Alison McGhee's Blog, page 31

Thanksgiving 2012

A few of the things I’m thankful for, every day: French roast coffee, the smell of pine woods on a late fall day, my father’s enormous laugh, the beautiful oak box-beam ceiling in my dining room, the way my dog tilts his head and looks at me inquiringly when I say his name softly, the Metropolitan State students whose lives and hard work humble me, the falling-apart quilt I made 20 years ago and pull over myself every night, the way my mother cries every time she hears “Teach Your Children,” the fact that I have spent my working life spinning stories out of thin air and turning them into things you can hold in your hands, my beloved best friend of 30+ years, the way this gorgeous land of ours rolls and swells and flattens and breathes beneath us like a great living being, my sisters and my brother and the friends whose hearts I carry within my heart, my one-room toy house on the slope in Vermont, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and the little machine that’s playing it right now, and, more than anything, always, the three almost-grown youthful companions who have brought me so much love and laughter and joy their whole lives long.

Poem of the Week, by Reid Bush

Campbellsburg

- Reid Bush

Driving State Road 60 northwest out of Salem,

10 miles out–

and 10 before you come to Spring Mill Park–

off to your right –for just a blacktop minute–

is Campbellsburg,

which was a town

when the man you were named for had his store there,

but a glance through your window reveals it’s now gray

abandonment–

ugly sag and fall.

And you wonder who lives there now

and how anyone

even to have a brick store all his own

ever could.

But nothing about it matters to you half as much as that your dad

came in from that hill farm to the north

to go to high school there.

And that’s what you always point out to whoever’s with you in the

car.

And through the years what all your passengers have had in

common is

now matter how you point it out

they can’t care enough.


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For more information on Reid Bush, please click here: http://www.wildviolet.net/blue_moon/contributors.html

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Visits to north-central Minnesota this week

North-Central Minnesotans, I’ll be spending this week in your neck of the woods. Would love to see you at any of these gatherings!

Tuesday, Nov. 13, 1 p.m., Brainerd Public Library.

Tuesday, 4 p.m., Longville, the Margaret Welch Library.

Tuesday, 6:30 p.m., Walker, Walker Public Library.

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 9:30 a.m., Bemidji Public Library.

Wednesday, 12:30 p.m., Cass Lake Community Library.

Wednesday, 3:30 p.m., Park Rapids Area Library.

Wednesday, 7 p.m., Blackduck Community Library.

Poem of the Week, by Stephen Dunn

The Sacred

- Stephen Dunn



After the teacher asked if anyone had

a sacred place

and the students fidgeted and shrank



in their chairs, the most serious of them all

said it was his car,

being in it alone, his tape deck playing



things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth

had been spoken

and began speaking about their rooms,



their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,

the car in motion,

music filling it, and sometimes one other person



who understood the bright altar of the dashboard

and how far away

a car could take him from the need



to speak, or to answer, the key

in having a key

and putting it in, and going.



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For more information on Stephen Dunn, please click here: http://www.stephendunnpoet.com/

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Manuscript Critique Service:

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To hear what isn’t being said

See how clean my kitchen is? My clean kitchen has nothing to do with this post, but it cheers me up to look at it.

Yesterday my youthful companion and I drove 418 miles across Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota back to our house. We stopped only once, at a Kwik Trip, where we filled the tank and used the restroom. She bought an orange soda, I bought a blueberry-pomegranate juice and some popcorn, and we got back into the car.

We had the iPod on shuffle for the ride, a decision which yielded one great tune after another, none of them the tunes that either of us were currently stuck on, which was why we were playing it on Shuffle to begin with. We wanted to break out of our ruts.

When this tune popped up I started beating the steering wheel and singing along. I had totally forgotten this song! The first time I heard it, maybe four years ago, I fell instantly in love and bought the whole disc based on that song alone.

Good morning, here’s the news. And all of it is good! Good evening, here’s the news. And all of it is good! And the weather’s good!

I’ve played that tune at least ten times today. Like my clean kitchen in the photo above, “The News” doesn’t have anything to do with this post, but like the kitchen, it cheers me up to listen to it. I would love all the news to be good. And all the weather to be good.

And I would love my candidates to win this election tomorrow.

