Wendy Brown-Baez's Blog: Wendy's Muse

We have passed Imbolc, the turning of the season from darkness to light, but it is also the time of year when I feel most impatient with the cold. Brigid, who brings us inspiration, enters bearing light and takes with her everything we no longer need. I feel the burden of darkness' uncertainty, the necessity of keeping warm in freezing temperatures and having a safe place to hibernate. I am writing with women who are victims of domestic violence or who have been living precariously at the edge of staying alive at this stage of the grant and I ask them to write about home, home as sanctuary, home as refuge. I think of the poem How to Own Land by Morgan Farley:

Find and spot and sit there
until the grass begins
to nose between your thighs.
Climb to the top
of a pine and drink
the wind’s green breath.
Track the stream through alder and scrub,
trade speech
for that cold sweet babble.
Gather sticks and spin them into fire.
Watch the smoke spiral into darkness.
Dream that the animals find you.
They weave your hair into warm cloth,
string your teeth into necklaces,
wrap your soft skin around their feet.
Wake to the silence
of your scattered bones.
Watch them whiten in the sun.
When they have fallen to powder
and blown away,
the land will be yours.

I think of how I am home yet not at home: Minnesota has been good to me, not only the grant funding but the church where I connect with a spiritual community and my weekly Divine Vitamin, dozens of cultural events to inspire and uplift my soul, writers who come to my classes with a story that is begging to be told and I have the priviledge to coax it out. And yet, my bones ache with the winter winds, my spirit demands beauty in natural settings whereas I am surrounded by buildings and pavement, and my heart wants a place to unwind, sanctuary that is all mine, not borrowed or loaned but where I can walk about naked after my shower and spin in the living room to loud music.

It is such an odd synchronicity that my piece Seeking Shelter has been accepted into Holy Cow! Press' anthology about Home. In my essay I lament the dozens of times I moved and celebrate creating a sense of home wherever I am with simple things such as a shawl spread over a table to become an altar, photos of my loved ones, a few favorite books.

For the women who are refocusing after moving from unsafe places, who now may live in the shelter either at Harriet Tubman (where we just finished a 6 week writing workshop) or Cornerstone in Bloomington (where we are into the third week of 6), I can ony imagine their frustration, their hope, their joy when they do get their own place, the courage it took to get out, the courage to say they deserve to be in their own skins, their own kitchens, their own lives without fear.

It's been a long time since I have written anything here. The writing workshops that I am able to offer due to the grant have taken up more energy than I realized they would: connecting with the organizations and scheduling, paperwork and background checks, lesson planning and copying hand outs, bus rides and teaching. But it's been wonderful to feel I am finally doing what I was put here to do. I began with The Bridge for Youth (transitional housing for homeless youth), Shingle Creek Commons senior center, community editors meetings at Saint Paul Almanac, and now am at Pathways healing center (Care for the Care-giver) and Harriet Tubman, services for families in crisis (that is to say, victims of domestic violence). Also, I am teaching at the men's prison in Stillwater. Besides the grant I have been teaching at other schools; participants in my writing workshops have ranged in age from 16 to 76.

Needless to say, my own writing time has been subsubed into the workshop writing time. It has been amazing to find new perspectives and new ideas emerging from the same prompts I have used over and over. It is amazing to see my writing twist and bend to resonnate with the group. And it has been amazing to hear writers break through to tell the stories, stories that have been on their minds for years. Finally they feel safe and strong enough to let them burst through, finally they have been heard.

We have had tears as we write about childhood abuse, family curses, loss and grief, fear of the unknown future after a health crisis, and tettering between sanity and madness. We have also heard stories about strength and courage, survival and healing, transformation and joy.

I will share what I wrote last night at the prison. Our prompt was "the direction of hope" from my poem Traveling Home. I normally don't share my own poems. There are plenty of contemporary poems to choose from and I love reading something unexpectedly poignant in simple language. But the grant gives me permission, since part of its purpose is to bring my work out into the community. After I had passed out the sheets of paper to the guys, I realized I hadn't even signed my name to it. This poem was written after the Megabus ride home from the AWP conference in Chicago, after hearing news of the latest tornado.

