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Meditations

2/5/2015

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by Anne Valley-Fox
Assignment to myself: Just tell it, in 14 lines.


Ebola
                      
The concubine of the underworld is expecting. Up above
we hold our breath with shivery fascination. She might deliver
at any time, any place, and in multiples. The very instant she
pirouettes west, a state-of-the-art hazard team will rush to the
scene—stifled in moon suits, standing back from her sweaty thighs
they’ll watch aghast as the newborn slips from its poisonous caul
into our midst. Though the infant’s isolation will be scrupulous,
the medical team will be sweating bullets. Because we are
linked, like paper dolls in a flammable chain of contagion
and death, the virus, a monster of pure chemistry, provokes in me
a feeling almost tender. Unlike the drone, dispatched from
a U.S. Air Force base to take out a terrorist target in Afghanistan,
or the hooded assassin raising a hatchet over a bowed head,
Ebola welcomes everyone equally into her fast embrace.



Car Salesman

Salesman in rearview mirror answers your questions
in slumped singsong. “Overdrive is automatic with
this transmission.” Cumulus clouds roll like whales
over the mountains. He might be driving your cabriolet,
reins slack, dozing behind the dray horses. He might
be the maestro conducting Mahler, waiting for you
in your stiff tux, to chime in with the cymbals.
He could be your stockbroker, talking you through
your hysterical order to sell everything. Or graduate student
in quantum physics waiting your table, tamping down
his impatience—What’s so bloody complicated?
He might be the sexy orderly bending over your bedpan.
Or one of your pallbearers, thinking of afterwards—whiskey
swilled from coffee mugs with diehards in the kitchen.



Swimming with Yeats

Swimsuit tugged up to hipbones, you check yourself out
in the dressing room mirror: breasts lifted in speckled hands,
skin like a prairie, body an attic cluttered with old clocks.
Plunge into aqueous swirl where sound is ascendent.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . by lap 8 or 9
the beast is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel . . .
Flip on your back and start the poem again. Another
century of stony sleep has nearly expired. “After you read
all them books," zen poet Philip Whalen wrote, “what do you
know that you didn’t know before?” Christ, what a mess,
windup humans hacking away at the earth and each other--
we haven’t learned to love. And what rough beast, its hour
come round at last . . .? In the savage wake of our rampage,
surely the earth's body will reconfigure.



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IN MEMORIAM: STANLEY NOYES (1924–2014)

1/27/2015

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NMLA GRATITUDE AWARD WINNER, 2012
by Anne Valley-Fox

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Jicarilla Peak with Ysa
     When Stanley Noyes was a teenager in Napa, California, he had a horse named Buttercup, a wild mustang. “She was beautiful—caramel-colored with a long black mane and flowing black tail,” he told me. But she spooked easily; sometimes she’d rear up and fall backwards, “as if a cougar had sprung on her withers” (“Mustang”). Thrown from the saddle, the agile cowboy would roll aside to avoid being crushed . . . but his mother, unimpressed, made him give the mare away.
     Later Stan rode bulls and bareback horses in rodeos in California and Nevada. His first novel, No Flowers for a Clown (Avon, 1961), featured a rodeo cowboy with a big, sad heart.
     During World War II, Stan served in the US Army. His troop’s reconnaissance mission in the Ruhr campaign was to cross the Rhine ahead of US troops and liberate slave labor camps. Stan was awarded the Bronze Star. In 2007 he published Alles Kaputt: Poems of World War II (Timberline Press).The late poet Keith Wilson wrote of this collection, “. . . the stark excitement, camaraderie, revelations, tragedy, horror and fear, and even the beauties of war are held in his rhythms.”


     SWEET SURRENDER

     The village was quiet when we reached it
     Nothing stirred on the central street
     (no slinking cat or barking dog), so
     the lieutenant fired from his M8
     a single explosive round which made a hole
     in the first building to the west. And abruptly
     the little town erupted: from windows
     on either side linen fluttered and wagged
     and up the road toward us ran
     a delegation, the mayor maybe with several
     other dressed-up gents to greet us effusively,
     with every show of “welcome, Americans!”

