Susan Rich's Blog, page 21

Paying Respects to Claudia Emerson, 1957-2014

Nostalgia and Sunday Afternoon Retrospect

NostalgiaI've just completed a short lyric essay on nostalgia, "The Imaginative Past,"  for the Tahoma Literary Review. It should be out next week and I hope you'll like it. For now I want to capture the feeling of being done with a project that was hard and long. (Actually the essay is very short but not the time it took to write it.) Thank you Kelly Davio for the opportunity!

When I finish a poem I have a good sense of whether it's strong or not --- not so with prose. This essay takes my poem "Sunday Afternoon Retrospect" as a jumping off point and then moves into a mediation on the nature of nostalgia. There's a double-edged sword when it comes to describing the past. I tried to be honest about both sides of memory --- the part where we want to lick the bowl of homemade cookie batter and the other --- where perhaps there is a fist or a hand licking us.

I'll post the piece here as soon as TLR publishes the link. But for now I want to celebrate a bit.

Let's celebrate!

Poets in the House 7pm Saturday, December 6th

Elizabeth Austen and Susan Rich read Saturday night
I am a lover of bookstores; an addict really. Independent bookstores are my favorite. Add the location of a small island in the northwest and it's a recipe for real pleasure.

One thing that happens in a small shop is that shelf space is premium which means that every book in the store needs to be there for a reason. Sometimes the reason is the beauty of the cover or the lyric title --- at least that's what I imagine.

This Saturday night Elizabeth Austen and I will do a "braided" reading at 7 pm at Griffin Bay Bookstore. If you happen to be passing through Friday Harbor, we'd love to see you.

Sweet Life: From Reviewer to Reviewed in South Africa

Sweet Life: From Reviewer to Reviewed

Happy Thanksgiving with Tony Morrison and the Colbert Report

My Ideal American WriterI just spent a goodly amount of time trying to find the Thanksgiving image that I wanted to share. One of my favorite parts of having a blog is sharing images. It answers something of the frustrated visual artist in me. And yet as I looked for something all I could find were odd turkey images or ivory white families or hunters. None of these represent my reality or any image I want to perpetuate. Instead, let me offer Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. If you haven't read her work, you're in for a huge treat. For today, you can begin with her appearance on The Colbert Report. 

And while I am super thankful for my lover, friends, cats, and writer's life --- I am not thankful to live in a world where black boys in Cleveland, in Ferguson, in places across our country, are being killed by police. "Race is a social construct" to quote Morrison. It is not scientific or anthropological. Her words need to be understood by us all.


Meanwhile, my hunt through "picture perfect" cherubs and mom's in the kitchen finally turned up something I could post. Here's one I'll title "Thanksgiving Femme Fatale."

Wishing You a Film Noir ThanksgivingThe only way we are going to do anything to change this social construct called race in this country is to talk about it. May you be brave around the Thanksgiving table today. And everyday.

Wishing you delicious pies and peace this Thanksgiving

Raspberry Pear and Honey Apple -- both gluten free for allTwo pies done. Both made from scratch with an almond flour crust and it's not yet midnight. Next is a kale salad with persimmons and pomegranate and pecans. Perhaps I should call it the Triple P?

This year having just hosted Kate Lebo and Molly Wizenberg at WordsWest, I am keeping their voices in my head as I prepare my offerings for tomorrow. Perhaps these pies will never win a beauty contest --- gluten free pies tend not to have top crusts --- but they were made with organic fruit and local honey, they were baked with love. My guess is that that's not a bad start.

On the eve of this holiday I am thinking about Ferguson, I am thinking about my friend's two adorable sons who have not yet learned that as young black boys (no longer toddlers) the world will view them with suspicion. They are as sweet as these pies and smart and loving but the world will not see that. My friend will have to someday soon talk with them about not running through neighbors/ yards (a great thrill for me as a child) or carrying anything that might be mistaken for weapon? Does this mean no water guns? How do black boys grow up safe in our communities? What can we do to help change the racism so rampant in our country?

So tonight I bake pies. I cut persimmons and take great pleasure in a jewel-red pomegranate.

Wishing you peace and pie this holiday season.

They Sell You What Disappears

I love this poem They Sell You What Disappears -- the craft, the content, the way it commands the white space of the page. The poet Hoa Nguyen is new to me although she has published several books. Here's a teaser:


They Sell You What Disappears
Why does this garlic come from China?
It’s vague to me               shipping bulbous netted bulbs
Cargo doused with fungicide and growth inhibitorWhat disappears is vague           I can’t trade for much
I can cook           teach you cooking         ferment
bread or poetry                 I can sell my plasma
-- to read the poem in its gorgeous entirety -- click here

Flying High on the Words of Hannah Stephenson @ Huffington Post

Hannah Maynard and Happiness 
On a rainy Friday night, home with a cold, I received a message from Hannah Stephenson with the subject line Guess What's Up. Hannah had just sent an email this morning saying that she'd sent the article on the the Huffington Post but that it might take quite awhile until the piece was live.
I can't thank this 21st century Hannah (whom I've never met) enough for giving 19th century Hannah Maynard a place at the table. The symmetry is not lost on me. How could it be? What follows is a little bit of Hannah Stephenson's introduction to Cloud Pharmacy followed by a little of my response to a smart question on my use of borders, railroad tracks, bridges, etc.

