Writer@9600ft: Writing News and Craft
for my mother 1929-2020
Already the moon pales, half-cast above fields, shifting, done.
The darkness that comes speaks, weaves half-words
of the timorous blown cottonwoods, conducts quiet bird sound,
the long sad cry of wind,
Of suburban dogs, of geese tilting toward silver water.
I stand half in it, in the half-light of barns,
Of remembered porches, half-voices of my mother and father,
speaking to me still
Funny and wonderful where your poems can end up. Thank you, Michael King of Cascadia Publishing House, for sharing this one of mine.
One of the surprises, soul-saving surprises, of this pandemic has been the creativity and generosity of care shown by so many, including the artists and writers of this world. The Gatherings Project is the brainstorm of artist Lynda Lowe: 56 boxes painted by professional artists and then sent out into the world to see what gifts they would gather. The boxes have now been sold and the profits donated to arts funding organization/s with well-established relief funds for creatives. Here’s the story of one box.
A few weeks ago at the Arvada Center, my friend Trine Bumiller handed me a cardboard shipping box tucked into a ragged shopping bag. Inside that box was a beautiful gold-painted wooden box with an orchid (erotic, as Trine described it) by the painter Fred Lisaius
And inside that golden box was Trine’s delicate rendering of a pine tree, inspired, I think, by her current gallery exhibit in Alaska, In Memoriam
And a poem by the poet Todd Davis about his mother in a memory care unit.
And I could add anything I wanted to continue this cycle of receiving and giving during this isolation of a pandemic. And so I did from the poems and photos I’ve been taking during this pandemic. Here, the swallows I watch along the old gravel pits by the South Platte River.
There’s something truly beautiful about artist and writers collaborating to bring some solace and support in a time of sadness for so many. See all the Gatherings beautiful boxes. And go to the Arvada Center to see the inspiring Pink Progressions: Collaborations exhibit of paintings, poetry, sculpture, installations, videos, and performance celebrating the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment.
The Colorado Sun is asking all of you, anyone with the capacity and the willingness to commit your thoughts to print, to share your observations of the many aspects of this remarkable period. We’ll publish select pieces periodically — an ongoing time capsule of sorts — as we confront the challenges ahead of us.
Email your work to kevin@coloradosun.com.
Include your name, address, phone number and a photo. They ask you limit submissions to 1,000 words.
Late Snow on an Easter Morning
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
rosy finch, nuthatch and house wren quibbling at the copper feeder I hung just a day ago
before the late frost air drifted through.
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
so I dry dishes at the sink, forget the days’ count since the last pink moon.
The wood stove burns and unquiet sparrows gather in the gathering snow.
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
rosy finch, nuthatch, and house wren quibbling at the copper feeder I hung just a day ago.
Finished reading James Agee’s “A Death in the Family.” Been thinking a lot about the “poetry of prose” in creative nonfiction these days. Not just the lyrical beauty of prose, though it’s hard not to get stuck in a brilliant passage like this, “fiction” as it may be, from Agee as he describes the evening noises of a neighborhood settling down toward sleep, the fathers after dinner hosing down the summer yards:
Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise three-noted, like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain.
Look at that little piece of figurative language, those links of a silver chain slipping. Just look and listen. In a piece I did for Essay Daily on the lyric impulse, about a student who wouldn’t look at her own bricks strewed throughout her essay on building a house, I quoted from the philologist Max Mueller, who said, “man, as he develops his conceptions of immaterial things, must perforce express them in terms of material things because his language lags behind his needs.” What I understood then was that figurative language becomes the vehicle for greater precision of expression; exactitude grows through metaphor, not necessarily through narrative.
I still believe it. Leonard sent me to a stunning essay published in the New York Times, I’m Going to Die. I May as Well Be Cheerful About It, by Mary Pipher. My mom is almost 91 and she wants to die, which she tells me every time I see her, so I think a lot about death now.
At the end Pipher’s essay, Pipher suddenly turns to the image of snow, what becomes the profound metaphor of her piece: “All of my life I have loved snow.” She then describes a beautiful memory of her and her family safely ensconced in their home while a Nebraska blizzard raged outside. That memory becomes a spiritual experience, snow outward and inward until death becomes a whiteout. There is the great precision, the greater exactitude of metaphor:
Snow falls inside and outside of me. It settles my brain and calms my body.
I hope death feels like watching the snow grow thicker and thicker. Doctors call dying of a morphine overdose being “snowed.” I would not mind that at all. I would like to disappear in a whiteout.