     And you know, that was the quickest way
     I’ve ever found of making friends.

                           (from Alles Kaputt: Poems of World War II)

     In civvies again, Stan attended U.C. Berkeley and earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees. There he met Nancy Black, who was to become his beloved wife of 65 years. They lived in France from 1951 to 1953 (Stan had thought he’d attend the Sorbonne, but decided he wanted to be a writer instead) and again in 1962 with their three young children. In 1964 they returned to the states and moved to Santa Fe where, as counterpoint to his writing practice, Stan taught literature at the University of New Mexico and the College of Santa Fe.
     When I met Stan in 1980, he was Arts Director for the New Mexico Artists in the Schools program, based in Santa Fe. I’d come down from Taos to interview for a Poet in the Schools position: happily, over a beer at a downtown sidewalk cafe with Stan and the late Michael Jenkinson, I was hired on. Each year, as the Poetry in the Schools program was gearing up and then winding down, Stan and Nancy hosted gregarious gatherings of creative (and sometimes outrageous) writers in their Santa Fe home. Stan never pulled the boss card. His management style, like his persona, was consistently courteous, inclusive, and good-humored. With Stan at the helm, our arts community had the feel of an affectionate, extended family—respect and appreciation flowing in all directions.
     Stan and Nancy were avid hikers. Back in the day, if you happened to be up and out before dawn in the Canyon Road neighborhood, you would have seen Stan striding along with his wolf hybrids—he walked them early each morning before going to his writing studio.
     Stan often hiked with friends, many of whom were fellow writers.  Arthur Sze: “Stan had a long stride and, especially coming down the mountain, I could barely keep up with him.” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: “You know what a workaholic I am . . . but when Stan asked me to go on a hike, I always went.” John Brandi: “He hiked me up all the major peaks of the Manzanos, Sandias, Jemez, and Sangre de Cristo mountains, wanting me to ‘see from the top what I was missing at the bottom.’”


     CLIMBING NORTH TRUCHAS IN SEPTEMBER
                                        ~ for Nancy
     In this cloud
     of fine blowing snow
     trudge up over rocks
     sharp stones, a steep thousand feet
     above alpine valleys
     gone brown

     Climb
     this hogback to reach
     13,060 feet, the stone cairn,
     halting at times to pant
     into the stinging
     cloud

     Wilderness
     down on west and east--
     small lakes, spruce woods, mountain-
     sides streamered with aspens’
     sunlight dimly glowing
     through gray

     Now the calm
     a cold summit to stand by
     here in a winter
     beyond the solar world
     in cloudy currents
     of snow

     To know
     this is truth, a truth
     even in spring or summer, while the
     heart slows. This is a truth
     within—all our seasons,
     friend.

                              (from Faces and Spirits)

     Stan’s tour de force in prose, to my mind, is Los Comanches: The Horse People, 1751–1845 (University of New Mexico Press, 1993). Based on a decade of research, Los Comanches is a definitive treatise on an advanced and complex equestrian culture. This book was followed by Comanches in the New West (University of Texas, 1999), a handsome presentation of text and historic photographs with an introduction by Larry McMurtry. After that he wrote White Bear, a novel involving French traders and their Comanche counterparts. This beautiful tale of love and clashing cultures is as yet unpublished.
     My Half-Wild West, poems of rodeos and western landscape, was published in 2012 by Tooth of Time Press.  The opening poem in this hand-bound, hand-sewn chapbook, “The Last Buffalo of San Jon, NM,” was issued in 2014 as a limited-edition broadside, hand-printed by Tom Leech at the Palace of the Governor’s Print Shop and Bindery, on paper made from buffalo-wool fibers. “Coda” is the last poem in this, Stan’s last collection.


     CODA: BURNED MOUNTAIN, WINTER, NM

     Snow to the tops of fence posts in the canyon
     below the road, and in the snowfields
     between woods only the tips of the fence
     at the cattleguard show where it is. On the distant
     mountain, aspens screen the snow with gray,
     and above them the forest of spruce and fir,
     green-black. The day above the mountains,
     the blue supporting the sun, is primal
     and intense as it once was everywhere.

