Jeannine Atkins

Slow writers can be friends with fast writers, yes? I’m rooting for friends who are trying to write a novel in a month. Cheering and amazed, even when the goal is for a very rough draft, or getting in the habit of sprinting past internal censors. And in my area, Leslea Newman http://www.lesleakids.com/, who is currently the very active and imaginative poet laureate of Northampton, MA, was inspired by NaNoWriMo to start a 30 poems in 30 days project.
You can read about it here: http://www.northamptonartscouncil.org/view/web/id/7746/title/30_Poems_in_30_Days_Project_

Leslea has done wonderful things for our community, such as getting poems in the local newspaper and poetry books into doctor’s offices. Now money raised by this project – she suggests anything from a nickel to a dollar a poem --will benefit the Center for New Americans, http://www.cnam.org/ which supports literacy and education for people new to our part of Massachusetts. From what I’ve read, many who’ve learned language and computer skills here go on to help others, making this agency both cost-efficient and friendly to those who might arrive with trepidation.

I know myself. I’d be beating myself on the head trying to write a poem a day, and would be left in the dust, tinkering, though Leslea says they just have to be poems, not good poems. But I’m going for the bystander role, sponsoring Dina Friedman d_dina_friedman who’s in my writing group. Dina writes:. “I'm seeing it as a goal to be disciplined and use the form to pay closer attention to language. I find that focusing on poetry from time to time really helps my fiction writing.” Other participants include published poets such as Leslea, Jane Yolen, Corinne Demas, Katha Pollitt, and Amy Dryansky, while others may be writing some of their first poems, or first poems in years. And all sorts of poets in between, with everyone welcome. It’s about having fun for a great cause.

Have you written a poem today? Go! if you can. And cheer on our friends if you can’t.

Last Tuesday night was warm enough to enjoy sitting on steps waiting for my friend Margaret, watching people in actual droves head to John Green Hall to hear poetry. Back bents from the climb up Elm Street, intentness seared the autumn air. Mary Oliver did not disappoint her 2000 plus admirers. She read from several of her twenty-six books, along with some yet-to-be-published poems. There were a lot of ponds, otters, wild geese, pines, ferns, and, from her newest poems, an adored little dog. Afterward, my friend and I wondered if this was her first dog: the poems had that first romance air about them.



Mary Oliver talked some about the ethic that’s formed her life’s work: to pay attention, to be amazed, and to tell about it. She said that in her Provincetown home, people tease about what makes a good walk for Mary: she starts out in a small blaze, gradually slows down, then ends up standing perfectly still. And she introduced a poem telling of how an editor offered to publish it if she took out the word, “beautiful.” She said no. Many cheered this short story, but I kept my hands in my lap. Mary Oliver reveres the world and seems like a happy poet, words that don’t always go together. Fine, but I’m not always excited to find the word “beauty” in a poem any more than I’d think the poet would love a tree with such a sign hanging from a branch. I want to see what she sees, and make an assessment myself.

Well, one quibble, and why not join her in seeing a poet as a performing artist: one who performs admiration? What a pleasure to leave with many people looking radiant, and speaking of red birds and purple iris. Our local women’s colleges, Smith and Mount Holyoke, have a lovely tradition of pairing older alums with students, and, when I walked the packed sidewalks to my car, I expect it was this kind of match I witnessed between two young women by a white-haired women with a cane keeping out of the crowd. The three women stood on a lawn bending their heads for a good view of the moon.


It's Poetry Friday! To read more blog posts about poetry or poems, visit Crossover http://crossoverbooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/poetry-friday.html

This collection of mother-daughter poems (Christy Ottaviano Books/Henry Holt) is the newest work from Hope Anita Smith, whose other books,The Way a Door Closes and Keeping the Night Watch, also tell family stories through poems. The first third or so of Mother Poems seem to emphasize rhythm more than the later ones, using it to lull us into the ease of love between a small girl and her mother. They ring as confidently as the voice of a young girl who is certain she is treasured. They describe episodes that are ordinary, but they take away your breath because you know what’s coming. A girl tries on her mother’s shoes, echoes her hand-on-hips stance: and we know that soon she’ll have to figure out what a woman can be without a mother to guide her.

Then the safety breaks, and the narrator wakes to a changed world. We’re kept snug within her point of view, not getting many answers, just as the girl didn’t, but tried to read expressions on the faces of adults. Perhaps this was the beginning of a poet.

The rest of the poems are about the unnamed girl putting together pieces of old stories and her broken self, trying to make a complicated world whole. There are encounters with other mothers and daughters that include envy, desire, and a sense of danger. Couldn’t she be the good and grateful daughter? No. Getting through Mother’s Day alone. Replaying the last words. The deals made, like trying to be perfect. The hazards of and necessity of memory. Wondering it it’s disloyal to enjoy another woman’s cooking. And finally a new mother whose words she examines with suspicion, but the woman brushes past, opening her arms, looking with eyes that “say it all --/Stop searching for evidence to convict me./I did it./I love you.”

