Author: ellen

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Meanwhile outside the ivy-covered walls…

Most poets seem to have at least one foot in the academic world. They teach, they are graduate students, they have fellowships, grants, endowed chairs. But one of my favorite poets, Linda Pastan is not among them.

She has carved out a place for herself–a highly respected one that includes major awards and recognition–all from outside the literary community of colleges and universities. How did she come to do all that excellent work on her own? She and I recently had an e-mail conversation about that.

ES: I guess if we were sitting down to talk about this I would want to know how you went about constructing your career as a poet without the usual role models and support of colleagues the way you would have had in a university setting. How did you know how to proceed? Did you just start sending your work to journals? Did you have any poet friends to discuss your work with or were you working totally on your own?

LP: From the time I was twelve, I have written poetry, but when I got married after my junior year in college, I stopped. I consider myself a victim of what I call the perfectly polished floor syndrome. It was the fifties: I felt I had to have a homemade dessert on the table every night, even though I was still in school.

Ten years and 3 children later, frustrated and depressed, knowing somehow that I was supposed to be writing poems, my very supportive husband helped me construct a strict schedule for myself. I hired a baby sitter, borrowed my husband’s study, and started working for several hours every day. This kind of artificial discipline was (and is) necessary for me, or I would have waited another ten years, maybe even longer, to become a poet. (Now, at least, I have a study of my own!)

As for the publishing part, I had no mentors and it would be several years before I met other writers in the D.C. area who could advise me. So I just randomly started sending my poems to journals, and they randomly started accepting them.

ES: What about the whole psychological aspect? How did you develop and maintain your confidence in your work without those colleagues? Or maybe that part was easier?

LP: There are many advantages to living outside the mainstream of writing and publishing, here in the middle of six acres of woods. There is really nothing much to do except write poems, and so I write them.

I also think that the competitive atmosphere of a place like New York (where I grew up} would have inhibited me. And the few times I have taught in writing programs, I have not had enough energy left to do my own work– I am a very low energy person.

Of course, during the 20 summers I taught at The Bread Loaf Writing Conference, I was absolutely intoxicated by being with so many writers– all I wanted to do was to talk to them about poetry for as many hours as I could keep awake. I certainly do miss that. But now I travel half a dozen times a year to various colleges, giving readings and meeting people, and that takes care of some of the loneliness definitely inherent in my life. And I have finally met wonderful poets here in the Washington area with whom I can occasionally meet and share my work.

ES: I’m wondering, too, where your strength came from to believe in your work while you were “randomly” sending out poems. And if, when you met other writers, you felt a little intimidated or somehow “other” because they might have seemed to know each other or even speak a language that you, working on your own, weren’t using.

LP: I have always believed in my work, it’s the one thing that keeps me going. It’s not that I believe other poets aren’t better, but reading those poets only makes me resolve to work harder. They make me happy. It is only mediocre poems that depress me.

ES: I think you’re absolutely right to believe in the work. I don’t know that you can do it at all if you don’t believe in it.

LP: –And I just have to add that there certainly are times that I think my poems are entirely worthless and that I should be doing something more useful with my life!

ES: I’m glad this is what you’re doing with your life! Thank you.

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The human voice–the Little Mermaid, Russalka, and Susan Boyle

Since it’s almost the end of National Poetry Month, I’ve heard a lot of poetry lately. I’ve been reading it, too, but it’s the hearing I’m thinking about. I’m struck by how delightful it is to listen to someone read poetry aloud. To hear the sound–the voice, the way the words work together, the breath, the rhythm.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about voice in a different context. I saw the opera “Russalka.” It’s based on a folk legend that appears in one incarnation or another across cultures. It may be best known in the version translated into the Disney movie, “The Little Mermaid.” Basic story: mermaid falls in love with human man, trades away part of herself–usually her voice–to be with him. In most versions–except Disney’s of course–things end badly. And even in the Disney version, charming as the music is, it’s pretty horrifying if you think about it. Especially if you picture theaters full of little girls getting the idea that it’s reasonable to chose silence when a handsome prince might be involved. The message is just be quiet.

So this month I was glad to listen to the enormous variety of voices raised in poetry. As a poet, I am grateful for each one of those voices and all the ones that came before, for those who laid down a long tradition and for those who add their voices in the hope of creating something of meaning and beauty.