     Silence. Then a little wind. Silences.
     Nothing moves. There’s nothing here but this,
     This and sometimes wind, and they are sufficient.

                                         (from My Half-Wild West)



STANLEY NOYES’S BOOK PUBLICATIONS

PROSE
No Flowers for a Clown (Avon, 1961).
Shadowbox (Macmillan, 1970).
The Indian Rio Grande: Recent Poems from Three Cultures (San Marcos Press, 1977, Gene Frumkin and
     Stanley Noyes, editors).
Los Comanches (University of New Mexico Press, 1993).
Comanches in the New West (University of Texas, 1999, introduction by Larry McMurtry).
White Bear (unpublished).

POETRY
Beyond the Mountains (Solo Press, 1974).
Faces and Spirits (Sunstone Press, 1974).
Commander of Dead Leaves (Tooth of Time Press, 1984).
Alles Kaputt (Timberline Press, 2007).
Annus Mirabilis: A Peripatetic Calendar (Timberline Press, 2003).
My Half-Wild West (Tooth of Time Press, 2012).

AUDIO
Stanley Noyes Reads (Vox Audio, 2010).



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“Celebrating Creativity in Elder Care: A Day of Learning.”

11/20/2014

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Over 100 people attend the conference on Saturday, October 25. NMLA partnered with the New Mexico History Museum and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project to present “Celebrating Creativity in Elder Care: A Day of Learning.”
Poet Stuart Hall of Santa Fe was the featured guest artist. Myles Copeland, the Deputy Secretary of the Aging and Long -Term Services Department gave the opening remarks.
The conference was in support the New Mexico Alzheimer’s and Related Dementia State Plan, with the endorsement of the Office of New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, the New Mexico Aging and Long-Term Services Department, and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

Other conference partnering organizations included: the Alzheimer’s Association, New Mexico Chapter; Alzheimer’s Café; Discover Your Story, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Institute of Dementia Education & Art; Lifesongs(TM) 
and Vista Living Communities.

Workshops were led by Gary Glazner of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. Jane Tygesson of Discover Your Story taught ways to give vibrant museum tours to people living with memory loss. Alysha Shaw, program coordinator of the Santa Fe-based Lifesongs (TM), showed how the project helps people in nursing homes and hospice create original and enlightening music. Ruth Dennis, recreational director of Vista Living, and Jytte Lokvig of the Alzheimer’s Creativity Project led a hands-on art-making workshop.

NMLA President Joan Logghe and board members Anne Valley-Fox and Elizabeth Raby helped to organize the conference and register the attendees.



 



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Ordinary Cloth with Stella Reed

10/27/2014

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RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 12, 2014, Zona del Sol, Santa Fe, NM

by Bridget Green

    Ten women graced the sunny table in the front room of Yarn and Coffee.  We each arrived with our own thoughts, ranging from chaotic to calm, our own stories from the morning and years of mornings, and our own vision of what each of us might stitch into “Ordinary Cloth.”  
    With Stella Reed’s lead, we sent pens sailing and scrawling across the page in open response to single word prompts, from body parts to universal themes.  What is the eye, the mouth, or loneliness, really? The group shared selected phrases, while keeping the bold shapes of other words and stanzas mollified by the page. We shifted like this time and again, from solitary moments of reflection and sculpting words to spoken moments, listening.  Metaphors brought distinction to more nebulous thoughts, like a child capturing a monster by painting its portrait. 
    Messages created for family members were subjected to dictionary translations that flung the counsel to the winds of alphabetic fate.  Some of us cheated wildly as we skipped clusters of words away from our original text to find substitutions, creating a mishmash of plays on words we wouldn’t have been capable of doing intentionally. The coding practice reflected times in women’s lives when it’s deemed appropriate to hold the pillowcase up to shield our plans, to hold the book close to the chest, to keep secrets safe.
    We arranged works, one word, one phrase and perhaps another to put in writing on cloth. We stretched ourselves on paper to invite our imaginations to play.
    Stories poked through like bright colors of embroidery thread and created lines both raw and refined upon which to connect.  When participants were each following threads of their artistic plan, thinking half-stolen by action opened up to associations.  Free commentaries soon sprang out from behind the coyote fence of formality.  Good fences make good framework for collaboration.
    In our daily lives we do what we need to do, whether we skip five nouns away from what we aim to say or not, as in coding messages, or whether we forego eroding our topics with prattling paths, instead selecting a single word or phrase to encapsulate thoughts, as when curating pieces for the cloth.  In a workshop such as this, we as artists, daughters, mothers, captives, clowns, lovers, readers, healers, friends, and teachers, craft as we choose.  