Traveling Home

On both sides of the highway
barren woods gleam in winter’s last gasp.
The bus is warm and the boy
seated next to me has fallen asleep,
his face pressed to the cold glass. My legs ache

to stretch, tromp through the snow,
leave white etchings across the stream
meandering to the north.
I imagine a sleigh and tingling bells, the
fur around my neck like a romantic Laura.

Images of debris after the tornado
dusted with snow aches behind my eyes
whenever I close them, the last thing
I saw on the tv screen before I left the city.
The photo’s relentless gaze: a man in church,

head bowed, weeping. A child named Angel
rescued from the rubble, removed from life
support this morning. The snow,
relic of a milder-than-usual winter,
prevents clean up or closure.

The townspeople have lost
the simple kitchen chairs, the plates
stacked on a shelf, the pile of boots
slung in a corner, the coffee table
loaded with lego pieces and old magazines,

the toy trucks and framed treasures.
The tornado took everything,
even the direction of hope.
The bus carries me back to what is familiar,
the boy next to me sleeps.

"The direction of hope"
The direction of hope for me is to put one foot in front of the other, take one breath after the other, one day at a time, as the saying goes. The direction of hope is the only direction I can go in. To go backwards into regret is to sink into despair and I have given enough of myself to that enemy of time. I always believe--I always believed--in the power of love, in the truth that we are meant to serve one another--and each time I have fallen down, I have gotten back up. The direction of hope is the rainbow after the storm and I have loved rainbows because they stretch across the grey skies and are not hindered by the fact that they are grey. The direction of hope is the star on the Christmas tree that reminds us that we are not forgotten, though the darkness be long and our own footsteps falter. The direction of hope is to see my legacy behind me--the children I taught to read is one of my favorite tributes to the power of language and words to open our minds. The direction of hope is to know that this may be the only life we have but we always get as second chance. It may not look like the one we wanted but it is the one we have to grab.

There was a time when I believed the computer and cell phones are bad for your brain. Perhaps they are, there is evidence that cell phones of 4G power can create energy drain and texting while driving is a hazard not only to your own health. But what would I do without technology? I suppose somewhere there is a technology god to give offerings to. If anyone knows His/Her name, could you please let me know? I am grateful, so very grateful, that I have the ability to instantly let people know my thoughts, my projects, my progress, and my creative inspiration. To celebrate, ponder, and network and to create.
Now I need you! I have created a fb page to document the process and progress of my grant. If you read the last blog post here, I have recieved a 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board award to bring writing workshops into non-profit organizations over a year's time with the goal of presenting dynamic, transformative poetry as part of the technique to enter self reflective writing. I want to share current news of the grant's progress without sending out emails each time, so the quickest solution is to have a fb page. This also enables me to create an internet presence and although I will be posting some things on my website, fb, let's face it, is quick and efficient. I will maintain my personal-poetic fb page as well, so if you are my "friend" you can keep track of my latest published poem, photos of my grandsons, and interesting news that has caught my attention.

If you have a fb account, please click the "like" button on my page
www.facebook.com/WritingCirclesForHea...
I have posted a condensed version of my proposal for the grant.

I am excited that we are connected in cyberspace. I never thought it would be possible that I can sit in my study, no matter if I am still in my pjs or bones aching from arthritis reacting to the damp and be writing to you!

Keep the creative fires burning!

Celebrate with me! I want to share my good news: I am the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. The grant will enable me to take writing workshops into 12 non-profits from May '12 - May '13. The proposal I submitted was to offer 4 sessions of 2 hours each. This can be for the clients or tailored for the staff to share my techniques.

I can also offer a presentation of my own work which is performance-based, that is, I act out my poems dramatically with story telling and props. The idea is to bring accessible, relevant poetry to audiences who are not usually readers of poetry. The goal is to create an intimacy with the audience and take us through a transformation as I share my story of healing and awakening.