Hope Anita Smith created the torn-paper collages that illustrate the poems. The ripped edges echo the often-torn, rough-at-the-edges feeling of the narrator, but the way the pictures of mother and daughter often overlap, not letting you tell one arm or torso from another, beautifully shows their bond in brave, true, and bold strokes. The book ends with “Constructing Trees,” as the girl remembers how she and her mother put together a Christmas Tree. This poem sends us back to the first poems, just as the narrator returns to memories, savoring, examining, and using them to make something brilliant and new.




To read about other poems, please visit Sylvia Vardell's blog http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/

(ED stipple drawing by my husband, from many years ago)

Last night I got to hear Marilyn Nelson (whose books of biographical poems, such as Carver, are wonderful), read Emily Dickinson. This was at the Jones Library in Amherst, part of an NEA sponsored program called The Big Read. http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org Marilyn Nelson read each poem twice, as she said was her habit over thirty years of being a professor at UConn. She asked the most spellbound audience questions beginning with: if you cover the poem with your hand, or close your eyes, what stays with you? We’d look at words, phrases, punctuation, then, when people replied, she opened and amplified the responses with her marvelous words and sweet voice. It was like being at a symphony. We listened to poems in which the speaker reveled in the wild drunkenness of spring, while others were restrained. We were reminded of the joys of wanting over getting, the richness and gift of not having, or as ED writes, “the Banquet of Abstemiousness” (poem 1447) There was discussion of the constraints within the poet’s life, but the bounty she found in her garden, as vast as her vocabulary.

Marilyn Nelson http://www.blueflowerarts.com/mnelson.html orchestrated such a bevy of comments – and while she said she spent three years immersed in Emily Dickinson, and had spent the afternoon contemplating one line (I forget which) – there were people in the room – biographers, high school teachers, college professors, special collection librarians, historical museum directors -- who spend almost every day with Dickinson. A lot of wisdom and opinions. Amherst is a town with regular events such as walking from Dickinson’s house to her graveside to read poetry on the day she died. With portraits of her in coffee shops (soon I’ll bring my camera). Click on the link above to learn more about local events including a biographical ballet, Jane Yolen reading her new picture book, My Uncle Emily, a poetry picnic, and the fifth annual ED Poetry Marathon, a non-stop reading of every one of Dickinson’s 1789 poems.

I took a picture of Marilyn Nelson, but it seemed to reflect more anxiousness about a babbling fan girl sticking a camera too close than her beauty. So instead, I’m posting some of what I got to drink in today on a walk with Mary and our dogs. Mary and me, wearing orange vests to ward off turkey hunters, pants tucked in socks to ward off ticks, were not quite such a picture. But with this view to behold, who cares?

On Sunday afternoon I met my friend Burleigh Muten at the Jones Library to hear Barbara Dana http://www.barbaradana.com/ read her new novel for teens: A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson. It was fascinating to learn about Barbara Dana’s process for the book which took about ten years to research and write, and to hear her read passages that sent us back in time and seem true to the young poet. That’s a lot of years to spend on a book, but Barbara seemed to hold no regrets. She said Emily would now be with her for the rest of her life, as was Joan of Arc, the subject of an earlier book. That’s good company.



Her research, she said, included talking with Dickinson scholars, a few of whom were in the audience. As a researcher, she first tries to find out everything she can, then, as a novelist, uses her imagination to fill in places where no record was left. She worked to get the voice right partly by playing tapes of Julie Harris reading Dickinson’s poems and letters over and over, while driving, doing dishes, or walking the dog, sometimes listening closely, other times letting the words be background to something else. Barbara acts as well as writes, and spoke of how she brings her acting into her writing process. Drawing from an exercise taught by drama teacher Uta Hagen, Barbara researches and considers aspects of clothing, habits, morals, language, buildings special to an era, then equally considers all the elements of a life that don’t change because of time and place. As an actor and writer, she tries to bring that experience-in-common to the specifics of another person.

She spent long times in archives, as well as walking through her bedroom and garden. In the special collections at Amherst College she saw Emily’s old Latin book and a lock of hair.
She spoke of being introduced to Emily Dickinson and her work by seeing Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst on Broadway. This summer, Barbara will perform that one-woman play for that Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Regina, Canada.

I look forward to reading the novel, which covers the time when Emily was nine to twenty-four. It is beautifully produced with a sepia toned cover, and reddish tones in both Emily’s hair and the fur of her beloved Newfoundland, Carlo.

April, Poetry Month, is going to be filled with other great Emily Dickinson events as Amherst celebrates its 250th anniversary and participates in The Big Read. For more information, check outhttp://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/events.html

The talk was also co-sponsored by http://www.EmilyDickinsonMuseum.org as well as the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. one of my favorite spots on earth. But I’d never been in the beautiful Trustees Room on the third floor. Here’s a shot I took of one corner, with a mummy case that enchanted me but is apparently not so universally beloved. A librarian told me that it had been made to stash cassettes and was one of those gifts no one quite knew what to do with. Anyone need a mummy case?

