Great Reads

As we remain self-quarantined, one of the best ways to treat ourselves is to read.

MEMORIES LOOKING THROUGH A SCREEN DOOR by Gerald Bigelow is a collection of poems that are a quiet protest against racism, a tribute to loved ones, a snapshot of communities, a history of time and place, an exploration of spirituality, and ultimately, the inevitability of aging.

Read them for the beauty of language, and lines that shatter you like ones from Must where a circus parade goes through town and “lions reach out/paw the air/create a fearful silence.”

The accompanying illustrations make a great companion to each section to the text. In his early years, he shows the precariousness of the world in which he lived, where fires erupted often. In poem #6, Bigelow writes, “I guess it was just the cost of doing business” of the the Plastics Factory fire, and “in those days people just died early.” “And they didn’t complain because they didn’t know any better.”

Bigelow points out how “grown folks give you directions… but “rarely do they give instruction on the safest way to get there.” Each poem in this collection of 87 has its own power. One that speaks loudest to me are Time Knows, in which “time knows the river, the same river flows/neither greeting/nor bidding farewell.”

Read them for their exploration on race, in It no longer matters, where Bigelow explores how “Your 1950s and my 1950s were not the same.” And finally, read these poems for the universal truth of growing older. “[in the mirror] I look and see lines and creases/ must be some kind of flaw in the glass.”

Happy Reading!

Why Do I Write YA?

When I still worked as a teacher and librarian it always saddened me to hear students say they hated to read. This was unimaginable to me. As a kid stories sustained me and were often my only friends during my family‘s frequent moves. Books were my guides to the world, a dialogue in an otherwise empty room. They were a message in a bottle.

It’s no accident I became a school librarian, English teacher, and later, a full time writer of YA. The seeds for our identities in the world are planted during middle grade and high school years. It's the first breath of independence from your parents. They may try to imprint their ideas and values on you, but during this time your personality forms its own framework.  You discover what you’re good at, what you suck at, who your friends will be, and if you’re lucky, what inner passions will drive you toward your life’s work.

I didn’t pay attention to the details of my identity, or perhaps I wanted to erase the Book Nerd stamp etched on my personality, so I wasn’t so lucky. Throughout my late teens and twenties I floundered around trying on a litany of college majors and half-assed jobs, and dating guys who, for the most part, were bad news.

Yet maybe I was lucky. These muddy side roads added layers to my experiences. Writers create alone, often sequestered in a small room in the back of their home or in a corner table in a coffee shop, but in order to create authentic work, writers also need experiences. We need to talk to people, work with our hands, know how it feels when someone breaks your heart.

In the late 80s, after finally earning my Bachelor’s degree with enough credit hours to have a PhD, I started writing. I wrote bad stories, wretched poems, and a really terrible novel. Most of that work is hidden in a file drawer. While my early work will never see daylight, to throw it out would dishonor the progress I have made. All writers start out being bad writers. Our work is derivative, filled with cliché, and often inauthentic. We haven’t learned to trust the process, to slice your heart open and bleed into the work. We get better by writing, reading, writing more, writing deeply, reading, revising, taking workshops, writing, writing, writing….

Good writing is driven by passion. I’m not talking about Harlequin romance lust, though many fine writers write romances. By the time I was thirty I realized books and words were my passions, and in quick succession earned a masters degree in library and another in writing. As a certified Book Nerd (aka school librarian and English teacher), my work opened up a new arena for writing.

Everyone has a story and writers are story magnets. If we listen, people strangers  share their heartbreaking, tender, funny, sad, incredulous, and authentic stories. They are my muses.

As a teacher my heart was further broken to hear students groan and roll their eyes when I broached the subject of poetry. To them, poets are all dead white guys who use too much flowery language and write about things that have nothing to do with their lives.

They had yet to encounter Pablo Neruda.

By teaching Neruda’s poems, my students learned “the word was born in the blood.” They were attracted to the violence in how the knife assassinates the tomato pulp and “how the sun floods the salads of Chile, beds cheerfully with blonde onion, “and parsley flaunts it little flags,” the in Ode to a Tomato.

One can't teach passion, yet my fervor for Neruda’s poems elevated my students’ concept of what poetry is, and opened the door to reading and writing poetry. It’s also no accident Pablo Neruda simmers at the root of my novel.

My characters in BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA aren't real (except to my readers and me,) yet their inception comes from an authentic place. My life experiences inform me, and allow my imaginary friends to channel their stories through me.

Digital publishing and social media have allowed everyone and his brother to easily promote their books, so a recent phenomenon for writers is to promote their ‘platform.’ Initially this concept left a bad taste in my mouth, as if I’m a product like running shoes or a bag of chips.

Platform can be defined as what we stand for or what causes we support. I believe in Pablo Neruda, poetry, books, and stories. Stories are the thread binding us together, peeling back the mysteries of our own existence.

Words are my platform.  Happy Reading!!

Meanwhile, here’s a review
http://www.cleavermagazine.com/breakfast-with-neruda-by-laura-moe/

A Poem is a Simultaneous Act of Resistance and Praise

I recently attended the annual Antioch Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Back in 1988, when I was a fledgling writer, it was my first of many writers’ conferences. I have grown immensely since 1988, but that doesn't mean I have nothing left to learn.