And I was thinking about how we use our voices when someone sent me the now-famous Susan Boyle YouTube link. Amazing, yes, but one of the most amazing aspects was the reaction, from the cynical Simon and his skeptical audience to the thousands of posted comments elicited by this one woman simply standing up and using her voice.

One little note to anyone reading this who’s in Texas. Jim Photoglo, a terrific singer and songwriter whom I met at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, will be on a concert tour to Austin, Chappell Hill, and Fredericksburg. Go hear him if you can.

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Introducing the book: “Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue”

Authors want to find readers and readers want a good book. It’s a two-way street, but there are often roadblocks, most notably right now the precarious position of newspaper book sections. One bright spot is the presence of so many excellent book review and discussion blogs. (You can see some of my favorites on my links page.) One of the things I wanted to do in my blog, which I also did in my Boston Globe column, was to help writers and readers find each other by occasionally turning this space over to an author to talk about his or her new book. It’s not an interview or a review, just an author introducing the book.

This time it’s a re-issue by Beacon Press of a book originally published by Penguin Books, “Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue.” The author, Danielle Ofri, is a physician, writer, and editor in New York. She is editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review and author of two collections of essays about life in medicine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and on National Public Radio.

In describing her book, Danielle says:

“’Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue’ grew out of my ten years of medical school and residency. All during my medical training, these stories were percolating in my mind and soul. It was only after I took an 18-month hiatus from medicine, however, that I could finally start to write them down. More than just describing the chaos of internship, I wanted to trace the emotional development of a doctor, how the inner being grows into the white coat. The book is about the “singular intimacy” of the doctor-patient relationship, one that has little parallel in other walks of life.

Bellevue Hospital is a crazy and wonderful place to practice medicine. It’s been my medical (and literary) home for 20 years now, and I suspect they’ll be carrying me out on a stretcher. People tend to think of Bellevue as a psychiatric hospital, but it’s just a regular city hospital. I’m an internist in the medical clinic and I see patients from every country in the world, with every sort of medical condition. There is a never a dull day at Bellevue Hospital.

Medicine is so fast-paced that there’s rarely time for contemplation. Writing, by contrast is slow and deliberative; it’s often only when I write about something that I have a chance to truly consider its impact. It is the special honor of medicine to be plunged into so many people’s lives. Writing offers the gift of being able to step back and contemplate these stories and their meanings.”

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Oatmeal lace cookies–nutritious, delicious, and ridiculously easy

Well, the title of my blog promises “the occasional recipe,” so here’s the first. One of my ground rules for the recipes is the effort-effect ratio: it’s got to be easy and yet taste better than the ease of preparation would seem to promise. This one is a real winner. It is one of the simplest cookies I know how to make, but it looks kind of impressive. And, since it’s made with oatmeal, I figure it’s got some food value going for it.

The recipe came to me from Anne Ritter, a friend of my Aunt Alice, who would have been 100 today!  Anne was beautiful, lived in an art-filled apartment on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia with a husband who adored her, and was one of the most effortlessly glamourous people I ever knew. She was a nurse with the Red Cross during World War II–one of that “greatest generation.” Maybe because she had no children she pampered me outrageously, including sending me wonderful cookies when I was away at summer camp. These were among the best.

Oatmeal lace cookies

1 cup quick oats
2 tbsp. + 1 tsp. flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) melted margarine
2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Line cookie sheets with foil or parchment. Do not grease. Mix dry ingredients well. Pour melted margarine over dry ingredients and add beaten egg and vanilla. Mix with spoon until well blended. Drop by 1/2 teaspoonsful far apart on cookie sheets and bake about 7 minutes, until golden brown. Allow to cool completely before removing from sheet. That’s it. If you’re ambitious you can glue two cookies together with a little melted chocolate.

Yum.

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Kungfu writing

Where does a poem come from? I asked Afaa Michael Weaver to talk with me about one of his poems, “The Shaw Brothers.”

Born in Baltimore, Afaa worked in a factory for 15 years while writing poetry and short fiction, a period he refers to as his literary apprenticeship. He is the author of 10 poetry collections and two plays, the editor of two anthologies, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his work. He holds an endowed chair at Simmons College in Boston, where he is also the director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. When I spoke with him for my Boston Globe column in 2004, he told me about his fascination with Chinese literature and culture. He frequently travels to, and teaches in, China and Taiwan. In Boston he directs the Simmons Chinese Poetry Festival.