I also use contemporary poetry as jump starts for the writing process. Self-reflective writing is a therapuetic tool for healing. Writing and sharing our words can help us change perspective and find courage and comfort. Poetry helps us to access the right brain, the seat of intuition. As I get to know the individuals in the circle, I select poems that I think will be relevant or resonate. It is my ability to pay attention that makes me the facilitator. Also, my job is to create a safe space where we are not judged as so many of us are our own worst critics. I am often surprised by the quality and honesty that I hear as well as what flows from my own pen.

The idea for this proposal came to me years ago. I submitted a similiar proposal in 2007 but I didn't get the grant. In looking back, I see that now the timing is perfect: the hips are healed from surgery, the poetry books are published and I have more experience in leading writing groups.

I feel like the poor widow in the parable: I found my gold coin, rejoice with me!

What I want to tell you is: Don't let go of your dreams. They take perserverance, they take work, they take faith. Yes, there are some of us out there with first published book becoming best sellers and the best teaching positions. I can not tell you how many rejections of poems and stories I have received and how often no one registered for a writing group or not enough people to make it happen. But I have this year to live out my dream and I am gratefully awed. Thank you, more please.

At what point does a love of reading become the desire to write? In Writing as a Way of Healing: how telling our stories transforms our lives, Louise A. DeSalvo writes that many of us become writers due to something that happened in childhood: trauma, shocks such as loss, death, incest, violence, racism, homophobia, or just feeling misunderstood, outcast, other. At what point did this happen to me, that I began to pencil the first mystery novel in third grade? Was it because I had had congenital hip dislocation and spent a year in a cast and a year in braces? Did I feel abandoned by losing my mother’s attention when my brother was born? Was it the tension between my parents who were too young, too broke, and opposite in temperament? Was it when my mother left me in the care of my grandmother for several days? And yet: my grandmother was my first case of true love. I always wanted to be with her and went for sleep-overs every week-end until she retired and moved to Florida. And my brother, I bossed him around until he got big enough to fight back. I have the photos of our tea parties to prove it. And as for the casts and braces, my father built me a rolling platform so I could scoot around the house and yard. When I turned 7, I started dance lessons and cartwheeled my way to notoriety on the playgound.

It could be something born in our blood as well as a disposition to heal through rectifying, through explanation, through making sense of things, and raising our voices to be heard. Perhaps the stories my mother read to me before I went to sleep were the advent of the Muse. Perhaps I had a vivid imagination and making up stories was only one of the many ways I explored self expression. I also drew and painted, danced and sang, made up plays, and loved dressing up in costumes.

At what point does the gift of words become a necessity, a vocation, a way to interface with the world? Are most poets introverts, are writers naturally reclusive? And so more available to the task of writing down what we think about, what we hear in our inner ear, our inner voices? And what does that mean about the push to market and promote yourself?

I love reading my work, performing my poems, to a live audience. The feeling of connection, intimacy, revelation, removing the veil and removing my self, getting out of the way for the Muse to speak through me. The secret to good writing is transcendent awareness, to be in the “flow” as they call it. There are people who become addicted to the adrenalin rush of thrill seeking, of risk taking, the need to generate those hormones of flight or fight because their brain chemicals thrive on them, they feel more alive. There is always a risk when you are a writer. The risk of failure, of not being understood, of being mediocre, of rejection or criticism. There are other risks as well. The risk of telling the truth, exposing your own fragility and vulnerability to the public, the risk of discovering what you really feel and think, the risk of self awareness and no turning back. There is the risk of experimenting and exploration and the risk of falling flat on your face, of taking leaps and crashing to earth, of giving of yourself only to be emptied.

The risk of standing on stage in front of others is something I never imagined I would do. I begin my poem “My Goodness Girl” with an explanation of how terrified I used to be and how a shot of tequila was my "liquid courage". This terror calmed down after the first few poems and I felt in sync with my audience, saw their compassionate eyes and heard their responses of laughter or sighs or applause. Sometimes saw their tears.