images - Edie Tsong, Stella Reed

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Codex-Making Workshop with Israel F Haros Lopez

10/25/2014

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RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 12, 2014, Zona del Sol, Santa Fe, NM

by Aly Kreikemeier
   
    Walking into the art space at Zona del Sur last Sunday-- cold cement floors, neatly chopped vegetables and hummus, scattered markers and paper, and a projector looping illegible symbols against the back wall -- I had to wonder what was in store for the three hours ahead of "codex making".
    "I am a Chicano artist", Israel introduced himself, cycling through a snippet of his story: the political implications of identifying as Chicano, the barrio that raised him in L.A., how he squeaked through high school with a sub 1.5-something GPA. "They were ready to ____ me by the time I was done" he said, smiling warmly as he lifted his leg to kick dismissal into the air.
    We began the cryptic workshop with projected images of "asemic writing" -- a post-literate exploration, having no specific semantic content. Israel had me when, in just ten or so minutes, he led us into an exploration of how violently we've come to communicate with one another; the importance of making space to come back to the heart in a language where labels invite division.

Abstraction, is the doorway to the unknown. 

    We dabbled with these profound questions for just a few minutes: how can communities come together and really listen in order to communicate from the heart? How does art, whether asemic writing or abstract painting, offer a medium for desperately needed connection through truer communication? It was a dribble of curiosity, an opening from which we could launch into creating.
    The next three hours were spent drawing, painting and creating, seated together but engaging our distinct voices. We practiced poetic communication, guided into writing prompts around identity and engagement. We constructed our own enigmatic languages and symbols. We came together outside in a standing circle, whipped by the cool fall breeze, to move our bodies and bring our voices together.
       As the workshop drew to a close, we came together and wove our codices-in-progress into a collective story - reading aloud the words that wound around our pages -symbols interspersed with spattered paint, geometric markings and bursts of color before pegando them to one another in order to form a unified piece over twenty feet long.
    As we listened to each other, we folded our individual pages into a unified piece. In that space we practiced, if only for a few hours, a way of connecting and communicating that invites humanity. Laughter, freedom, and play marked an afternoon of strangers coming together, suspending cynicism and difference, in order to step into play, creativity, and connection. 

images - Israel F. Haros Lopez
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Poetry Texting With Elizabeth Jacobson

10/24/2014

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RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 9, 2014, St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art

Elizabeth Jacobson writes:
     This workshop employs phone texting to create compact, immediate and spontaneous collaborative poetry. Taking inspiration from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, and a few other poets, we will write our own questions and responses. Next, from the work generated by this exercise, we will partner up and use texting to create collaborative poems.
     My daughter and I were reading The Book of Questions together, and communicating about it one night via text messages.  We started to create our own lines back and forth in response to our conversation, which culminated in writing some short poems.  We used texting as the sole construction method, which we both found completely inspiring and interesting!
Workshop participant Lonnie Rankin writes:
Text a line. Get a line back. Line by line, a poem is born. Elizabeth Jacobson’s Poetry Texting workshop introduced a brilliantly innovative way to bring poetry into everyday life. Something we definitely need more of. Loved it!

