YOUR BOAT, YOUR WORDS
It was a wonderful celebration, and it put me in mind of what miracles can happen when a small group of friends work together. This weekend Amherst Writers & Artists Press released our thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth books of poetry by poets who have come into their own voices over many years of participation in AWA workshops, trainings, and in leading their own workshops. Ellen Summers’ chapbook, Spooner’s Cove, is celebration of the ways of water, in the human body as well as on the face of the earth. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis calls them a “gorgeous collection of sea-spangled, archetypal poems. The Glass Train, by Annie Fahy, is a full book. Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2003-2012, wrote about it, “The poems . . . are delicate, beautiful, clear as crystal but also momentary shards of glass that cut when they deal with trauma.”
What a bright, refreshing difference it is to work intimately with a group of friends who take craft utterly seriously, but understand that we grow as writers just as we grow as human persons – in an atmosphere of encouragement, experimentation, careful and constant learning, and belief in our own dream.
Years ago, when I was beginning to lead creative writing workshops, and without knowing it, building a workshop method that enabled, rather than disabled, writers, a poet whose work looked like no one else’s – brilliant, daring, her own unique voice, Sue Darling, sent new poems to her former professor of writing. He wrote back, “Your poems lack discipline.” I wrote a poem in a heat of anger. After all these years, listening to these two newly published authors, the poem came back to mind:
YOUR BOAT, YOUR WORDS
Your boat, they will tell you,
cannot leave the harbor
without discipline.
But they will neglect to mention
that discipline has a vanishing point,
an invisible horizon where belief takes over.
They will not whisper to you the secret
that they themselves have not fully understood: that
belief is the only wind with breath enough
to take you past the deadly calms, the stopped motion
toward that place you have imagined,
the existence of which you cannot prove
except by going there.
~ Pat Schneider