About “The Shaw Brothers,” Afaa says, “As I composed this, I had in mind a tribute to the Shaw Brothers, the Hong Kong based film company. When the kungfu films they produced hit the market in the 70’s they were popular in the black community, and in places like Baltimore, the audiences interacted with the film and studied the moves so they could try them at home—or in the movie house. So the poem is also a nostalgia piece about an aspect of black urban life. The martial arts were a way of channeling energy and emotions for many black people, so much so that lives were saved as some people were able to set positive directions for themselves. I wanted the poem to move associatively with an inexact syllabic count. I also wanted it to be evocative throughout as opposed to a syllogistic movement that leads to a concluding set of lines. I have been concerned about how loosely people apply the term “narrative” to poetry, which is to say I don’t consider this to be a narrative poem. If anything, I would say the construction is a montage, in the filmic sense of the word. Cultural references include popular myths in the black community, as well as Afro-Centric ideas of the dissemination of African culture throughout Asia, such as the historic renderings by Chancellor Williams in “The Destruction of Black Civilization.”

The Shaw Brothers
                     for the Drunken Boxing Masters

If we had the space in the backyard we could have built
a Shaolin temple of our own, or at least one of the chambers,
the sun sparkling off the edge of those shiny blades,
silk outfits popping with that invisible power, iron palms,
golden shirts, eagle claws, death touches, and most of all,
flying, we would be flying, higher than after two gallons
of battery acid cheap wine, or Sunday’s holiest dance,
the earth trembling when our bodies shake to ancient wisdom
when Hong Kong came to Black America and saved us
from the lack of answers in the box of riddles life came to be,
we cheered, ate popcorn or the contraband chicken taken
from the kitchen keeping place, and all else that made
Saturday kungfu the first level in Paradise, never mind Dante,
never mind the way the world turned flat at the edge
of where we lived, with the drowning river between us
and what lay all around us in a world that was round, we
had the secrets slid to us from the old connections
because Egyptian mystics sent the secrets to India and China
then back to us as we watched quadruple somersaults
ending in spinning triple twirl back kicks, masters who
melt iron and stop waterfalls, snatch dead warriors back
from six feet under, stomp their feet and make an army rise up,
just when somebody ate the Babe Ruth without sharing
and we started practicing in the movie house, reverse
punches and steel fingers, eyeball staring contests to see
who could make the building shake, throwing steel darts
we made at home out of aluminum foil that won’t fly,
letting loose the secrets this time in a world of Kool Aid,
blessed by eyes peeled to stars, touching nirvana with fingers
weaving the tapestry of what holds us together, what makes life.

Published in “American Poetry Now,” edited by Ed Ochester

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Print shmint, or should we care if newspapers die

If a newspaper falls in a forest, should anyone care? People seem to think, with all the online news sources, including blogs, newspapers are obsolete.  Well, I used to be a newspaper columnist and now I’m a blogger and I’m here to offer this paraphrase: I know newspapers. Newspapers are a friend of mine and blogs are no newspapers.

In the short weeks since I started my blog, I’ve been doing a lot of online reading. I’ve found plenty of good blogs. Really impressive ones, well written and well intentioned. Plenty of bad ones, too. But there’s no blog, no collection of blogs–much as I like the Huffington Post–that takes the place of a newspaper. Even a newspaper online is barely up to the job. Boston.com, the Globe’s web incarnation, is so user-unfriendly that it does the paper no favors. I hate to carp, but when they generously added a link to my blog, I had to contact the editor for directions on how to find it!

There’s a scope of articles a newspaper tackles that’s hard to find anywhere else. There are knowledgeable writers who write great blogs about national politics, toxic banks, and health care. But no one’s digging into your town’s solid waste management problem. Local investigative reporting is something newspapers could afford; most blogs can’t.

Newspapers also land on the doorstep with a certain level of credibility. Facts have to be checked to make their way into a newspaper and if they aren’t the result is a printed “correction.” With a blog it’s hard to know if the “facts” are factual. It can be hard to figure out who among the zillions of bloggers has something of value to say and who is simply grinding an ax.