Can you catch a fish in a net of sunlight?
Only when wandering the mountains at night,
stepping cautiously over streams of tears.
Where is the wall when you need nothing to look at?
What is the thing that never changes?
Wind pushing the world before it.
That place, my seed, born as a sprout.
Grass lying down beneath the doe.
                                ~ Lonnie Rankin and Elizabeth Jacobson


Who organized the committee of exits?
Is someone always trying to flee their situation?
Or are situations large birds who prefer anyplace but here?
How many sizes do birds come in anyway?
I'm not sure. You might have to ask the google bird.
I think it's flown off to find the exit ramp.
So then are all my regrets planted on this continent?
If that's so, are they then in-continent?
That's between a laugh and a sigh like leaving a body you love
    to fend for itself.
A body in motion tends to fend for itself.
                            ~ Margaret Lubalin and Joan Logghe

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Excerpt from Ransomed Voices

5/31/2014

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by Elizabeth Raby

Chapter 28 Vassar Virgins   
Poughkeepsie, NY 1959-1962                        
            
Sadly, technically speaking, I was one, more or less, on April 4, 1962, when President Sarah Gibson Blanding gave her famous speech. No one knew why we had been abruptly summoned to the chapel for this unusual all-school compulsory evening gathering. After a brief announcement and explanation of the need to increase fees for the following year, Miss Blanding, her hair in its usual bun and her saddle shoes firm on her feet, surprised us. She launched into a stern denunciation of premarital sex and excessive drinking. She told us neither would be tolerated at Vassar. Disciplinary action would be taken against those who did not follow the “innate standards” of the college. We sat in embarrassed astonishment as Miss Blanding declared that promiscuity was indecent and immoral. She advised those students who could not follow the rules to withdraw voluntarily from the school, before they were asked to leave. Virginity and temperance were required of Vassar students. 

I wondered how they would know for sure who had broken the code. Would we be summoned to the Warden’s office to swear that we were neither wantons nor drunks? If we were already indecent or immoral how could they rely on us to adhere to Vassar’s honor system? Were we all to have a mandatory gynecological exam? What a horror — to spread my legs before the infirmary doctors and nurses.

We had all already endured one unbelievable breach of privacy — the “posture pictures” which were mandatory for every incoming freshman. One at a time, stripped naked, we had been made to enter an empty room where a voice directed us to stand just so, to turn to the right, to the left, while someone took photographs of us. Mercifully we couldn’t see the photographer, but, shivering and humiliated, we wondered who was on the other side of the camera. How many people would look at these pictures? Where were they kept?  We were told, of course, that they would be handled with discretion, but what did that mean exactly?    

The purpose of these pictures, supposedly, was to determine any faults of posture which could then be addressed and corrected in an amazing course called “Freshmen Fundamentals.”  In “Fundies,” as the course was dubbed by its unwilling participants, we were taught how to sit gracefully, stand elegantly, walk fluidly, and most important of all, how to lift a suitcase correctly onto the luggage rack of a train. We strove, of course, for perfect posture in each movement.

One of my hall mates, her small frame muscled and taut from prep school softball, was assigned, much to her disgust, to "Remedial Fundamentals" when it was determined her hamstrings were too tight. In "Remedial Fundamentals," learning to keep one’s knees together and ankles crossed while seated was supplemented by additional hours of stretching and flexing.

But what had caused the president’s sudden outrage? Had she discovered someone in flagrante delicto?  Did she really expect seniors with less than two months until graduation to confess and to leave without a diploma? As far as I could remember, our handbooks had not said Vassar was for virgins only.

As incoming freshmen, we had learned from the sophomores and juniors in our dormitories that a man’s jacket hanging on a closed door meant, “Do Not Knock. Do Not Enter. Do Not Ask What is Happening in This Room.” As long as the door was closed, fornication apparently wasn’t anyone’s business except the participants’. It didn’t seem fair for the president to be stating an anti-fornication policy retroactively.

When we were freshmen, the warden had told us in an orientation lecture that Vassar considered the custom of going off on weekends to men’s schools a valid part of student life. These weekends were more or less unsupervised fraternity debauches. Had the college really been unaware of what had been going on both on campus and off?

Lord knows there were plenty of unpleasant possible consequences that carried their own grim punishments. The fear of pregnancy and venereal disease was sufficient to frighten many of us into some sort of self-restraint. Religious conviction prevented others from “going all the way.”  Nothing, however, was sufficient to keep us all from the pleasures, mysteries, and misadventures of sex.