There is controversy about applause at readings. At some, applause is saved until the end, which unnerves me even as an audience member. The cheers and applause and noisy raucous responses at slams were liberating and created excitement and solidarity.

But it is not for the applause that I have overcome my terror time and again to step out in front. And although I know now that I won’t faint if I make a mistake, that my terror will be reduced to butterflies and weak knees, it still surprises me. But the reason I keep going back out there is that I want to speak. Perhaps it is not the traumas and shocks and disappointments and sorrow and grief and fear that made me want to become a writer. Perhaps it was that as a child I was a chatterbox and was told to be quiet. Perhaps I just needed to finally take the stage.

It seems only days ago I was posting a complaint on fb about my neighbors installing their Christmas lights right after Halloween. "Can't we celebrate one holiday at a time?" I scolded. And now suddenly here it is the New Year with the celebrations of Solstice and Christmas behind us.

2012 is a hot topic as we wonder which of prophecies will come true. End of the World or just more technological and environmental changes? Crisis or transformation? Revolutions that are violent and bloody as Middle East protestors are gunned down or revolutions in mind-body-spirit that bring us to authenticity and truth?

The publishing industry is undergoing a revolution. More and more authors are taking the short cut of self-publishing rather than the long wait to have a manuscript accepted, then another wait for its debut, with the necessity to have a marketing plan, a platform, and a willingness to invest one's time and money into promotion in either case. I once had a manuscript accepted only to have the publishing company go out of business before the release date, thus needing to start all over to find another (and haven't yet). I just read one success story from a woman who made her manuscript into an ebook and sold 4 million copies within months. I also know that sometimes even with the best marketing strategy--the book launch which takes place at the best local bookstores and which includes other well-known local talent, the radio interviews, the review, the platform of readers and friends created over time, the previous readings--may still not come up to our expectations and the box of books seems not to dwindle down at all. The cost of magazine ads may not even fit into out budgets; even to enter the Minnesota Book Awards cost the equvilent of $150.

I believe 2012 will be a good year for me. The past year was both challenging and exciting. Healing from the right hip replacment, publication of my chapbook transparencies of light, attending the Austin International Poetry Festival, watching my dad's dementia worsen, the death of my son's fiancee from burns suffered in a gas explosion, the birth of my fourth grandson, a whirlwind of writing workshops and 14 appearances, one under a spotlight on stage and others as part of a group effort, are some of the highlights. It has been productive and horrifying, heartbreaking and uplifting all mixed together.

I look forward to the reading sponsored by Saint Paul Alamanc with the high school students from the after school writing workshop next Monday because I am so proud of them for showing up and completing the work despite their own challenges of young children at home, working and supporting themselves, or low reading comprehension, and yet taking the risk, diving into material that was not always easy literarilly and emotionally.

My favorite story from this past year comes from the writing workshop at The Aliveness Project, a non-profit that serves people with HIV or AIDS. One of the participants told me that he has joined a men's support group 6 months previously but had not yet contributed to the discussion or even introduced himself to the group. "I read the writing we did in the workshop to introduce myself," he told me. His story brought tears to my eyes. I know that must have been hard, and yet, what a wonderful way to break the ice! It is proof that writing together, self-reflective writing with a focus on healing, can have dramatic results.

I hope 2012 will be a time of inspiration as well as transformation: inspiration to use your talents, to show your support for others who may be struggling to get their work out into the work, cooperation and joyful exchange of ideas as well as hands on helpfulness and loving kindness. I am excited to enter this new year with some of my challenges behind me and with the strength to face those coming. But most of all with awareness that my dream of being a poet, a writer, a teacher is my true north and thus cannot but point me where I need to go.

Mouth

Mouth that pulls at my mouth.
Mouth that has pulled me along;
mouth that comes from afar
with beams to illuminate me.

