Our local Poet Laureate, Will Reger, and the Urbana Arts and Culture Program, created an opportunity for local poets to write poems to accompany 4 murals (also by local artists) that the city commissioned a few years ago. My poem “At the Iron Post” was selected to be displayed in downtown Urbana under the tremendous mural entitled “Portrait of Chip McNeill” by Christopher Evans. Yesterday we had the ribbon cutting ceremony and I just can’t even say how cool this feels for me.
Clifford Brooks, Jr. is the editor of the Blue Mountain Review and founder of the Southern Collective Experience. He’s a pretty amazing guy. I got acquainted with him through email after I won 2nd place in the Women of Resilience Chapbook contest. The tone of his correspondence was the virtual equivalent of a warm smile and a huge hug from a person that really means it. So when he asked me if he could interview me for his other endeavor, an NPR radio show called Dante’s Old South, I couldn’t say no. And even though I was pretty nervous going into it, he put me at ease right out of the gates. You can hear the interview on the 18th episode of the show, at about the 17 minute mark or so. Anyway, cheers to Clifford Brooks for encouraging me and for giving me a place to tell about my journey as a writer. It felt great. Also interviewed are the third place winner, Angela Dribben, and the first place winner, Laura Ingram, both remarkable women with interesting stories. You can listen to all three of us here.
Some outsiders insist that this part of the country has it’s charm, but I figure they’re just being polite. No one comes to visit. Our guest room is kind of a joke. Who wants to spend a day of their precious vacation time visiting East Central Illinois, when you could be in the mountains or near the ocean or in an enormous forest? But for the last couple of weeks we–the people of Urbana–have been posting pictures of this sunflower field on the east side of town and dare I say it? It’s stunning.
And it’s not lost on us. Each night enough people head out to Stone Creek Boulevard that it’s tricky to park. You see fancy clothes, selfie sticks, professional photographers, wheelchairs being wheeled off the sidewalks, mediation rugs, tai chi practitioners and children squealing as they run in the tall stalks. It’s quite a spectacle. And just the thing for a community so starved for delight. With no pools open, no Sweetcorn Festival and no County Fair, it’s been a bleak summer. This field was a timely gift, a beautiful surprise and one that will be well-remembered in photos.
I’m working on a poem about it. I know it’s strange, but I find it much easier to write about hard things than I do writing about something so plainly lovely. It’s so easy to fall into cliche or to write something saccharine and forgettable. But I’m not giving up! Until then, I just offer this picture I took of the field at sunset. Isn’t it something?
It’s been a tough year at our house. Our particular issues are unique–but who isn’t struggling right now?
A friend said recently to me, “It’s been the kind of year that turns your lights out.” And isn’t that it? Yes. That’s it, right there, for me anyway. I’m trying to write a poem worthy of that line, but for now I’ll just put this picture I took of a sunset in northern Germany. If you can’t keep the light on in your life, you have to try to hang on to its memory. That’s the best I cant think to do, anyway.
I have a thing for doors. I found this one in Germany last year. I may write a poem about it, but maybe it’s a poem unto itself…
I was very taken by this powerful poem. I hope you will take the time to listen to it.
One year ago my husband gave me the gift of a week-long stay at Christ in the Wilderness in JoDaviess County, Illinois. Both my brother and my mom had done silent retreats there. The place is just a few miles from the family farms of both my mother’s parents. It is also where my mother grew up and where I lived for about 4 years of my childhood. I feel deeply connected to this beautiful part of Illinois, also known as the Driftless Area. Unlike much of the rest of the state, it is forested, with hills and bluffs and river valleys and rock formations. Yes, there are also farms with red barns and pastured cows and cornfields, but it feels decidedly different from most of the rest of Illinois which was scraped flat by glaciers.