And what about “excessive drinking”? Alcohol was not allowed on campus or in the dormitories. Those rules were pretty well respected. We did our drinking off campus, legally, since eighteen was the legal age for drinking in New York State at that time. I had watched a very drunken girl throw up all over our housefather’s shoes once. As freshmen, a group of us, having consumed the Gallo Port we carried in our wineskins (a most sophisticated accoutrement, we thought) went swimming in our underwear in the drainage creek behind the faculty apartments. Sophomore year, the handbook added the creek to the territory to be kept alcohol-free. But surely, I thought guiltily, that freshman indiscretion could not be the cause of this chastisement.

Excessive drinking was harder to conceal than lack of virginity. Looking around, I really couldn’t tell who was a virgin and who was not, whereas a drunk would have been detectable by the smell, if by nothing else. Of course, for the most part we knew such facts about one another. We knew who returned hung-over from weekends (most of us, if truth be told.) We knew who had succumbed to the importuning of a fiancé with much misgiving and subsequent guilt. We knew who hung out at the “townie” bars and gaily rode away on motorcycles clinging to the back of a tee-shirted stranger. We suffered pangs of jealousy at the pretty and willing among us who went off with the Kingston Trio after its on campus concert. We knew, or suspected we knew, those who had had abortions. We knew, more or less, who was spared the temptations of sex with a man by a preference for sex with women. Was sex with a woman premarital sex? Was it promiscuity? Until Miss Blanding’s lecture, we had considered our behavior to be a private matter of conscience or appetite or hope or despair.

The aftermath of the speech was really rather unpleasant, pitting the un-fallen against the fallen, the good against the wicked, in bitter argument. A college poll of 1,040 students out of a total student population of 1,450 concluded that fifty-two percent of us agreed with Miss Blanding that we should be pure and temperate. Forty percent of us disagreed. The rest of us were undecided.

We were further embarrassed by prurient reporters asking impertinent personal questions. Most of us scuttled to classes, trying to avoid them, but every major newspaper and magazine wrote stories about us and about our reaction to President Blanding’s surprise.

However, the poll contained an additional proposition. “Social morals are a personal matter that should be of concern to the college only when they bring the name of Vassar into public disrepute.”  Eighty-one percent of us agreed. This was perhaps a portent. Although I voted for privacy along with eighty-one percent of my fellow students, I sometimes thought it might be pleasant to have no choices, for rules to be so explicit and generally accepted, that no moral decisions remained to be made. I was only slowly stumbling into the autonomy of adulthood.

Apparently Miss Blanding’s speech was more of a cri de coeur, a last blast from a fading moral position, than an actual statement of policy. As far as I know no moral delinquents were drummed out of school. None of us was summoned to an inquisition. I’m quite sure future handbooks did not state virginity as a necessary condition for admission.  

Within two years Miss Blanding had retired. The social revolution of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s rendered her speech quaint, dear, and irrelevant. Soon after Miss Blanding left Vassar, the student movement dismantled the concept of in loco parentis. Then Vassar and its dormitories became co-ed. For a few gaudy years, until some sort of balance was restored, I’ve heard that many young women felt like prey in a hunting preserve. In 1962, drugs had still been a rumor. We had heard of marijuana, but only a tiny minority of us, the truly rebellious, had tried it.

I don’t know how any young woman negotiates the pressures of freedom these days. I had enough trouble making my way in my own less complicated era.  From what I read “hooking up” is unproblematic to the majority. It would terrify me.
 