I came away from the first workshop feeling the molecules in my body had changed, so I was excited to return to Yellow Springs for another week. The original conference was held at Antioch College, a lovely liberal arts campus. I had known the college closed for awhile, but they had reopened with a small student body, and i believed this conference would be held at the college. (This was explicit on the web site, but I tend to skim details.) When I drove into town, the old college looked like news footage of Bosnia. I drove around the abandoned buildings until I found a groundskeeper who told me the workshop is now held at the new Antioch University Midwest campus just at the edge of town.

Enough back-story. What did I glean from this experience?

We go to conferences to make connections with other like-minded souls. My friends and family don't mind that I write, but they don't care about the process. Only other writers understand suffering over the word, fretting over using ‘mysterious’ vs. ‘esoteric’ in a sentence or line.

In the morning craft talk on day one, poet Jeff Gundy discussed Finding What Shines and how poets hurry slowly. The energy behind our work is in the quickly written draft, but the soul of it evolves slowly through multiple revisions.

He paraphrases William Stafford and Donald Hall by stating, "Write great poems but lower the standard." As poets we want to write grand messages that will solve the world's problems and carve our names in infamy. Yet as Jeff points out, we need to lower our lofty goals and write for an audience of possibly just ourselves. We can't solve the world's problems in one poem. We can only tap at them, nudge a small reaction, which creates another reaction, where poems speak to other poems (and the reader.)

A poem comes from a life, not a study. William Stafford writes in Writing the Australian Crawl, “When I write, grammar is the enemy…Swimmers know that if they are relax on the water it will prove to be miraculously buoyant….writers know that a succession of little strokes without any prejudgments about the specific gravity of a topic…will result in creative progress.”

Poems that matter also go beyond craft . In an essay The Art of Finding, Linda Gregg states, “Too often in workshops and classrooms here is a concentration on the poem’s garments instead of its life’s blood.”

. “You can produce fine poems without believing anything…” we have all seen well crafted work that possess attention to diction and syntax, but under the glossy surface is air. This type of writing becomes “manufacturing instead of giving birth.”

Do we need to know what every poem means? Lit teachers like to beat meaning to death. I don't always care about literal meaning because my accumulation of life experience does not echo yours, and we will find multiple meanings in the same combination of words. What feels blue to me renders you orange.

This is what Jeff terms as a ‘happy problem’.

Beginning poets often believe poetry relies of self expression. It's all about me! Well, no, it's not.
You kind of don't matter after all. You are only a channel. Poems that matter are about what happens around you, not just to you.


The poems we looked at in session 1 were Some Say Horsemen, Some Say Warriors, by Sappho; The River at Wolf, by Jean Valentine; The Half-Finished Heaven, by Tomas Transtromer (tr. Robin Fulton); All the Fruit, Friedrich Holderlin, (tr. Robert Bly]; and When the Neighbors Fight by Terrance Hayes.

His exercise was to let yourself be drawn to a line or two in one of the poems and let that line open your imagination to praise or lament. Essentially the line becomes a catalyst for your own poem.

Above all, read poetry

Time Keeps on Shrieking into the Future

The Scintilla 8 prompt has to do with writing about how you feel about a specific time in your life. This time I chose to write a poem. Maybe my mind is already set for April and National Poetry Month.

Stowing Away the Time

Thirty years ago it was yesterday.
The sun wrinkles time.
Knowledge etches lines on the skin.
Knowing grows grey hair.
Words are thinned by lips.
Aches are heavy with chins.
A body is scattered in broken bones.
The heart is stronger in years,
yet funerals shed more tears
The soundtrack to my life
is now sold at a discount

Laura Moe


Exercise
The weather has turned and you need to go outside. Using Basho’s quote:”Unless things are seen with fresh eye, nothing is worth writing down”, find a place or object (flower, weeds, the sun), sit, and observe. Take field notes as if you are in a biology class. Use all the senses. What di you see? Smell? Hear? Taste? Feel? Take your notes and connect your subject with a larger theme to create a metaphor.ie, Sun and eternity, or a blade of grass and the passage of time.)


Happy Writing.

A Tribute to a Luminous Poet

Poets are not mere mortals, and their passing, even if I have never met the poet, saddens me deeply. Former Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska died on February 1st. NPR calls her a “poet of gentle irony” who “deployed a whimsy,…even ion weighty themes.” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski wrote, "In her poems we could find brilliant advice which made the world easier to understand."

At 88, her career spanned more than sixty years, and at the time of death she was still working. In spite of her long career, only 400 poems survived her “ trash bin in my room.”Symborska said, “A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive."

If you are not familiar with her work, and you should be, please visit the following link.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/340

As a tribute to Ms. Szymborska, I composed the following poem.

The Last Time it Snowed in Krakow
for Wislawa Szymborska

She sits by the window of her apartment, a cat on her lap and a cup of tea in her hand, watching.

On the street below it snows; it is always snowing these days, she thinks.

She sets down her tea and writes the line, The last time it snowed in Krakow was the day I died.

She strokes the cat, stretched across her thighs like a striped yogi, and imagines its thoughts in her absence.

In her poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment”, where something doesn’t happen as it should, she foretold this unfortunate creature’s future.

The cat will lie awake like a lone bird on a housetop; his days will pass like smoke as the poet’s ashes burn.

“You’ll be a pelican in the wilderness,” the poet says to her yawning companion, "because my days are declining like shadows.”

She ponders the weight of its grief; Ecclesiastes said he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Soon the cat will know the weathered world outside the window lays out its welcome mats only so long.





Happy Writing.