Some years ago I took a wrong turn out of a parking garage in Boston. The street we were looking for wasn’t there, and I had to make a fast right or left. Either direction was wrong. My daughter beside me was freaking out as I headed down a dark street in a city famous for fast drivers and bad signage. “We’ll never got home,” she shrieked.

“Of course we will.” I felt like screaming, too, but kept my voice calm. “There will be signs for the Mass Pike somewhere, and we’ll get out of here.”

“We don’t know where we are! We’re stuck.”

“Nothing looks familiar yet, but sometime it will.” I so totally wanted to slam on the brakes, grab my daughter, get out, run. But with fast cars and trucks ahead and behind, I had to keep going. I couldn’t stop in the middle of the road. And eventually – I’m here to write this tale – we spotted a sign and found our way to the home of the calm-seeming driver who was shrieking “eeeeekkk!” inside.

Starting some poems, I want to scream “eeeeekk” some more. What am I doing? Where can these images coming from and where can they possibly go? I throw them down. I let them cluster. I make a mess. I know that if anyone looked now they’d think: you call yourself a writer?

So where is the calm-seeming driver, my other half? I remember this traffic jam of words is how I start. What’s like the speeding cars ahead and behind me, a line that keeps me going? I suppose knowing I’ve set out into grand messes of words before and found my way out. I don’t know just how, but I’ll do it again.

Back when I was young and angsty, I liked reading Virginia Woolf’s published journals and novels. The nature of my interests and patience have changed over the years, but I still love the way she spoke of writing her diaries and sometimes being surprised to find “diamonds in the dust heap.” I just had one of those moments, when after creating a jumble of notes about Marie Curie and her daughters, I glimpsed some patterns in their lives.

It’s a reminder of what a huge mess I need to start out with before trimming to a few words. Many excellent biographies have been written of Marie Curie, including one by her youngest daughter, Eve, so there is plenty of material to cull for details I’m using in poems. After lots of jotting, mostly of common nouns, patterns appear.

As a child, Marie sometimes covered her ears with her hands to keep out the noise in her house where there were lots of brothers, sisters, boarders, and, perhaps most importantly, sickness: her mother died when she was ten. The covering up of ears is repeated by Marie’s daughters, and in some ways, by herself as an adult. She ignored some dangers in order to focus on scientific truths. As with many mothers and daughters, advice and commands are repeated, so those become patterns, as does play: Marie chased butterflies with a net as a girl, and so did her daughters: I get to use yellow-winged butterflies and green nets. The practice of science demands repetitions of stirring, note-taking, gazing at blue light that can go into poems to create structures. Then there’s that marvelous repetition when Marie is awarded not one, but two Nobel prizes; then her oldest child, Irène, wins a Nobel prize of her own.

I’ll set up patterns in poems and within my series, and then get to twist them. As a child, Irène demands: Look at me, something she essentially repeats in her letters to her often-absent mother as she grows up. She wins her mother’s attention with her bravery, academic excellence, and devotion to carrying on her work with radium, but the series of poems I’m working on will turn toward an end not when Irène feels seen, in a deep sense, but when she looks at her mother.

I was a little kid who liked to read, memorize, and write poems. I can still make an awkward attempt at “The Shores of Gitcheegummee, by the shining deep sea waters.” As a teen, I didn’t consider another genre that wasn’t short and hard. In my first college creative writing course I focused on verse, though my wise teacher asked me to turn in some letters I wrote home, describing my actual life, to steer me away from too much “huh”ness, a tendency to say… anything. I found I liked being grounded more, and wanted to involve myself with characters for a duration; I also loved reading novels.

After a fling with teaching junior high, I went to grad school, where aspiring writers had to choose a place: poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, and stay there. It was clear there were identity issues in these placements, too. We fiction writers may have had a very poor shot at making money, but, hey, we thought, at least we’re not poets. The fiction teachers were all guys, tough enough to earn the program the nickname of “The School of Hunting and Fishing.” Of the two poetry professors, one wore long, gauzy dresses and evocative hats, while the man was apt to endearingly crack up at just about anything. They were cool, but would you want to bring them home to your family, and say, this is who I might become?

Decades have passed since then and I feel pretty secure in who I am. I love fiction and nonfiction, and my poetry impulses have gotten some play in the paring I’ve done writing picture books. But as I make a new connection with an old love, poems that can stand on their own, I feel tentative. Do I have what it takes? Will readers sigh or laugh or choke? And that identity thing still hovers. When I told my husband of 24 years, who knew my grad school friends, that I was writing poems, he joked, only slightly nervously, “I didn’t sign on for this.”

Still I’m making the leap.