Dawn that fires my nights
a red and white radiance.
Mouth crowded with mouths:
bird full of birds.
Song winging its way
upward and down.
Death that subsides into kisses,
into a thirst to die slowly,
you give the blood-stained grass
two wing beats that gleam.
The upper lip, sky,
the lower lip, earth.

Kiss moving through darkness:
kiss that comes rolling
out of the first graveyard
toward the outermost stars.
Star that has silenced
and stopped your mouth
until a celestial dew
flutters your eyelids.

Kiss moving toward the boys
and girls of tomorrow
who won’t let the streets
or the fields lie empty.

Mouths, however many now buried,
mouthless--we are digging up!
I drink for them from your mouth
with your mouth I toast all those
who'd imbibe the wine
in their loving glasses.
They're memories now only memories’
kisses turned sour and gone.

I sink my life in your mouth
I hear the booming of space
and infinity seems
to have poured itself over me.

I shall return to kiss you.
I have to return, and falling
Sink with the centuries
descending into the deep ravines
like a feverish snowfall
of lovers' kisses.

Mouth that with your tongue
drew out of the earth
the brightest dawn. Three words,
three fires you have inherited:
life, death, love. There they abide,
inscribed on your lips.

--translated bt Edwin Honig



THE WOUNDED MAN

for the wall of a hospital in the front lines


The wounded stretch out across the battlefields.
And from that stretched field of bodies that fight
A wheat-field of warm fountains springs up and spreads
out
into streams with husky voices.

Blood always rains upward toward the sky.
And the wounds lie there making sounds like seashells,
if inside the wounds there is the swiftness of flight,
essence of waves.

Blood smells like the sea, and tastes like the sea, and the
winecellar.
The wine cellar of the sea, of rough wine, breaks open
where the wounded man drowns, shuddering,
and he flowers and finds himself where he is.

I am wounded: look at me: I need more lives.
The one I have is too small for the consignment
of blood that I want to lose through wounds.
Tell me who has not been wounded.

My life is a wound with a happy childhood.
Pity the man who is not wounded, who doesn’t feel
wounded by life, and never sleeps in life,
joyfully wounded.

If a man goes toward the hospitals joyfully,
They change into gardens of half-opened wounds,
of flowering oleanders in front of the surgery room
with its bloodstained doors.

II.

Thinking of freedom I bleed, struggle, manage to live on.
Thinking of freedom, like a tree of blood
that is generous and imprisoned, I give my eyes and
hands
to the surgeons.

Thinking of freedom I feel more hearts than grains of
sand
in my chest: my veins give up foam,
and I enter the hospitals and I enter the rolls of gauze
as if they were lilies.

Thinking of freedom I break loose in battle
from those who have rolled her statue through the mud.
And I break loose from my feet, from my arms,
From my house, from everything.

Because where some empty eye-pit dawn,
she will place two stones that see into the future,
and cause new arms and new legs to grow
in the lopped flesh.

Bits of my body I lose in every wound
will sprout once more, sap-filled, autumnless wings.
Because I am like the lopped tree, and I sprout again:
because I still have my life.

--translaed by James Wright

Beneath my skin is the tingle of sea touching sand, the ebb and flow of moon tide, the ricocheting cries of seagulls, the thud as waves hit the boat. I dangle my feet close to the wet stern; I leap onto sloping sand; I follow my friend to hot cobblestones of an ancient street; the smell of fish and lime entice me to a sun baked porch and the smoke of fire blazing beneath the banana leaf-wrapped salmon. Beneath my skin is happiness wanting to bubble up like champagne and sadness coating the waters like an oil slick, dangerous, unpredictable. Beneath my skin is a dark cave lit only by a torch held high in the hand of a medicine woman, her hair blown wild, her eyes full of wisdom, the quaking of my insides. Beneath my skin is a universe of stars expanding and spider webs patching the wound. Beneath my skin are the stories that spill from my soul across the arch of time and make me whole.

The year has come around again to that day when many traditions believe that the veil between the worlds is thinnest and the dead return to the places they once inhabited.

