a puzzle to pick away at, getting satisfaction with each piece that drops into place.

I tried the puzzle challenge Cameron gave me:
bare
bark
lark
lurk

and:

love
live
life
lift

There was no name for it. Cameron finally confessed that he had made up the form. So we're calling it the mind-twisting thought-confounding letter-changing four-line poem. Try one!

Snow day

We’re snowed in, we lucky ones. The unlucky ones are out bravely slogging their way through it to get to someplace they need to be. The mail delivery got here, though it made me feel guilty--he trudged here just to bring a couple of catalogs and a magazine I don’t care about.

On Facebook it looks as if people are home everywhere--everybody changing their profile photos, adding 8, 10, 26 new friends. A sure sign everyone’s snowed in. Also, a sign that our concept of “friend” has been co-opted, but that’s another story or at least another blog post. I was recently at a party where one of my favorite people--yes, a friend!--noted that he had more friends in the room than he had on Facebook.

The snow is piling up outside and I’m reading and writing and making two kinds of soup, though I have doubts about one of them. We’ll see. Another friend sent me his annual list of the books he read this past year. I am awed. Haven’t even finished reading the list yet.

Last night I finished Pat Barker’s “Ghost Road,” the final book in her trilogy about World War I. Beautifully written and fascinating, just as many of you said. I continue to read “The Known World” by Edward P Jones, but find I need to take it in just a little at a time--it’s harsh.

Meanwhile, time to poke a little at the fire and feel grateful for warmth and firewood and for many other things, including friends on the phone and online.

When good things happen to good writers

I have just returned from a lovely party celebrating my friend Edith Pearlman and her new book, “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.” It is Edith’s fourth book and begins with an enthusiastic intro by Ann Patchett, herself a wonderful writer. You may have read the glowing front page review in the New York Times with your morning coffee. Or the similar one in the Los Angeles Times. I can’t wait to read the book and you’ll want to read it, too.

Edith has published hundreds of works of fiction and nonfiction in literary journals, national magazines, and online publications. Her short stories have been anthologized (“Best American Short Stories”) and have won O. Henry, Pushcart, and other prestigious prizes. So why has the tone of the praise been along the lines of “why haven’t I heard of Edith Pearlman before?” More importantly, why are people hearing about her now?

Edith herself credits a few people--her agent, Jill Kneerim; Patchett, who has admired her work for years; and Benjamin George, the editor of Lookout Books, the brand new literary imprint beginning its life with “Binocular Vision.” What happened was that George, who had published Edith’s stories in the magazine he edits, “Ecotone,” simply liked her work enough to want to help it find a larger audience. Maybe “simply” isn’t quite the operative word here, with all the complications of publishing and promoting a book, getting it into the hands of reviewers, and then the hands of readers. But the short version of what happened is this: Someone. Paid. Attention. Someone noticed that these stories were, indeed, very fine, worthy of much praise and wide readership.

I am extraordinarily happy for Edith (to whom I am eternally indebted for introducing me to Dr. D!). And her experience, I think, has something to teach us all. For writers the message is to stay true to what you do. For readers--and that includes the writers--honor the work that has been offered to you. Read it with open hearts and let it touch you: pay attention.

Edith will be reading from “Binocular Vision” this Tuesday at 7 at Brookline Booksmith. See you there.

Let us now praise copy editors

For the past few years I’ve been thinking about copy editors. Actually, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for them: as a writer I’ve appreciated their ability to keep me from embarrassing gaffes and missteps. In fact, that keen second look is one of the things I miss now that I’m writing a blog instead of a newspaper column. And as a reader, I’ve appreciated their behind-the-scenes touch that leaves me free to concentrate on the sense of what I’m reading without being distracted by errors.

I just read about a major copy editing lapse at the New England Journal of Medicine where, you would think, attention would be paid to the fact that a mistake could actually be a life or death issue.

Typical, I say. For several years now I’ve been wondering if copy editing, even at major publishing houses, has been replaced by a quick run through a spell check program. So “here” can sometimes be “hear.” Or maybe “there’s” no “they’re” “their.” No book, it seems, is significant enough to get careful hands-on editing. I was particularly grieved to find two glaring mistakes in the late Wendy Wasserstein’s final work, her novel, “Elements of Style.” And more recently, the Pulitzer Prize winner “Tinkers,” too, had two sadly obvious problems. In fact, there’s hardly a book I’ve read lately where I haven’t noticed at least one error.