But as my friend Joe quotes one of his friends as saying, “Here’s the thing. No matter what happens, essentially half of voters will not get the candidate that they chose. This election has brought out a lot of passion, a lot of anger, a lot of distrust, a lot of divisiveness and a lot of hurt.”

All true.

If my candidates lose, I will be furious, despairing and full of blame. I will lie awake at night worrying about the country that my children will inherit.

If my candidates win, the man across the street, whose lawn signs make our two houses look as if they’re playing Opposite Day, will be furious, despairing and full of blame. He too will lie awake at night worrying about the country that his grandchildren will grow up in.

The divisiveness won’t be over on Wednesday morning. One side will feel vindicated; the other, betrayed. Four years from now the cycle will repeat. And repeat again four years later. It tires me out to think of it.

Anyone who knows me knows what my politics are. I’ve never voted for the other side in my life. There are lawn signs on my front yard’s dead grass, there are buttons and sample ballots scattered around the house.

Most of my friends vote along the same lines that I do. I remember one of them saying, a few years ago, that “I literally do not know a single person who’s __________.”

That’s not entirely true for me –I do have friends, and plenty of acquaintances, who vote along different lines– but I know the comfort and safety and pride and relief of being in a room full of people who all think the same way. Who believe in the same things. Who are not the enemy, out to destroy the values we hold most dear. I love and crave that feeling of belonging, of knowing that those around me believe in the same way of life that I do and that we agree on how best to get there.

And I also know how dangerous it is.

People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.

Dr. King, you were far wiser and far braver than me. You lived and died by those beliefs. You tried, far harder than I ever have, to listen. To find common ground. To communicate with those who believed differently from you.

That idea –finding common ground with those who believe the opposite of me– seems essential, but the idea of actually getting out there and trying to do it exhausts me. Makes me rebel. I’m right. They’re wrong. But I have learned over the years that if everything in me rebels at an idea, there’s something in it that’s true.

It’s true that it’s easier for me, a person who doesn’t like conflict, to argue, to avoid, to walk away, to turn my attention to someone or something else, than to have an actual conversation –not a debate, a conversation– about a divisive political issue.

This realization, that I would rather avoid tough conversations than try to find common ground, chills me.

So I have challenged myself to have conversations –real conversations– this year and from now on, at least once in a while, with those whose beliefs are fundamentally different from mine.

That is how it came to pass that two months ago I went out to lunch with a few people, three of them close friends and one a man I’ve always disliked for his wildly, and, in my view, utterly condescending, nasty, meanly articulated politics. He doesn’t like me either, but he puts up with me because his friends do. We’re always polite to each other, but that’s as far as it goes.

But I had challenged myself to have a real conversation, and so I waded in.

It was tough going. At first, I listened in silence –he was talking about teachers’ unions and Head Start– but I realized early on that I wasn’t really listening. I was waiting for those key phrases to float out of the air into my ear –union. . . teachers. . . Head Start– and then I was responding to them silently, in my head.

And not politely, either.

I forced myself to stop thinking and focus on the man, sitting across from me in the wooden restaurant chair. His eyes: shifty. His posture: hunched. His voice: quick and low. He kept turning the pepper shaker around and around as he spoke. I didn’t like anything about him.

I forced myself to stop focusing on those things and listen to him. Listen, Alison. Listen to what he’s really saying, and try also to hear what he isn’t saying.

In order to listen you have to stop waiting for a chance to jump in and say what you want to say. You have to remain silent. You have to attune everything in you to the other person. The act of listening requires both deep concentration and a letting-go, letting your intuition take over. It’s both a conscious and unconscious act.

“What do you think about Head Start?” I said to him.

He shrugged.

“It’s expensive,” he said.

That right there –”It’s expensive”– is the kind of remark that would ordinarily make me shut right down. I would jump to the conclusions that he believed that anything that cost government money was wrong, that he believed funneling money to schools was wrong, that he believed the schools are doing a crappy job, that Head Start is an unnecessary program that should be cut. And I would tune out and turn away and sit there silently seething, waiting to leave and return to the place where people believe the way I believe.

But I couldn’t do that, because I had challenged myself to listen.

It’s expensive.

That’s what he had said. That was all he had said. Listen, Alison.

“It is,” I said, and I watched him raise his head and look at me in surprise. “It is expensive.”

