Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 41

Poetry Is Good For Your Brain (and Maybe Your Heart Too)

I love the new neurological research. It's turning up all sorts of things that make the yellow journalists look like media whore sleazebags with their terrible-terrible news. Here's a new one that caught my fancy -- reading poetry may activate your brain more than reading prose. A study at The University of Exeter showed through MRI monitoring that brains are differently activated when reading poetry than when reading prose: specifically, brains are more lively reading poetry. Different areas of the brain light up when reading "more emotionally charged" writing. And emotion is the heart of poetry, so the poems read -- regardless of comprehension -- stimulated the brain more than prose.

Over at Brainpickings, Alain de Botton, one of my favorite authors, is quoted from his new book, written with John Armstrong, called Art As Therapy. I don't like the title, but I do love a few things he says about the value of art and how it changes us. I like what he has to say about the dancers in Matisse's paintings:

"The dancers in Matisse’s painting are not in denial of the troubles of this planet, but from the standpoint of our imperfect and conflicted — but ordinary — relationship with reality, we can look to their attitude for encouragement. They put us in touch with a blithe, carefree part of ourselves that can help us cope with inevitable rejections and humiliations. The picture does not suggest that all is well, any more than it suggests that women always delight in each other’s existence and bond together in mutually supportive networks."

Putting us in touch with the joy we all carry within is no small part of the way art changes us. Joy as the goal of life -- not a bad idea, and art, especially certain kinds of poetry, inclines us to believe it's so.

P.S. My new book, Gods of Water and Air was discounted at Amazon -- for the time being, you can get it for $12.88 + shipping! Of course, if you order by emailing me or sending a Paypal, you get it for $14.95 WITHOUT shipping! Which is a better deal, because you also get an inscription. If you'd like.

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Published on November 08, 2013 12:57

The White Flash of Egrets at the Creek

<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 3.05in; text-align: left;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">I'm going to have to create a chapbook of bird poems, I think. Lesser and greater egrets at the local creek, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, mourning doves, crows all have made their way into my work. If I count up the number of bird poems I've written it probably could form a whole book! This one is from my new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Water-Air-... of Water and Air<b>,</b></i></a></span></span> available at Amazon.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 3.05in; text-align: justify;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 3.05in; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">As Yearning Is Red</span></b><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">Sudden as a hat is ripped away</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">by the wind, he was over my head.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">Long, black legs scissored together</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">as he plowed the seamless sky</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">with a beak like a boat’s prow.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">His wings rowed lazily.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">There’s little reason to look up </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">when I walk. I passed as he paused </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">to float on a thermal.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">I was heading downhill </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">and he was gliding</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">down to the creek. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">We were nearly eye level.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">I had a precarious feeling, </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">as if my marching feet</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">had risen off the ground.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">His wings rippled several times </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">as he held onto the wind. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">They rippled again:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">a lace bedspread shaken out. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">He was white as yearning</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">is red and still as night’s </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">first sip of moon.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">Then the luminous being was gone, </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">leaving me ruffled and aired, </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">forever feathered,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">able to lift </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB;">on the beat of a breath.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

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Published on November 05, 2013 13:06

The Crafty Poet and Ways to Kickstart Your Writing

Diane Lockward's wonderful book to jump-start your creative process, The Crafty Poet, has had a great mention in Poets & Writers as one of the "best books for writers." I'm pleased to have a poem of mine included in this juicy craft collection, "Worst," under the Prompt: Missing You. Diane's prompts and tips are richly illustrated with poems from so many poets I love I can't begin to name them all.

I especially love the chapters on Revision and Recycling poems. Adele Kenny, whose blog The Music In It gives weekly prompts, has a poem, "Snake Lady," illustrates the principle of revising a poem by adding layers of complication. This is a favorite trick of mine when considering a poem whose heartbeat is so faint I can barely hear it loud enough not to consign it to the morgue.

Here's one, "Scared Birds," that I revived with the above technique of layering, and it made its way into Deep Water Literary Journal. It's also included in my new book, Gods of Water and Air . This one was a case of two poems that collided in the night, with great cacophony and surreal mangling of metaphors in a sort of fairytale way. It scared me when I wrote it, hence the title.

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Published on November 02, 2013 09:08

On this All Souls Day, I offer a poem about one kind of a...