And, really, copy editing is one of those things that shouldn’t be noticed. It should be invisible. You should be able to read a book without thinking that someone had to make sure each word was right. Each word should, simply, be right.

Putting something in print gives it authority, so it had better be right. There is a lot of fine writing out in the world. And there is some good, careful editing, too. Maybe it’s economics. Maybe it’s the democratizing effect--good in so many ways--of everyone being able to publish instantly. Whatever the cause, there’s also a lot of bad writing, too, and it chips away at our respect for the craft, to the detriment of the good writers. And, perhaps even worse, careless editing leaves us distrusting the written word.

To all you copy editors, my thanks for work well and unobtrusively done. Your work may be invisible, but when it’s left undone or poorly done, it shows all too clearly. And we, as writers and readers, are the worse for it.

Life lessons

I’ve lost people lately--family members, friends, people I had known for years, and those I’ve known only recently. In each case I attended a funeral or a memorial service in which tributes were offered that spoke to various aspects of who these people were and what their importance was in the lives of others.

Yesterday I heard a nephew’s deeply loving--and beautifully written--tribute to a grandfather who, he said, had "only one laugh”--never a sarcastic or condescending or polite laugh, but only a genuine expression of humor to be relished and shared. A few weeks ago heard a woman talk of a poet friend’s passion for reading not only poetry but about the lives of the poets and what may have led them to write the particular words they wrote. I heard about a new friend--a man I met only after he had become quite ill--whose unremitting appetite for life lasted through physical trials that might have discouraged someone else.

And from hearing about each of these lives, I learned a little more about what I want in my own.

I’ve found that kind of lesson, too, in obituaries I’ve read. I know people don’t like to admit they read obituaries. It seems like the occupation only of the old. But I’ve been fascinated by them for years, these mini-biographies of people who have left some mark on my own times. They may have been well-known, maybe people I admired. Or maybe they were people I had never heard of. But their stories told me something about how lives are lived.

There is a line by Willa Cather which sounds very true to me and which I have quoted in my own writing: “There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Those stories have been lived before. Other people have discovered ways to live them and their examples offer lessons that can inform, even enrich, our own lives.

And so, to those writers of memorial service tributes and to the writers of obituaries as well as to the writers of biographies, my gratitude for teaching me more about what is important, what is enduring, what make a life of meaning in the world.

A favorite poem from a poet friend

Just for a treat today, here is a lovely poem by my friend June Beisch. This was published in the Harvard Review in 2006 and also appeared online on Verse Daily.

I had the great pleasure of reading with June a couple of months ago at the Concord Library. Everyone thereI enjoyed hearing her read her work and also hearing her use her natural teaching talents in her comments between poems.


In Muir Woods

Last night, a giant redwood fell
    either from old age, disease, or
"sometimes they just give up," the ranger said.
Listen, I was in the woods, I
    heard it too, like my own death
falling inside me.
Here in the last of the old growth forests
    where some trees are still virginal,
some older than Moses,
I thought, then, of you. You are not the one
    dying, you said to me,
and I quoted to you from Montaigne
that death was not a proper object of fear
    but only the end of life.
What is a proper object of fear, you asked,
and I said death of the heart.
    But life, you said, was
everything. And you were in love
with that beautiful lie.
Sometimes these trees send out
    all their sap at once
making them vulnerable, sometimes,
they grow burls of anxiety
Look, the ranger said to us,
    the bark is so wet because the tree
drinks hundreds of gallons of water a day
from the fog that rolls in
    over the Golden Gate Bridge.
That bridge which is so beautiful and which
holds such promise for tomorrow
    with its blue shimmering bay.
Every day when I see the fog now,
I think of you and then I can almost
    feel the fog cover me with
that enveloping mist, can almost feel
the branches of the redwood
    being kissed by its cold
ministrations. I would, if I could,
stand here all day like these trees, but my
    heart is so sore, it is almost ready to burst,
and I am filled, suddenly,
with a wild and insatiable thirst.

Just four words

I read the death notice for my friend Carol's mother in The Times the other day. I never met Carol’s mother and didn’t know much about her aside from the lingering decline of her last few years. But four words in the obit made her come alive in my mind. Not as the 90-something woman who had become the object of care and worry, but as her actual self. She had been, the paper said, a “double-dutch jump-roper.”