Should I keep on going? Should I let it rest there? I didn’t know. I kept going.

“Some studies say it might actually save money in the long run. That it gets some kids on a better footing early, so that they end up staying in school and not dropping out.”

“Yes,” he said. “I read those studies too.”

He shrugged again. He held out his hands.

“Look,” he said. “If it saves money in the long run, I’m for it. I’m for saving money. So, Head Start, all right.”

Head Start: all right. Different reasons maybe (and maybe not even that different), but the same goal.

That above is a condensation of a longer and more rambling conversation, but it was an actual conversation, and it was between me and someone I have never liked. At the end of lunch I picked up his check and paid for it. It made me happy to buy him lunch, and it made him happy too. We shook hands goodbye. My feelings about that man have changed. I might not ever truly like him, but I have some respect for him now.

I wish I could say that listening to him was easy. It wasn’t. But listening to what he was really saying, under the surface of his words, and responding to that, allowed us to find common ground. At least a little. For the first time.

We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. (Mary Parker Follet)

Poem of the Week, by Linda McCarriston

Riding Out at Evening

- Linda McCarriston

At dusk, everything blurs and softens.

From here out over the long valley,

the fields and hills pull up

the first slight sheets of evening,

as, over the next hour,

heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads predictable deer

browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s

herd of heifers, the kitchen lights

starting in many windows. On horseback

I take it in, neither visitor

nor intruder, but kin passing, closer

and closer to night, its cold streams

rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half-aloud, I say to the horse,

or myself, or whoever: let fire not come

to this house, nor that barn,

nor lightning strike the cattle.

Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights

of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless

or foolish to ride out in the falling light

alone, wishing, or praying,

for particular good to particular beings,

on one small road in a huge world?

The horse bears along, like grace,

making me better than what I am,

and what I think or say or see

is whole in these moments, is neither

small nor broken. For up, out of

the inscrutable earth, have come my body

and the separate body of the mare:

flawed and aching and wronged. Who then

is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,

might course over the entire valley,

over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace

of flight, who presses against her breast,

in grief and tenderness,

the whole weeping body of the world?

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For more information on Linda McCarriston, please click here: http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/cwla/faculty/corefaculty/lindamccarriston.cfm

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Poem of the Week, by John Hodgen

Boy Struck by Lightning Survives

- John Hodgen



what he was



St. Elmo’s boy, St. Vitus dance,

Franklin’s poor fool left holding the key.

Call him Ahab, ensnared,

snapped up in the lines, strapped

to the quivering column of whiteness.

Call him Jonah, spewed up,

his spiked hand bleached, pointing upward,

like a Joshua tree in a desert rain.

He knows the name of the fire that has found him.

He sings the accurate God.



what he saw



Slender lines alive in the light,

the swirl of magician’s wands,

the dance macabre in the veins

of an old woman’s legs,

chiaroscuros of the blind,

eyesockets of snakes,

spun gyros, filaments,

the wrinkled skin of the air,

every jot and tittle,

the blue and red whirlygigs

pulsing on the walls of the placenta.



what he will do



The teachers will let him stare out the window.

He will dream of King Midas, his scarred hands,

of pickpockets and frightened assassins,

of the concentric grooves inside a gun barrel.

He will know the umpire’s loneliness,

the idiot’s keen delight.

He will stand by the buck fence

at the end of the clearing

and wait for the sky to fill up,

the way he will wait for his father

to come home in the twilight,

the black Buick coming lonely over the rise.

He will become a surveyor,

will move a man slowly across the horizon,

like a lost cloud that he suddenly halts,

his hand held high in the air.



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For more information about John Hodgen, please click here: http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/09/john-hodgen.html

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“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die every day for lack of what is found there”

Just now I sat at my kitchen table, eating saag paneer and yogurt and sauteed carrots and reading a book of poems. Flipping through the book of poems, to be accurate, letting serendipity dictate which ones I ended up reading. A word here and there –ghost, twilight, firefly, road– the sort of word I’m inexorably drawn to, would catch my eye and then I would stop and read the poem.

In the early morning, every morning, I read a few poems. Three, usually. Sometimes I trawl the internet for poems, typing a few catch words into Mr. Google and seeing what the tide tosses up on the beach.