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Elizabeth Raby’s memoir, Ransomed Voices, published by Red Mountain Press in 2013,  received an award from New Mexico Press Women. She is the author of three books of poems, This Woman (2012), a finalist for the 2013 NM-AZ Book Award, Ink on Snow, (2010) and The Year the Pears Bloomed Twice, (2009) all from Virtual Artists Collective (www.vacpoetry.org).      
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Living and Dying Every Year 

4/28/2014

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by Edie Tsong
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When I was 46 the wind blew the dust off my face. I saw myself clearly. 
When I was 45 I became intimate with darkness. 
When I was 44 I found a place in the community.
When I was 43 I only knew myself in relation to others. 
When I was 42 I awoke to the racing of my heart. 
When I was 41 I let the stars and planets guide me.
When I was 40 I couldn’t wait for my morning coffee in a handmade mug.
When I was 39 I stayed at home. 
When I was 38 I gave birth to a beautiful being.
When I was 37 I followed the path before me however foggy.
When I was 36 I gave myself away. 
When I was 35 I didn’t know boundaries.
When I was 34 I was surprised by the person I saw in the mirror. 
When I was 33 I fell in love with a ghost beast.
When I was 32 I felt the magic of my ideas come to life.
When I was 31 my identity mutated with each interaction. 
When I was 30 I blew out the candles of two cakes at once.
When I was 29 I left the mountains for the swamps. 
When I was 28 I felt beauty and pain from inanimate objects. 
When I was 27 I pretended to study so I could play.
When I was 26 I wandered begrudgingly. 
When I was 25 I struggled with obstacles I could not name.
When I was 24 I drank and danced all night long. 
When I was 23 I circumambulated a holy city. 
When I was 22 I wanted to be alone.
When I was 21 I took flight when they chased me.
When I was 20 I wasn't bothered by what people said. 
When I was 19 I stopped wearing my glasses because the world was sharp.
When I was 18 I took the stairs daily to the 15th floor.
When I was 17 I ran as far as I could.
When I was 16 I said no.
When I was 15 I obsessed over my appearance. 
When I was 14 I searched for a best friend.
When I was 13 I imagined a better life as an adult.
When I was 12 I felt like a person.
When I was 11 I time-travelled in my spaceship igloo.
When I was 10 I made a plan to run away.
When I was 9 I imagined dramas as I played the piano. 
When I was 8 I did everything correctly.
When I was 7 I was tall enough to reach the sink.
When I was 6 I understood linear time.
When I was 5 I spun as fast as I could til I fell. 
When I was 4 I confided in my wool doll, Yoshiko. 
When I was 3 a supernatural wave washed over me.
When I was 2 I understood there to be more than one language. 
When I was 1 I felt the world open up as I stood on two strong legs.
Before I was 1, I marveled beneath the dappled light of a tree. I was safe.
Edie Tsong is an artist/writer activist whose projects explore how we connect with one another. She is a board member of New Mexico Literary Arts, the founding director of Cut+Paste Society, and the director of Snow Poems Project. 
www.edietsong.com
www.cargocollective.com/plainsong
www.snowpoemsproject.com
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Where Do You Go When You Write?

3/31/2014

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PictureFlamenco Fiesta at Teatro Paraguas (photo: Stephanie Hatfield)
In the middle of a flamenco performance, I see the dancer disappear into the dance. Her name is Illeana Gomez. She’s wearing a tight black dress with fringes. Shadows and light play across her face as she whirls on the stage - staccato footwork, sinuous arms. The singer sings a cante about hardship. The voice is deep, tremulous. Las vueltas que el mundo da/Ay, válgame Dios ; The turns the world gives, save me from them, O God.  The dance has been building in movement; the song in feeling. And then she goes somewhere else. So do I watching her. I only know it when she comes back, when her expression changes, when her eyes connect back to us and everyone is on their feet, applauding.

Later she tells me that the cante laments the life of a miner in nineteenth century southern Spain.  “The feeling is old, heavy, deep, torturous and I was connecting into it.”
“I saw that,” I say, “and I wanted to ask you, ‘where do you go when you dance?’ Because you went somewhere.”
“I don't know,” she says smiling, “but it was intense.”
             
I think she goes where I go when I write. It’s like falling asleep. You don't realize you’ve been asleep till you wake up. It’s the waking that alerts you to the sleep.