What a picture. Four words and she leaped--jumped!--off the page and back into to her own vibrant, active life. Those were just the exact words, like Cartier-Bresson's exact moment , to capture her image. I could picture her eager, spunky, full of fun, and maybe a little more athletic than was convenient for a young girl growing up in the 1920s or '30s. I could also imagine her as a likely source of Carol’s own spirit, energy, and courage.

Those four words also made me think, once again, about the power of every single word we choose to write or utter. Just a few can create a whole world. They can bring someone back to life.

Letters

Lately I’ve been thinking about letters. The kind we don’t get anymore. The kind we don’t send anymore. The kind we’re glad someone once wrote and saved. When Mozart was writing his opera “Idomeneo,” for example, he wrote long letters to his father discussing his work. I heard a talk about the opera the other night that included some discussion of how significant the letters were, to Mozart in thinking through and explaining what he was trying to accomplish in writing his first opera and to those who want to understand the work and the process more fully.

I heard that talk soon after I finished reading a book of letters between Wassily Kandinsky and his lover, also an artist, Gabriele Munter. I hadn’t known anything about her, or about their relationship I until I saw it referred to throughout an exhibit of Kandinsky’s paintings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last winter. The letters in the book were filled with triumphs and--more frequently--self-doubts about work on the part of each, along with talk of their relationship and also very touching encouragement from each to the other.

A few years ago I read another collection of letters, between Edith Wharton and Henry James. Again, with ups and downs and those self-torturing questions about their work and their lives. And, again, the focus on doing the work (James) and on how to get the work done in the face of family demands (Wharton). A reminder that probably the female half of any creative couple still has to figure out what’s for dinner, not to mention who bears and cares for the children. But that's another discussion.

Anyhow, all this leads me to wonder where the next generation of letters will come from , or if there will be any. Is anyone saving e-mails or text messages? And, if so, what will they tell us? Will it still feel like eavesdropping on a private conversation--in a good way?

In just a few years we’ve become conditioned to dropping everything at the sound of a “you’ve got mail” indicator. But remember the (admittedly less frequent) excitement of finding in an actual mailbox an actual letter with a stamp with handwriting and maybe a few smudges or cross outs, carrying, even invisibly, the fingerprints of an actual person who has written it? Aren’t we still--once we get over the shock--still excited to get one?

Maybe the next Mozart is, right now, sending a txt msg: “gud wrk on nu opra. mnc. l8r” Think someone’s going to save it?

New on the bookshelf: “Had Slaves” by Catherine Sasanov

What if you discovered a family secret, something that shook your whole idea of the family you came from? How would you begin to think about it, make sense of it? If you’re a poet, you might write about it, which is what Catherine Sasanov did when she discovered that members of her family had been slaveowners in 19th century Missouri. The result is her new poetry collection, “Had Slaves.”

I spoke with Catherine for my Boston Globe column back when she had written a chapbook called “Tara” about her family’s slave-holding past. Now this full-length collection is out from Firewheel Editions. In 2009 it was the winner of the Sentence Book Award, which is given annually to a manuscript consisting entirely or substantially of prose poems or other hard-to-define work situated in the grey areas between poetry and other genres. It was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

Catherine spent four years researching the lives of the Steele slaves of Southwest Missouri. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, "Traditions of Bread and Violence" (Four Way Books) and "All the Blood Tethers" (Northeastern University Press), and the libretto for "Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours," commissioned by Mabou Mines. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her journal publications include Pleiades, Field, Hotel Amerika, Agni, and Poetry. She lives in Boston. Her readings are listed at her website.

In reviewing her work for NewPages.com, Sima Rabinowitz wrote, "Sasanov demonstrates here, as she has in the past, that it is possible to tell a story in verse that takes advantage of what makes poetry so powerful, its magnificent potential for restraint, economy, and a kind of emotional precision that nearly defies comprehension."

I asked Catherine to tell more about “Had Slaves” and this is what she said:

“’Had Slaves’ was written out of my discovery in 2005 of slaveholding among my Missouri ancestors, and my field and archival research into what happened to their slaves. The book consists of lyric poems and prose poetics ending with a notes section. The notes are not there to explain the poems, but to help with greater historical or cultural context if readers want that. Since America’s racial history has been so poorly looked into and discussed, it felt important to make notes available.