When I arrived, the nun that runs the place hoisted my things into the back of her ATV and drove me through a meadow and then over a steep, washed out, rocky road into the woods until we saw the view you can see from this picture. I stood in the threshold of my little hermitage and tried to hold off crying until she was gone. It was such a gift to have all that uninterrupted time and solitude in such a beautiful place.
I was so eager for some uninterrupted time to focus on writing–to read, to write, to revise and to put together a chapbook manuscript. I organized my files, typed up poems I had in notebooks, assembled a draft of a manuscript on the twin bed. I read The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver as well as plenty of books of poetry I had brought along. In the between times, I cooked small meals for myself or took naps. I also spent a lot of time on the screen porch, watching wildlife parade by, lost in thought. I went for long walks in the woods. I filled a notebook that would have taken me months to fill at home. I was alone–more alone than I had maybe ever been in my life. Sometimes I even felt a little too alone and too isolated. One night when it stormed and I couldn’t go outside for my evening walk, I felt a surprising sense of cabin fever. I didn’t imagine that a week would feel so long! But a week in one place with no other people was quite a shock to my system after years of living with a husband and kids and a dog and a full time job. Also, I really wanted to leave the door unlocked and the windows open at night but I just couldn’t do it–I couldn’t shake my city sense that there was danger after dark. But overall, I felt so much peace and a very uncomplicated joy I hadn’t felt in many years.
It was not too long after this experience that I published my first poem. And then my second and third and fourth. This retreat was my chrysalis–I climbed in not knowing what to expect and I emerged a week later feeling quite changed. I’m so grateful for the experience.
Since this picture was taken, my kids have faced some pretty tough things in their personal lives. Now they are also navigating the momentous changes brought about by COVID 19, not to mention the ever-present backdrop of climate and social justice crises that worry them so.
It’s a hard time to be anything right now, but I’d say the thing I’m struggling the most with is being a mom. Assuring kids that there is a bright future waiting for them when they hear so much evidence to the contrary is a tough job. And sometimes I feel like a snake oil salesman when I do.
This poem by Maggie Smith has been such a comfort to me over the last few years, but never more so than it is now.
The title of this blog comes from a favorite poem of mine by the Latin poet and philosopher Lucretius, written sometime in the 1st century BC. It’s incredible to me how relevant it is today.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lucretius )
On the Nature of Things…
No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
You too, oh earth-your empires, lands, and seas –
Least with your stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these you too
Shalt go. You are going, hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are, shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. Life lives on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives, that die.
They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all-indissoluble All:-
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain’s foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.
Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!
Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.
Atoms to atoms-weariness to rest –
Ashes to ashes-hopes and fears to peace!
O Science, lift aloud your voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills –
Thrills through the conscience with the news of peace –
How beautiful your feet are on the hills!
My mom is a writer, too. She writes novels. When I was a kid, before computers, she kept her manuscripts in boxes. I knew even then that writers worked day and night, behind closed doors, for months on end to fill their boxes. I thought that novelists were the top of the writer heap. I mean, look at those page counts! Staying up all night to finish a chapter! And then one glorious day, a bound book is born!–a thing they can hold, and know that the heft of words in their hands is entirely the fruit of their labor. That they created a whole world people could slip into. And people would want to stay there for days or weeks–however long it might take to read the thing.
For me, that was the only real writing. That was the pinnacle. But I don’t seem to have the stamina or focus for writing a novel. I get bored of my characters. I tire of my own voice. I sabotage my ideas at some point along the way and decide it’s all stupid–the plot, the twist, all of it. Sometimes I think I decided to write poetry out of laziness. Or impatience.
But maybe not? Maybe I’m not a marathon runner in writing, I’m a sprinter. My ideas leap out of the starting blocks and surge into something in a hurry. Like a tulip, I spring up fast, stick with it out a week or two, then peter out. But tulips are nice, right? I’ve always appreciated a tulip. I’ve always admired the sprinters. They’re not less of a runner than a marathoner, right? Just different types of muscle, something different in our brains.