Here in Boston, where the Globe is teetering on the brink of possible nonexistence, Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has used his blog to call for a “blog rally” in support of the Globe. Mine is among the outpouring of comments. People are arguing in favor of print or in favor of online sources. But the fact is it can’t be either or. Each has something unique to offer in giving us the information we need to remain participants in a functioning democracy. The question is how are newspapers going to survive to fulfill their responsibility. They may be dinosaurs that have yet to find sure footing in this new reality. But blogs are the not-ready-for-prime-time players, with an important role to fill, certainly, but without the ability to do it all.  Until or unless they are, newspapers in some form need and deserve our support.

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What should a book review be?

Recently I read the kind of book review I hate. The book, which sounded like nothing special by an author I was unfamiliar with, was held up to ridicule by a reviewer intent on showcasing his own cleverness and erudition. What’s that about?

With newspaper book sections being cut back–like all other newspaper sections–was this a good use of the space? This wasn’t a must-review book from, say, Philip Roth or Toni Morrison. And it wasn’t a gem we might have missed. This was either a gift of sacrificial lamb for a carnivorous reviewer or maybe a favor owed–yeah, sure, we’ll review it…. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a service to the reader.

I talked about this with my friend June Beisch. June is a poet and she also writes book reviews. We wondered about the politics of what gets reviewed. But, speaking as a reviewer herself, she said it’s usually the less experienced reviewers who try to make a name for themselves by savaging a book. She starts, instead, from a place of respect.

“When I start to write a review, the first thing I think about is that the author worked five years on this,” she said.

June told me about a review she wrote recently. The book was “Walden by Haiku,” author Ian Marshall’s collection of “found” haiku pulled from the Thoreau classic. June thought the concept was interesting and that many of the poems were well done. But she also pointed out one major problem–that Thoreau used metaphor extensively, while haiku, as a form, does not.

That’s my idea of a satisfying review. It brought a book to my attention that I might not otherwise have known about and gave me something substantial to think about.

“The first line of a review should catch the reader’s attention, as a good lede might,” June said. “The review should be as succinct as a poem and should not give away the plot or just recount the contents of the book without placing it in the larger context of the genre (novel, short story, etc.). And it should, above all, be entertaining to read.

“My own belief is that before you review a book you should read all the books by that author and get a sense of the writer’s oeuvre.”

Sounds like hard work and certainly not as much fun as ripping a book to shreds. But it does give the reader something of real value.

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About writing… and not writing

Writing poetry is something I love to do. I just keep not doing it. I put a picture on my computer desktop that was supposed to inspire me. To write, I hoped, wonderful poems, but most of all just to write. It’s a photograph of the view from the window of the studio I worked in last spring on a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I wrote some poems that I was happy with there, looking out at that view, the pasture stretching beyond an old wire fence, the trees beginning to green faintly and cows just out of sight. I thought I would be transported into creativity whenever I looked at that picture.

Well, it hasn’t worked out that way. I always mean to start working the minute I get to my desk. I make resolutions about how I’m going to do that. Instead, I look past the view on my desktop, check my e-mail and what’s on Poetry Daily, peek at a couple of newspaper and blog headlines and follow some interesting links to wherever they lead. When I emerge from Internet quicksand I find–surprise!–it’s an hour later and I’ve accomplished not one thing. Time suck is such a perfect, if inelegant, description. You can just hear that down-the-drain sound. Shlooop. Time gone. It’s not writer’s block–it’s just not writing.

I have a great quote by poet Jane Hirshfield tacked up above my desk: “If I don’t create the time to write, day after day will just slip by. The poems won’t get written and I won’t have lived the life I most want to live.”

The life I most want to live. That’s exactly the point for me. I suspect the world is not holding its breath waiting for my poems. But writing them is how I most want to live my life. So why don’t I get to it? Why don’t I do what I most want to do, what I feel exhilarated having done? What holds me back? And, since I’m guessing I’m not alone here, what holds you back? Besides reading this blog, which I’m glad you’re doing. A question to think about.

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Reading the “Rabbits”

I had promised myself I wouldn’t start my first post with “welcome to my new blog.” So here are those words, in my second. I picture that sentence being written a hundred, maybe a thousand, times every day, often by people in exactly my situation: I’m an outcast from old media.

For seven years I wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe. But now that my section of the paper has been shut down, here I am, jumping into the deep end of new media. Ready to see if I sink or swim or simply tread water. What I want to do here is what I did in my newspaper column, have a conversation about reading and writing. But the exciting thing here is that it can be an actual conversation. You jump in, too!