“I’ve come to my subject as a first generation northerner on my father’s side. Except for two pieces of paper in my family's possession (an 1857 will where my ggg-grandfather, Richard Steele, leaves nine men, women, and children to his family members, and a note left by an elderly cousin where the words had slaves appear) there were no other written or spoken traces in my home of my bloodline's involvement with slaveholding. For that matter, except for the mention of a handful of events, the lives of my white ancestors were shrouded in silence, too. As if the past couldn't endure the journey from Springfield, Missouri, to Rockford, Illinois, the city my father settled in after WWII and where I was born and raised.

“It still takes my breath away to think that I could have gone to my grave without any idea of my family's slaveholding past, that something so terrible could have been swallowed up in silence. It didn’t help that I also grew up with a very ‘Gone With the Wind’ idea of the landscape it took to nurture slavery. A small Ozarks grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn wasn’t my idea of Tara. As if slavery couldn’t survive outside of an environment rich in moonlight, magnolias, Spanish moss, oak alleys, Southern belles, mammy, and the big house. These revelations really drove me to work against myth and bad history regarding where slavery took place, and who was involved in it. God-fearing ministers held slaves. Revolutionary War soldiers fighting for freedom owned them. Small landowners and men who supported the Union troops during the Civil War kept them. Examples of all four of these slaveholders exist in my bloodline alone.

“I traveled to Southwest Missouri in 2006 to do field and archive research, trying to find out what happened to the Steele slaves and freedmen. If I hadn’t come to the area already knowing that slavery was a part of its landscape, I would never have guessed it. Evidence that the black Steeles ever existed kept coming back paper, kept coming down archival, since every visual trace of slavery has been passively or actively eradicated from Greene County except in words. The evidence lurks in census, probate, and court documents, in business ledgers, doctor’s notes, bills of sale, tax lists, wills, appraisal sheets, death certificates, land deeds, Civil War pension files, marriage licenses, and plat maps. Paper as a kind of amber preserving the past. Its data are often untrustworthy, sometimes on purpose, sometimes from sloppiness. And while I logically knew that the information I looked at translated into human beings, the language of slavery is often constructed to make it easy for readers to distance themselves from the people being discussed. They can never be clearly envisioned.

“In writing ‘Had Slaves,’ I became something of a forensic anthropologist, fleshing out the bare boned, fragmented information I was uncovering about the individuals my ancestors owned. I wanted to make real that it was lives my family held in bondage, not a bit of cursive on a page, or a group of names that could be lumped into a faceless, unindividuated mass called slaves. At the same time, I wanted to reflect on how difficult it is to resurrect the dead when one works within the straitjacket of a shamed history: the paucity of details, lack of images of the people one is discussing, and nothing in their own words. I reflect on this absence in a number of poems, but the poem that most embodies it is the shortest in the book. It was written out of my knowing only that 19-year-old Steele slave Edmund was bequeathed by Richard Steele to his eldest son, a man who’d come up from Tennessee to collect him. The poem in its entirety reads:

Willed, Bequeathed: Edmund, Walked Towards Tennessee,
Is Never Seen Again: September 1860

The sky, the bloody
meat of it,
sutures itself
with geese

“Life was particularly brutal the further south a slave was sent, and it’s possible that Edmund may have been sold beyond Tennessee by his new owner, a man who may have been more interested in cash than another slave on the eve of the Civil War. It was something I had to consider since Edmund isn’t named among the black Steeles of Tennessee or Missouri after Emancipation.

“Slavery officially ended in the 1860s, but many of the people who survived it lived deep into the twentieth century, nipping at the heels of my birth. It staggers me that John D. Steele, the youngest slave owned by my family when the Civil War ended, died only four years before I was born."

Where do our words go?

This Sunday afternoon, March 14, I’m reading in Plymouth in “Poetry: The Art of Words,” the Mike Amado Memorial Series. The series is named for someone I never met, but to whom I am connected in a strange and humbling way.

One thing I know about Mike Amado is that one of the great pleasures of his brief life was writing poetry. Mike was ill for most of his life and died of kidney disease when he was just 34. He lived in Plymouth and was a musician and poet, the author of two collections, “Poems: Unearthed from Ashes” and “Rebuilding the Pyramids.”