For me, it starts with a kind of premonition that something is emerging. Maybe I’ve had a conversation, seen a certain slant of light, had a dream. All of these triggers have an incomplete feeling to them –something unfinished, something withheld – I have to supply the words to complete them. When the words come, I am conscious for a good long while – there is pain, there is procrastination, there is frustration – but then there is that moment when I don't realize how intensely I’ve been writing till I look up from the page. And I look at some of the sentences astonished and wonder how they came and where I went to get them.

Some time ago, I read a poem by Alice Meynell that explores this theme. It’s called A Song of Derivations and it starts  “I come from nothing; but from where/Come the undying thoughts I bear?” 

She links her undying thoughts to many things: the legacy of writers who came before her, the unknown possessing the known, other stories mingling with her own. What I appreciate is that she gives credit to the mystery of wherefore and how we create - that as much as it’s personal and particular to our lives, it’s universal.

On days when I get good writing done, when those disappearing moments happen a lot, I imagine I’ve wandered into a field of clouds or tendrils of smoke and clouds. Each tendril is a sentence or sentiment or image – something that draws from generations of lived and unlived human experience. I just happen to have fallen into that cloud field or walked into it. I wander through in a haze, tendrils attach themselves to me, and I emerge with something that is of me but also, 
beyond me.
 
Where do you go when you write?
Shebana Coelho is a writer, filmmaker, NMLA board member and flamenco student. Her website is www.shebanacoelho.com
5 Comments

Off the Deep End by Michelle Holland

2/22/2014

12 Comments

 
PictureMichelle Holland
I’ve been an English teacher most of my professional life, teaching grades 6-college level.  I’ve spent the past six years teaching at Los Alamos High School.  I’ve always enjoyed the classroom, and I’ve had great success developing student creativity and skills in composition and literature.  At times, the experience was simply a blast.  However, over the years at LAHS, my creativity has dwindled, and my writing life was compromised.  I didn’t focus as much on my poet identity, lost that thread of conviction in the glare of hostile and unsupportive colleagues, and felt bereft.  My connections with writers and poets through New Mexico CultureNet, NMLA, Sin Fronteras/Writers without Borders, and the rare times that I could write with the Monday writers in Santa Fe kept me in touch, at least.  The short story, I quit teaching high school English at LAHS in December.  My life has changed.  I am writing again.  We are broke.  I leapt off the deep end.  No insurance.  No steady income.  No retirement.  But, we don’t owe anybody anything.  My husband and I carry zero debt.  And, financial security of some sort is part of every writer’s writing life. It has to be.  

The poems I receive intermittently, emailed from my husband, and my poetry responses, are also part of my writing life.  Our exchanges began four years ago when I spent most of every work week living with our daughter in a place we invested in up in Los Alamos.  Sylvia, our daughter, was active in soccer, track, and cross-country, so we decided it best to keep her as close to her school as possible.  Tom would come up on weekends, or I would drive down to our real home in Chimayó when I could.  In between, we would email poems to one another.  The practice has continued, and sometimes, those poems were all the writing I did in a given week, or even month.  When our daughter graduated, we sold the condo, and we moved everything back down to our house, then moved most of the furniture into Sylvia’s rental home in Albuquerque.  Now, with my husband reading the paper across the living room from me, I check my email, and surprise!  there’s a poem he wrote about baking bread the other day.

I’ve already responded with a poem about sprinting “diagonals” with my new (and first) coach, Abraham, gesturing me to keep my knees up, and run in a straight line, not waste precious yards on my wayward sense of direction.  I am invested as much in my running and training as I am in my writing, so the two have become merged as I think like a poet and an athlete.  I’m not sure where that puts my audience, but I’m always searching for the words to make the balance and thrill of my body in motion manifest in the height of my knees, the rhythm of footfalls, the feel of the earth from the rocky inclines, and sandy arroyos, to the give of the oval track where I run as fast as I can, looking at my Garmin, then glancing up to see the snow trails on the Santa Fe Ski Basin. 

My writing life.  Not Hemmingway’s, or John Updike’s, or Sylvia Plath’s, or well, anyone else’s.  Right?  And, even this life, right now, is not what it was last year at this time.  For the first time in many years, I am writing more daily than not, and I have goals.  First, I’ll check my email to see if there’s another poem!


12 Comments
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