HS  The condition of looking creates longing--or maybe it's the other way around. Art always finds a way to dance between desire and distance. Whether that distance is located in geography or time, art allows an artist to speak to a viewer located in the future.

In her newest book, Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014), poet Susan Rich communicates with painters, photographers, and past selves. What I appreciate most in her work is how keenly aware of her reader she is. Yes, she's talking to a photo, and to the photographer, but she's also speaking to the reader. Wistful, vulnerable, and unapologetic, Cloud Pharmacy's poems prescribe mirrors, light, lust, love. Rich offers back to us "our art/ imperfect and striving." To continue

And a little bit from my part: 
SR  So yes my art does "travel in by window." Art--whether we're talking about visual art or poetry amplifies our own range of experiences. And not only the actual objects which drew me to them as remnants of my own thoughts, but the human lives behind them, too. What choices were open to Hannah Maynard, a 19th century woman? Did she recognize her own artistic genius? What happened to Max Liebermann's imagination as he watched the Nazis' slow climb to power? Will any of our art be remembered by those who inhabit the earth after we're gone?The window into art is the window into our own obsessions, our own pulsing of the blood. You can continue here

The Alchemy of Pie and Poetry and Travel

Thanksgiving Pies of Holidays PastI still remember how insanely proud of these pies I was when I took this picture three Thanksgivings ago. One was apple and the other raspberry pear. I'd just learned that using cookie cutter leaves and stars could stand in for a top crust if one's skill level was that of a beginner. Mine was. These were my first pies completely from scratch.

My friend Wendy coached me on the facts of pie crust for two weeks. Each morning, we would drive to work together and she would impart pie wisdom to me:  the use of vodka in the crust for an essential flakiness or how not to burn the edges of the crust by covering them with aluminum foil in the final hour of baking. Each day I would find yet another ingredient --- a half bottle of vodka --- before grocery stores were allowed to sell hard liquor  --- a decent pie pan (one borrowed from Wendy) and the aforementioned cookie cutters. For me, the hardest part of baking is often collecting all the needed materials so I can actually begin.

This year I will once again create homemade pie for Thanksgiving -- this time it needs to be gluten free. I'd like to think that after enrolling in Kate Lebo's Pie School last summer and "graduating" from the class with a golden pie of blueberries, butter, and other delicious ingredients, I can handle this. However, doubt has already snuck in. At least until last night.



Last night I had the great pleasure of listening to Kate Lebo and Molly Wizenberg read their literary and culinary work at WordsWest #3. Molly is the gorgeous voice behind the blog Orangette which she has been writing for ten years. This makes her an elder in the blogosphere. Kate's new book is Pie School: Tales in Fruit, Flour and Butter. I suspect my Thanksgiving pie recipe will come from this amazingly tasteful book.

All day I've let myself dip in and out of Molly's book Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table. As she mentioned last night at the reading,  Molly isn't as interested in food writing as she is in people's relationships to food. I get that. 

As I read the brief chapters -- almost like poems --- almost like blog posts, I feel as if Molly is my new best friend. It's not just that we both lost our fathers at a young age or that we fell in love (and fell hard) for Frenchmen, it's that Molly welcomes you into her world. I've now met her mother and her father, know about her sister's scones and the fore mentioned Frenchman. More than that, I know that Molly enjoys cooking the occasional meal alone and that the recipes in this book came out of hard work, focused attention, and a little experiment. This is a woman who is a bit of a perfectionist but can also laugh at herself. I've never read any type of cookbook where I learned so much.

Both Molly and Kate are combining love of words with a love of creating food. It's like they are collaborating with different parts of their brains bringing together the intellectual and the sensual in very tangible ways. I'm intrigued with how the writing feeds the cooking and how the cooking -- or baking -- fuels the words. 

Several years ago when I was working on the book, The Alchemist's Kitchen, I went through a very long period when every poem I wrote --- or at least almost every poem --- had some type of food named within it. There were French pastries and cereal boxes, lobsters and summer picnics. They just kept appearing on the page. I don't have a good explanation for what was happening except that I was falling in love with the sounds of words and I was also looking for a new way to write. 

Food allowed me to move more deeply into image and sound, into texture, color, and taste. Because food is also very much linked to place, I also could return to Parisian bakeries and West African markets. In Bosnian, the word for tomato is "paradise." In South Africa I first tasted patty pan squash, my first oyster was in Seattle -- or at least the first oyster that I enjoyed -- I think I can remember the exact table at Ray's --- but that's another story.

Here is "Food For Fallen Angels," a poem from The Alchemist's Kitchen.


Food for Fallen Angels

If food be the music of love, play on
Twelfth Night, misremembered

If they can remember living at all, it is the food they miss:

a plate of goji berries, pickled ginger, gorgonzola prawns

dressed on a bed of miniature thyme, a spoon


glistening with pomegranate seeds, Russian black bread

lavished with July cherries so sweet, it was dangerous to revive;

to slide slowly above the lips, flick and swallow – almost.


Perhaps more like this summer night: lobsters in the lemon grove

a picnicker’s trick of moonlight and platters; the table dressed

in gold kissed glass, napkins spread smooth as dark chocolate.


If they sample a pastry ~ glazed Florentine, praline hearts ~

heaven is lost. It’s the cinnamon and salt our souls return for ~

rocket on the tongue, the clove of garlic: fresh and flirtatious.


Published in The Alchemist’s Kitchen, White Pine Press, 2010