Mike was also a member of the Bagel Bards, an informal group of Boston-area poets that meet on Saturday mornings, usually around an Au Bon Pain table in Davis Square. And that’s where he and I have a connection. I’ve sat around that table, too, and, when I wrote a column for The Boston Globe, I once wrote about the group. Mike read the column, found a poetry home at that table. The contacts he made there led to wider publication of his work and to frequent readings. He published his two books, started a reading series in Plymouth, attended a summer writing conference, and became a presence among area poets. Then he died, in early 2009.

His friend Jack Scully told me all this this later. It was Jack who had shown Mike my column and it is Jack who keeps the reading series going, with featured readers and an open mike.

Here is an excerpt from Mike's poem "An Offering of Eagle Feathers," which was published in Wilderness House Literary Review 4/4:

Show me the path through the pines, Let me feel
raindrops from young, green maples drape
my shoulders as I freely walk home again.
Here I will lay eagle feathers before we all become extinct.

So this Sunday when I’m the featured poet, I’ll be feeling the connection I have with this young poet I never met. But I’ll also be thinking about how our words, written and spoken, ripple out from our small circles and end up in places we cannot predict. We can never know their impact, good or bad. We can only know that they take on a life of their own. Sometimes we find out a little about where they go and whom they touch. And we can hope that they go out into the world to do good things.

The time of our lives

I have the honor of being a guest blogger on the blog of Melusine, an online journal of literature and art. (I am also delighted to have a poem in the current issue.) The blog post is about boredom, something I always dismissed, but am now taking a new look at.

A few years ago someone said that time plays a major role in my poetry. If that’s the case, I’m not surprised. It is a major theme in my life--my use of time, our allotted time, the accumulation of time. What I was thinking about when I wrote the piece on boredom was how we have so many tiny and often inconsequential demands on our time that we don’t even have enough time to get bored, and I think that’s a loss.

I used to have no tolerance for boredom. “Only boring people are bored,” was my watchword. But I’ve begun to think that what used to be boredom may now be more aptly called “unstructured time.” Every minute of our lives seems to have its demands, its--as Keats said in a way-pre-Google age--"irritable reaching after fact." Few of those demands are important and most of them are set up by us.

I thought about this--and wrote about it--recently when I found myself tempted by a shiny new smartphone. I have to confess that I have still not entirely closed the door on that, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make my decision in a way that still keeps me in charge of my time.

So here’s my new thinking on boredom. If we fill up every available minute, maybe we’ll never experience boredom. But maybe, too, we’ll never have the available time to think the thoughts that would be most creative or would make us most aware or would in some way add to the pleasure and significance of our lives. Maybe the free time, the unconnected time, to be a little bored would be the best gift we could give ourselves.

Here’s a challenge I'm setting for myself and offering to you, too: unplug a little. Not completely, just a little. See what comes into your mind. Maybe think of it as the new and improved boredom.

Only connect--but how much?

It started innocently enough. I was in the Verizon store on a quick errand, and, just for fun, I asked if I was at that two-year mark when I should look at a new cell phone. Sure enough, the saleschild looked up from his screen and said, “Oh, yeah.” So I wandered, flirting with the chained-down models, and found myself seduced by a cute little almost iPhone-like Palm.

I played with the stuff on the screen and visualized myself with 24/7 e-mail access. I pictured myself looking as if I belonged in this decade with a colorful phone and a cute little charging stand. And apps. Apps? Apps!

“Would you use it mostly for texting and e-mail or would you want to have a lot of games?” the salesboy asked.

“I’d be using it mostly as a phone.” My answer was disappointing to us both.

“Oh.” But he tried to regroup, showed me lots of cool features. I could picture myself using one or two of them. I left intending to think about it, ask around, learn more.

But when the Verizon spell wore off, I was left with the suspicion that maybe I didn’t want to be followed day and night by all my e-mail. The spam? Those nice chatty ones from friends that serve as mini-visits--I wouldn’t want those to demand my attention just when I’m out doing something else.

One of my favorite things about e-mail is its ability to wait for you. It’s not a ringing phone; you get it when you want it, when you have time to read it. I appreciate that as a sender, knowing that I’m not interrupting someone, and as a receiver, having that control over my time.

Time. That’s the thing. The one definite, finite commodity of our lives. The one thing that’s ours to use, to waste, to make of whatever we choose. Do I really want to add a new level of outside demands on it?