As I tried to tell that student of mine so long ago who wouldn’t pick up the gift of the bricks she had given herself for even a moment, sometimes we have to hold the thing our heart sends us, though unbidden, though not always understood, and let it just be for a little while, filled with mystery and some other kind of better truth.
#writerat9600ft
My newest book, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children from Saddle Road Press, available through Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Powell’s Books, and Indie Bound.
A Collaboration of Writers and Artists : the PINKPROGRESSION in Denver
Just over three years ago, a sea of women in protest of the rhetoric and actions that permeated the 2016 election donned their pink pussy hats. They marched arm in arm with citizens of all genders and races in a breathtaking show of solidarity against the walls of misogyny and racism. This historical march ignited artists and writers across the country to continue the movement in exhibits that showcase “human rights, equality, gender identity, and inclusivity.”
Well, the PINKPROGRESSION is here, now, in Denver. It honors the fourth anniversary of the Womxn’s March and the centennial anniversary of Women’s Suffrage. A week ago, Poet Carol Guerreo-Murphy and I, through google docs of all things, put in the last line breaks and the last fusion of images in our series of collaborative poems, Two Women Poets of (Certain) Age: Letters of ( ).
We’ll join over twenty fabulous Colorado artists, poets, and writers in the Poetry + art reading and book launch at theMcNichols 3rd floor gallery, March 14th from 1-3p.m. as part of the PINKPROGRESSION:COALESCE exhibit. The reading will be followed by a writing workshop, A Letter to My Mother, presented by Eriko Tsogo from 3-4 p.m. The book will accompany all 2020 exhibits.
I know as we wove our poems together, through a surprisingly creative technology, that Carol and I thought about our daughters and our daughters’ daughters and their sons. My friend Monica Fuglei’s little girl, topped in the pink pussy hat that Monica knitted for her, reminds me of the world of beauty and creativity and acceptance that we can’t just want, but demand for them. I am looking forward to seeing the worlds and visions my fellow artists and writers created in their collaborations. I hope you will join us.
The PINKPROGRESSION:COALESCE exhibit continues through April at the McNichols Civic Center. PINKPROGRESSION: COLLABORATIONS exhibit, a fusion of narratives and mixed media opens at the Arvada Center in June through August. These exhibits include collaborative art exhibits, artist talks, workshops, readings, and book launches. Go to Pink Progression for all the details.
Whitman? Socrates? Magis? “Garage Publishing?” Sacred mornings? Ruffians? Exactly how does one go about interviewing Edward Hirsch, the President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation?
Continue reading “Interviewing the Poet Edward Hirsch: Poet Marty McGovern Shares His Recent Conversations with Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation” →
My friend, the poet Carol Guerrero-Murphy, and I go waaay back to the late 1980s when we were both completing our doctorate degrees in Literature and Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Denver.
Jobs, daughters (and son), and books later, we’ve found ourselves following similar paths again: retirement, partial teaching employment, writing, and books.
Chained Dog Dreams (Finishing Line Press) is Carol’s second poetry book. Her first book, Table Walking at Nighthawk– this early winter, I even got the privilege of climbing over the family gate with Carol and walking up a snowy lane to her ancestral cabin in Nighthawk- was a finalist for the WILLA Prize in Poetry. Laura Pritchett calls this collection of poems, “quietly moving, deeply felt look at our vulnerable world, our vulnerable souls.”
Continue reading “An Interview on The Journey of a new book, Chained Dog Dreams, by Carol Guerrero-Murphy” →
I was in the Florida Keys, reading the poet Ocean Vuong’s genre-blurring novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, off my Kindle when the first social media posting of Michael Steinberg’s death appeared in my Earthlink. Michael, writer and founding editor of the literary journal, The Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and I had just emailed each other a couple months before because, as all the beautiful tributes to Michael’s generosity attest to, he had kindly agreed to write a blurb for my upcoming book, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, despite his upcoming eye surgery, asking only that I send my manuscript in large script. I did not realize then how serious his eye condition was, nor to what discovery it would, so sadly, so soon, lead.
But even before I heard about Michael’s death, Vuong’s novel, a soaring and lyrical tour de force about Little Dog and his family of refugees from Vietnam, had me thinking about the convergence of poetry and prose and what Michael had written to me a few years ago when I asked him to be part of an AWP presentation on the lyric essay.
Continue reading “Convergences of Poetry and Prose: In the Light of Ocean Vuong and Michael Steinberg” →