On this All Souls Day, I offer a poem about one kind of afterlife (there are many) from Gods of Water and Air:

Smiling Back from the Afterlife
I meet my father for breakfastin some life after Alzheimer’s. He smiles: Are you still my daughter? The first sick joke from the afterlife begins on the phone. I say, I regret that I am. His skull knobbed yellow and blue, bruisedfrom an unremembered mishap, I imagine his facethe color of a car’s undercarriage, the sunfrom his ocean view windowcatching the green mica flecks in his eyes. His thoughts float on the surface, torn out of context. He’s dying, he says:ninety-two and a ragpile wreck.
He throws down the paper. Still all assholes! he proclaims and asks the word for forgetfulness. I remind him it’s CRS syndrome: Can’t Remember Shit. His favorite joke lives on in my memory. Everything between us lives in me, so when I leave him in his black leather chair, I feel his confusion pelting my back. Do I know you? Your name is Rachel, right?The phone catches his frown, then smilein its black brick, photo grim as a toe tag.Still your daughter, I say from the airport.
Now I’m on a plane and as far as he’s concerned, I might as well bein the afterlife. I’m mulching himover, planting him in memory, watering him with thin answers,sure that he’ll spring up in life after this, my old deep-rooted weed.

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Published on November 01, 2013 13:03

Another Amazon Review for Gods of Water and Air

Thank you, Marc Flayton, for your review of my book on Amazon! I especially like this: "The journey of life contains many aspects. One is the parent-child relationship. If it turns out your parent is as creative and as diligent in their art as Picasso, you will enjoy Gods of Water and Air. It pits a creative and talented daughter with a creative and talented father -- the fireworks fly."

Sometimes you wonder if people are reading anything you write. This kind of review makes me want to pick up the pen again today, and begin where I left off. You can read the rest of the review and others at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Water-Air-Rachel-Dacus/dp/0615842410

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Published on October 16, 2013 12:15

Loss of a Poet

Poet and editor C.E. Chaffin was a fixture in my weekly poetry life for a number of years, thanks to the Melic Review's Roundtable and also his appearances at the Alsop Review's Gazebo. These two poetry workshop sites helped me shape my writing in the 1990s, when I began to shift from focusing on prose to poetry. C.E. passed away unexpectedly in the last week. I remember reading with him at a reading John Amen organized in at a bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District for The Pedestal contributors. C.E. brought his guitar and both he and John sang. It was also a great evening because I got to meet Jaimes Alsop, now also gone. May they both rest in poetry heaven. They have richly earned it!

Other literary news that delights me is hearing that "the Canadian Chekhov," short story writer Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What, a woman? Who writes about the kind of people I might actually meet and know, with little violence involved in the stories, and almost no political angle? Have they lost their minds? Can't wait to hear her speech. Sanity prevailed. And gender blindness.

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Published on October 10, 2013 11:02

New review of Gods of Water and Air!

Thank you, Barbara Ellen Sorensen, for a wonderful review of my new book on Amazon! She says:

"This is language that burns and pivots. Acutely cognizant of the inextricable link between beauty and death, desire and hunger, Dacus grasps words with warrior strength and molds them tightly until they pop open into molten surprises."

Delighted!

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Published on October 08, 2013 10:38

"Eight en Croix" or talent = practicing

Excerpt from an essay in my new book, Gods of Water and Air:

Eight en Croix, Four on a Side, Every Day Until You Die
At age thirteen, you need something glorious in your life just to breathe. My mother was at Long Beach State afternoons earning her teaching credential, and Dad was at his new apartment. Everything was changing, so I needed a daily dose of tradition. I found it at Rosalie and Alva’s Ballet Theatre on Weymouth Corners, next to Perry's Five-and-Dime, where after four o'clock class I could load up on bubble gum and chocolate bars. "Raychelle, point your toe!" shouted Rosalie. Six years of study, and she never pronounced my name right, but she was like radar on an unpointed toe.Rosalie pounded her stick on the floor and bull-horned another order – something about a bent knee. With her hair tucked under a white turban and her coral-painted lips and hair, she looked like Rhonda Fleming playing a female yogi. Rosalie raced around the room, bending an arm here, poking a leg there, shouting. Everything about her was theatrical and excessive, from her fabulous arches to her rusty garage door shriek. "You have great potential," she had told me. "You may even have talent, if you can find the drive. If you want to dance, you can't think about anything else."This was a problem for a shy dreamer with too many hobbies, but I was a faithful student, taking four classes a week. Rosalie was a model of her own philosophy. Though her dancing had been in movie musicals and night clubs, not in ballet companies, she was devoted to high art, and hoped her students would exceed her career of high-lift ballroom dancing with Alva. Talent was a potent word, one my mother shied away from when I showed her my stories and poems. "Very few people have talent," she said. "It's inborn." Dad said even straight A's did not mean you could rest on your talent. I was desperate for someone to discover it had been born in me, talent for something. I knew I had a destiny that had something great about it. Rosalie seemed to think I might have talent, which in her view had nothing to do with being born.In a studio filled with music, passion and pink satin, springing to my toes on a pliant wood floor, despite intense pressure on my knees and toe joints, I could feel talent steaming off my skin. It propelled me into the air. I imagined I might pause in mid-air, as they said Nijinsky did. So I did my eight en croix, four on a side, figuring I would do these exercises every day until I died, because satin toe shoes were levitation devices. With them, I could float onto imagination's gauzy stage, a soloist at last. The cavernous, raftered studio had once been a warehouse and still smelled faintly of walnuts, but it was so capacious that I could leap and spin across it far and fast, feeling myself an object of pure momentum. Ballet was one thing girls could do better than boys, better than anything in my father's supersonic world of satellites, apogees and payloads. Music was energy flowing through me, and I needed no quadratic equation to catch its waves and ride. Rosalie said I had some physical defects, but determination could overcome almost any defect. I had just seen Margot Fonteyn dance at the Hollywood Bowl with that handsome Russian defector Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet. They were so perfectly paired and he danced behind her with such reverence that I felt I could do pliés forever to dance like that. "Talent will out," my mother said mysteriously. I did not know what this meant, but would rather hear Rosalie say, "Raychelle, you must work, work, work." With my tendons stretched so taut in an arabesque I thought they might snap, I thought, if this isn't talent, I give up. Rosalie came over and whacked my leg with her stick. "That's where your arabesque must be. Have you gained some weight?" I had no reply, but she had moved on to her next demolition.

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Published on October 02, 2013 08:38

Another ocean, another poem with Monet

From Gods of Water and Air. I write a lot about the sea, living along California's coastline all my life. Monet's Normandy paintings spoke to me of the coastline I know so well, and inspired this.

Monet At Pourville
He hasn’t quite abandoned the shorefor the celestial. He leaves the viewer a toehold on the sand. He has yet to go sailing with the gods of water and air. Confronted by the vast, he answers with seven sailboats on the horizon, spaced as evenly as place settings. Tiny between sky and sea, they float there, witty as elder aunts. He isn’t choosing between here and hereafter--just letting the hues grow full of fire. The boats both approachand recede, as he plays with their figure-ground.
He hasn’t yet gone into the world of mist, but an evanescence is growing. I’m madabout the sea, he writes. He brushes alight its hidden prisms. In his umbrella pastels and wool-tuft clouds, eternity leans closer. Still, that dark patch of sand at the lower corner makes us hear the crunch under Madame Monet’s black shoes as she comes, calling, and calling him to lunch.

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Published on September 29, 2013 11:42

The Salt Gods

So many of the poems in my new book, Gods of Water and Air , are connected to the sea, beside which I spent my childhood, that I had to reflect the twin elements of wind and water in the title, as essential to my consciousness. This poem from the book was started on Kauai, where I felt the ocean's presence on my body constantly, and daily bowed to its salt gods.

The Salt Gods
On a necklace of rocks, sand-colored, she lies in the sun, not seeing the photographer who doesn’t aim at herbut at the rocks that float in the sea.
He snaps and goes.She slips into the water to ride sloppy currents among sea turtles, crawlingbeside their slow ballet,measuring herself against salt gods in mottled shells.
Afterward, she sitson the rocks. The breeze rumples around her. Richly draped in the sea’s perfume,she wraps the wind around her hips.
This is what happens when you dive with gods:The picture shows no one but clicking palms frilledwith yellow parrots.

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Published on September 28, 2013 11:22