It’s especially too easy for writers to spend their days avoiding the time they have. “Now I’ll sit down to write...but first I’d like a cup of tea...and maybe I’ll do the Times crossword puzzle/ read one more chapter/ throw in a load of laundry...” And that’s even before checking the blogroll (which, unlike the morning newspaper, has no end) or having the stray thought that demands satisfaction from Google. Then maybe just a quick peek at the e-mail--oh, the pooch pottie and I could change my life today with a degree in medical records...And all that is without the phone ringing.

In this morning’s New York Times Sunday Styles section, there’s an article about people bucking the trend toward more apps on their phones. One woman is quoted as saying, “There’s this sense that I’m missing out on something I didn’t even know I needed.” Exactly. Just because they’ve built it, do we have to come?

I’m not sure what my decision will be, but right now I’m leaning away from the adorable little Palm and toward just a basic old phone. I know I’ll have regrets about all that missed coolness and cuteness. (If only there was a phone that looked cute and cool.) But how much of my life do I want to make available to outside demands? It’s my time. I think maybe I want to decide how to use it.

The end of a week of poetry prompts

Today is the final prompt in my series honoring my teacher, Ricky (Ottone Riccio) and his new book of poetry assignments, “Unlocking the Poem.”

Ricky is known for his poem-provoking assignments and I hope you've tried some of these. In the time I studied with him there was always that moment at the end of the workshop when he would say, “For next week...” And what followed was often something that sounded impossible, involving both form and content, and eliciting groans around the table. But, invariably, we returned the next week energized by our efforts, eager to share our poems, and enriched by the challenge to step outside our comfort zones and try something new. And, strangely, if he gave us a few weeks off to just write whatever we chose, we’d often ask for an assignment.

For today, I’m feeling benevolent, so no villanelles based on complex text, no Shakespearean sonnets on Sumerian goddesses. Just a free verse poem of 25 lines or a prose poem of 100-120 words on the subject of “year’s end.”

Did you have some fun with these prompts? Let me know.

Thursday poetry prompt

I continue with my week of poetry prompts in honor of my teacher, Ricky (Ottone Riccio)’s new book, “Unlocking the Poem,” written with Ellen Beth Siegel.

Here’s the one for today: write a poem based on this quote by Albert Einstein, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

Now, imagine the poem...

Another day, another poem

I’m blogging more frequently this week to let you know about a new book of poetry prompts, “Unlocking the Poem,” by my teacher, Ottone (Ricky) Riccio and Ellen Beth Siegel.

Today’s prompt comes from Ricky’s web site, where it is the assignment for the month of November: a rondeau about ocean waves crashing against the shore.

Here, from Ricky’s first book, “The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry,” is a little about the rondeau to get you started. “the rondeau evolved gradually from the older rondel and consists of 13 full lines of four beats each, arrange in three stanzas of five, three, and five lines. Only two rhyme sounds are permitted. At the end of the second and third stanzas there is a tail--a half line taken from the first half of the first line. It’s a non-rhyming tail and is frequently turned as a pun. Using R as the symbol for the tail, the rhyme pattern is aabba aabR aabbaR.”

It’s easier if you see an example, like this famous World War I-era poem by John McCrae
In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.


Now go try one of your own.

Today's poetry assignment

Yesterday I blogged about a new book of poetry prompts, “Unlocking the Poem,” by my teacher, Ottone Riccio--aka Ricky--and Ellen Beth Siegel. I offered a sample assignment. Today, as promised, another:

Write a poem, between 12 and 45 lines. It should be about you, but may not include any of the following: your name, birth date, place of birth, physical description, profession, schooling, family, partner.

Also as promised, here’s my poem from the wolves/skate prompt I talked about yesterday. And, yes, my mistake: it was wolves, not wolf. I had seen the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra play an outstanding concert of Peter and the Wolf on Saturday, so I think I was still in “wolf” mode. Though not wolf’s clothing.

So, are you writing a poem?

where the wild things are

the wolves are always waiting
staring into us with pale unblinking eyes

they watch us as we rush to hear Mozart
our red claws brushing past outstretched hands
we smile our crushed glass smiles
and hurry into cars
to restaurants with sparkling chandeliers

and the wolves with licking tongues
watch as we skate the knife edge
between day and night