Some days are dry and stunted. No poems appear, or maybe my mind is a desert that day, unable to see glints in the sand.

Other days a friend will send me a poem I’ve never seen before, by a poet I’ve never heard of, and it will hit me like a shock wave, that enormous jolt that Miss Dickinson described as feeling as if the top of her head had come off. And when I hunt down that new poet, each poem I read shocks me anew.

And that new poet leads to other new poets. One shining poem after another, all cut and pasted into my poetry files. Thousands and thousands of poems I’ve saved over the years. Sometimes I go back twelve or more years, just to see what poems I loved back then, to see if my taste has changed.

Nope. The thing is, if I loved a poem back then, I still love that poem. Same with music. Same with art. Same with people, most of them anyway. I am not a fickle lover.

I don’t remember liking poetry when I was little. Back then it came in the form of limericks and doggerel and jingly ads. The ending words of every line rhymed. The meter was rigid, a prison of rhythm that forced you to recite the poem with Sousa-like precision.

If poetry didn’t come in the form of limericks and doggerel and the occasional haiku, it was so formal, with apostrophes in weird places and half-words like ’tis and ‘ere and o’er, not to mention a lack of thingness –literal thingness, as in things that you can see and touch– that my eyes glazed over.

I was little. I was untutored. I was semi-feral. If I wasn’t making forts in the hay barn or escaping into the treehouse that only I was able to haul myself into, I was reading novels or one of the hundreds of biographies about the Childhoods of Famous Americans that the library stocked.

The only thing I remember, about poetry, is that my grandfather used to recite it to us. He was a dairy farmer who didn’t graduate high school, but he knew a lot of poetry by heart. Long poems, which he would recite spontaneously, in the living room, in their entirety.

I don’t remember reading poetry in high school, unless you count the Rod McKuen and Susan Polis Schutz paperbacks that everyone carried around back then, and I don’t.

I don’t remember studying poetry in college either –I was a Chinese Studies major– unless you count the Chaucer-Milton-Shakespeare class I took freshman year, and I do. The teacher had us take turns reading the Canterbury Tales aloud, in middle English, and I loved that.

If I didn’t think about what I was reading, if I just let the strange words form themselves on my tongue, they rolled right out. It was as if I’d been speaking middle English my whole life. Reading them aloud, you could hear the music and laughter and enormous intelligence behind those bawdy tales.

For my 21st birthday my brilliant mathematician friend Doc gave me a book of poetry by John Ashbery. I puzzled over that book for a long time. Mostly because I wanted to be worthy of the poetry book that Doc, whom I adored, had picked out for me. So little of it made any sense to me, untutored and semi-feral poetry reader that I still was at that point.

But these lines made me shiver, and I memorized them. They still make me shiver:

    Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life

      Like the wind, like tumbling clouds

    In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds.

Like tumbling clouds in a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds. From those few lines in that book which, because my beloved Doc had given it to me, I read and read, searching for meaning, I learned the power of words repeated upon themselves.

In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds. This was something that no Childhood of A Famous American, no matter how many dozens of them I tossed down like after-dinner mints back then, could teach me.

By the time I moved to Minneapolis at age 26 I must have turned the poetry corner. I know this because I remember standing in line in Calhoun Square with a paperback book of poetry clutched to my chest, waiting patiently for the woman who wrote the book to autograph it for me. I was getting up at dawn every day back then, writing my stories, not one of which would be published.

There was a poem in the book I was holding that haunted me. It still haunts me. The ending line especially, the italicized fierceness of it: Sister, there is nothing I would not do. That line stayed in my head for years.

It’s still in my head. Years ago it became part of my bones and blood and heart. One day, years after I first read that line, my friend GE and I were walking along the Mississippi River.

“Some people are still water,” he said, “and others are moving water.”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant –GE is a little Ashbery-esque himself– but still, I knew that he was right. In that same moment the line from the poem –Sister, there is nothing I would not do– came haunting back into my head. The next day I began to write All Rivers Flow to the Sea, which is a book about sisters, and which I wrote in the form of moving water.

So there I was, in my 20′s, waiting in line at Calhoun Square for the darkhaired, friendly woman sitting at the table they’d set up in the courtyard there to sign my book for me. She was there to sign another book, a newly-published, different book, a novel, but when I got to the table she took the little paperback poetry book and smiled at it.