Have you read the Updike “Rabbit” books? I hadn’t and, after Updike died in January, I decided it was time I did. So I set myself to reading all four.

I have to confess, I didn’t love the first, “Rabbit, Run.” It is beautifully written, yes, but it seemed so, well, male. All those sports images, that casual male sexuality, that clueless aimlessness. With the second, too, “Rabbit Redux,” I felt I was slogging through a lit course assignment. I took a little break. But now I’m reading “Rabbit Is Rich” and that’s really grabbed me. In fact, I can’t wait to stop writing this and get back to it.

Still more male than I can easily relate to. But there’s that tenderness, those poignant descriptions of flawed human beings stumbling through the mundane dailiness of a flawed world. Updike seems to feel love not only for his characters, but for the millions of people in the real world whose lives are no more exciting or ennobled than those he’s writing about. He observes our daily lives in all their smallness and forgives the countless ways in which we fall short.

I’m sad to think that, after I finish this, what is ahead is “Rabbit at Rest.”

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Teen angst in novel form

Remember high school? OMG who doesn’t, complete with what Steven Goldman terms its “acceptable level of abuse” of anyone who was “different.”

I talked recently with Goldman, the Jamaica Plain-based author of Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About The Grapes of Wrath. The book is a young adult novel, a genre that probably exists specifically because it’s not easy being in high school. Not now and not in 1980’s North Carolina.

“The world has changed from when I grew up in a very conservative part of the Bible Belt,” says Goldman, He recalls that , as one of very few Jews in his community, he felt that abuse, alongside the people who embodied the other two taboos of differentness–being gay and being black. Those memories led him to write a book in which an 11th-grader reacts to finding out that his best friend is gay.

“It’s about how the world changes for the straight person. Mitchell (the protagonist) is narcissistic. He doesn’t get it that it’s not all about him.”

“I was interested in how it might be different today compared with the way it was for someone being gay in North Carolina in the ’80s,” says Goldman. He says his own children, growing up in such a different time and place, couldn’t understand, during the public discussions around legalizing same sex marriage, that someone might not want their friends’ parents to marry.

“The book is about how groups accept and reject people. My interest is in how that happens . I like to inhabit a character and see it from that perspective.”

Despite the serious underlying circumstance, the book is disarmingly funny, filled with the nerdy dialogue and deadpan interior musings of adolescent boys trying to sort out their place in the world. For example, Mitchell, who, at 17 considers himself “the single biggest loser on the face of the planet,” admits that, aside from going on one date, his “entire romantic life has consisted of kissing exactly two females who are unrelated to me.

“(T)he two kisses occurred at a party in seventh grade. The two females in question kissed practically everyone at the party. It was some sort of dare thing. My active involvement was basically happening to stand in the right room. Given the speed of the lip action, I was lucky to escape unbruised.”

Goldman had not set out to write a young adult–or YA–novel. After teaching middle school, he assumed that younger age group would be his target audience. But, while studying for a master’s in creative writing at Emerson (College, he found himself drawn to the YA.

“I was writing a novel that just happens to be for that age group,” he says. “There was a lot of emotional resonance with that time period in my life. I tried to ground it in some emotional experience I understand. This is a novel I’d like to have had to read when I was that age. Younger kids are capable of reading the book, but it’s not necessarily geared to them.”

Which brings us to the big YA problem.

“I didn’t read Salinger until around my late 20s,” says Goldman, who spent his teen years reading more challenging adult books. “By that time, I was kind of late for it.

“When I was 17 I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a YA novel,” he admits. And he knows he’s not alone, especially here in the Athens of America and beyond where credential-gathering and what looks good on a college application are often the criteria for selecting reading material.

Goldman makes the case that YA novels speak directly to their readers’ experience. He puts in a good word for reading–in the emotional sense–at grade level. Sure, high school students can read War and Peace just as parents can tuck their children in with Shakespearean sonnets, but, in books as in many other things, there is a time that’s right.

And this is the time to say this is my final column for City Weekly. For the past seven years it has been fun to think about who might be turning to this page on a Sunday morning. To everyone who read my words, to everyone who shared their thoughts with me and my readers, and to the editors who helped me get those words right, my thanks.