I have celebrated Día de los Muertos with a bilingual poetry performance in Puerto Vallarta. I asked the members of the audience to light candles in honor of their own dead and later, my performance partner and I called out the various Spanish names of La Muerte (la perra, la hedionda, la harpienta, la chingada, La Katrina, etc) across the space like an echo, as if we were searching for her. The realization that death is a cycle of life, that it comes for all of us, was healing after my son's death.

In 2000, my partner Michael and I wandered among the graves in Xoxocatlán, the site of ancient Día de los Muertos traditions, under the hovering ruins of Monte Alban in the city of Oaxaca. I wish you had been there with me. The air was reverent but festive. Copal incense rose up to sweeten the air; the graves were illuminated by candles; families sat together to pass along stories; candies, hot chocolate, and cervezas were enjoyed. For two weeks, we saw people with huge bundles of cempúsechil flowers on top of their cars or in wheelbarrows and every public building from the panadería to the biblioteca had ofrendas, homemade altars with sugar skulls, miniture skeletons, flowers, candles, and treats for the dead.

Michael would pass on a year and a half later. His ashes were spread on a hilltop above the town of Magdalena, a town that often began our excursions into Mexico. With roosters echoing the colors of the sun, four of us lit candles in each of the four directions and blessed him. This town favored plastic wreaths over the elaborate designs of Oaxaca and although the cementary was packed, Día de los Muertos felt more subdued.

Two years ago I dressed as La Llorona, the mother who wanders the arroyos of the southwest weeping for her dead children, an archetype of a misfortunate and terrorizing ghost. I was attending the Dead Poets Party sponsored by The Loft. I teased my hair into a tangle, painted my face white with teardrops, and dressed in black. Who knows what the people on the bus thought? I felt inhabited by her. I understood that she did not kill her children as she is accused, but that they were murdered and she was blamed. Too stunned to defend herself, she wanders the world weeping. Today she weeps for the destruction and desecration of Mother Earth. I think she also was weeping for the slain children of my neighborhood, the senseless violence of gang retribution.

Last year I did a presentation of Versos de Calaveras, a Mexican tradition of eulogies for the living, in particular those in power, such as politicians and the weathy, as a form of social protest. In some villages, the poets seek out those who have lost someone recently and their silly "character roasts" are meant to bring the survivors back from mourning to rejoin the living.

This year, I will decorate my ofrenda with the photos of my loved ones who have passed on, but I will not be there to greet them if they come from the other side. I will be holding my 8 week old grandson.

Tell me, what will you do to honor this sacred time? Light candles for those who have fallen in Iraq, both soldiers and civilians? Your ancestors? Your best friend who passed away from cancer last year, your elderly neighbor, the I35 bridge victims, the dying in Africa, the murdered women of Juarez? Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, or maybe Jimi or Janis? Not too much time has passed; time means nothing on the other side. Do they come to check up on us, to be sure they are not forgotten? Do they come to bring a message? Do we show our love with a prayer, a candle, a visual creation? Or do we simply hope that someday, we, too, will be remembered and thus, set the example of how we want it to be done.

But for the Dead Poets party tomorrow, I will dress in my red fringed Spanish shawl and read Neruda's poem Nothing But Death:

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

Translated by Robert Bly

Who knows how often I hugged loneliness to me like a prodigal daughter, how often I have draped the shawl of grief around my shoulders, how many nights I tossed and turned alone on the edge of understanding and not caught a glimmer in the moonlight of my own holy face? Feast on memories of loved ones around the table dipping bread into oil, drinking wine, toasts and laughter. Feast on songs that carried my bones into dancing, feast on the unbroken web that is between us, irridescent. Who knows that I struggle with the shadow within, claimed finally after allowing others to be the mirror image? Who knows that I now have asked for the blessing, no matter the limp from the broken thigh? Feast on the light, enkindled by words, by touch, by love, by willingness, holding the lantern to the sky no matter how fierce the wind.