“Jacklight,” she said. “I love that you brought this.”

She looked up at me and met my eyes. She looked at me for what felt like a long moment. Then she picked up her pen and wrote something in the book and handed it back to me.

For she who enters the deep woods.

It was one of those rare moments in life, a moment when a stranger looks at you and sees something in you. Recognizes something in you, a fellow traveler. That line has been with me ever since, carried in my heart and also in that little paperback that has journeyed with me everywhere I’ve moved since that day.

Just now I was running upstairs to get some socks and I looked to the right, where a series of original sketches from the picture book most close to my heart hangs on the wall. Sometimes my own obtuseness stuns me, and this was one of those times. Look at this sketch, will you?

The line from Someday, the book that accompanies the sketch (by the wondrous Peter Reynolds) is “Someday you will enter a deep wood.”

That I didn’t consciously connect that line with the one the poet scribbled in my book so long ago doesn’t surprise me, because I’m a dolt, yes, but also because I have learned that those rare things, including those rare people, that you love completely and utterly the minute you see them, don’t ever go away. They migrate into your heart and become part of you.

(I just mis-typed the last part of that previous sentence, so that before I corrected it, it read “They migrate into your heart and become art of you.” Both sentences are true.)

I’ve never formally studied poetry, but knowledge of it has seeped into me by osmosis, the reading and reading and reading of beautiful poems. Giving myself poetry assignments –write a picture book in the form of a sestina, write a villanelle that contains a river flowing north, write a pantoum, write a free verse poem that begins with Carver’s question “Did you get what you wanted from this life?”– has been an education unto itself.

Once I sat in a lecture listening to a novelist talk about the two types of writers, those who were writers of story and those who were writers of language. I turned to the writer I was sitting next to.

“You’re a story teller,” I said.

“And you’re language,” she said.

I was right, and so was she. To this day plot is my weakness, story my weakness, not that I don’t like a good story, but I would prostitute myself for beautiful language, story be damned. This is why a novel that reads like poetry is my ideal novel. This is why I love the reviewer who wrote, “She’s a poet who writes novels.” This is why poetry is my ideal, period.

Long ago –fifteen years now?– I started choosing one poem a week and sending it to a few friends: “Poem of the Week.” Those few friends began forwarding them to a few friends, who sometimes asked to be put on the original mailing list. The list began to grow. Now it numbers in the many hundreds. Most of the recipients are people I don’t know, some of whom live in other countries halfway around the world.

Once a week or so a poem boomerangs back, the recipient having thought she was forwarding it to someone else but mistakenly sending it back to me. Sometimes, from the forwarded email, I see that the sender is sending it on to dozens of others, forming her own poem of the week list. In this way I know that the poems are seeding themselves, spreading far and wide like apple seeds.

Some of the poems I send are by famous writers, most are by lesser-known poets. The only criterion I have for the poem of the week is that I have to love it. Any other reason for sending a poem out would muddy the waters, and poetry is one part of my life that I will not muddy.

A few weeks ago I told my students to memorize a poem to recite in class next week.

“The only rule is that it has to be a poem you love,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be more than a couple lines long, but you have to love it.”

That way, when they memorize the poem, it will become part of them. A gift that they can carry within themselves forever, always available.

  Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life

      Like the wind, like tumbling clouds

    In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds.

Poem of the Week, by Brynn Saito

Match (excerpt)

- Brynn Saito

You live in a house of sound and you live

with a ghost. The one who stole your heart

also lives in your heart so you cut it out

with a carving knife and send it flying.

You say sometimes you wake and wait

for the god of loneliness to leave you alone.

I say our city is small and teeming

with ghosts and there are no seasons

for hiding. So we let go of the ones

who called us by our names. We make

ourselves new names by tracing letters

in a sand tray with sharp stones.

This is called Patience or Practicing

Solitude or The Wind Will Ruin Everything

but what does it matter let’s go for beauty

every time. You say the price we pay for love

is loss. I say the price we pay for love

is love.

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For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/bio/

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Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai

Forgetting Someone

- Yehuda Amichai (tr. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light

in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

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For more information on Yehuda Amichai, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/yehuda-amichai

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