by Andrea Bates

No matter what happens, I always carry a notebook and my favorite pen du jour. No matter what happens, I write it all down. And if not all, then at least the parts I remember. This year more pages detailed the things I would prefer to forget. But the writer in me must bear witness. No matter what.

The end of a year, and over two hundred and fifty hand-written pages stare back at me from between my notebook’s covers. It’s a natural time to pause and reflect, to re-read, to re-group, to re-imagine the future, to be re-inspired by the writers and artists who I had the good fortune to learn from this year at various writing workshops and conferences, their wisdom lovingly shared and gratefully inscribed in my black notebook, in black ink, in my large, unruly handwriting:

“Get into trouble. Get into a poem. A poem’s trouble.”—Earl S. Braggs

“Sometimes talking about something realistically doesn’t do it justice.” – Robert Thomas

“Think all around the photo.” – Emily Smith, in a workshop on ekphrasis

“Persona poems are a great alibi.” – Robert Polito

“The worst thing you can be is already decided.” – Carole Maso

“Fill the void. Tell the greater truth.” – Silas House

“When the big moment comes, one page is not enough.” – Earl S. Braggs

“The nature of writing is to wobble.” – Katherine Soniat

“If you don’t write poetry, you’re surrendering [to trauma]”—Alicia Ostriker

“From the claw you can deduce the lion.”—Mark Smith Soto, retelling a Spanish proverb

“The basic problems never go away.” – Fred Horowitz

“Everything is a dance.”—Paulus Berensohn

“Art is a bridge between visible and invisible worlds.”—M.C. Richards via Paulus Berensohn

“Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back. Then choose wisdom.”—Earl S. Braggs, retelling a Chinese proverb

We may never know when we might be the bearers of words delivered at just the right time – to exactly the person who needs them most. No matter what happens, there is always a pen and always a notebook; there is always a story to tell and poems to write. No matter what happens, it is comforting to remember this line from Mary Oliver: “Keep room in your heart for the unimaginable.” We may never know when the right words will fly in on light-glazed wings, illuminating the recesses inside that most mysterious–and resilient–chamber.

Meredith Trede, Toadlily’s co-editor/publisher, will be reading from her new book of poems, Field Theory, on Saturday, November 12th at 2:00 at the Warner Library, 121 North Broadway, Tarrytown, NY, www.warnerlibrary.org, and on Sunday, November 13th at 4:30, with B. K. Fischer, at The Blue Door Gallery, 13 Riverdale Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10701, (914) 375-5100, www.bluedoorgallery.org.

On Thursday, October 6, 1:00-2:30 p.m., Toadlily poets will be reading at the JCC of Mid-Westchester, 999 Wilmot Road, Scarsdale, (914) 472-3300. Details: jccmw.org

By Andrea Bates

Inside my bedroom closet there is nothing for me to wear. Not literally, of course. I could choose from: a pair of jeans too baggy in the bum, a skirt that threatens to slide down my hips unless it is nipped at the waist with a safety pin, or a black “librarian” cardigan missing a button. Some garments are ghosts of a former self: the tailored black blazer I wore only once, three years ago, at my mother’s funeral; the white prairie skirt I wore when my lover and I sat together in the big chair in my living room and he read aloud the poems I wrote for him. Every morning I sigh, faced with the personas I have constructed from such rags.  Nothing fits anymore.

There’s that old wives’ tale: every seven years or so most of the cells in our body are replaced. We shed our skin, our liver regenerates, fresh blood flows through our veins. I can see this transformation re-reading the poems I’ve written.  The language has shifted; what once preoccupied now bores. Metaphors have ripened and decayed like fruit left in a bowl. Muses have come and gone. As I put together my first full-length manuscript, I think: the book is a body wearing poems for clothes.  Every time I read through it, I sigh, faced with the personas I have constructed from such flights of fancy, such madness, such longing. Nothing fits anymore.

In poetry, personas are masks; they are an essential component of the costume drama. They allow, as Julie Sheehan said in a panel discussion “Channeling Voices” at this year’s AWP Conference, “an escape from the relentless self.” Or, as Robert Polito remarked, personas allow “a confessional moment that is someone else’s confession.” Personas allow us to play dress up, to pretend, to transgress, to breathe life into historical figures; as Robert Thomas said, they can be “a way of interpreting a dream to someone.” Clothes, like personas, are a means of concealment. How freeing it is, then, to run naked in one’s dream. How liberating it is when you finally take off your clothes and face who you really are.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves, “In Buddhism there is a questing action called nyubu, which means to go into the mountains in order to understand oneself and to remake one’s connections to the Great.” Deep in the Blue Ridge mountains is a little cabin at the end of a dirt road where wild blackberries grow. Thirteen hundred feet above sea level, nestled among the pines, it is the secret place of my heart. There, on the screened in porch, festooned with solar powered lights shaped like stars, I sit cross legged on the papasan chair, my eyes closed, listening to the crows. I’ve just showered, the ends of my hair still wet and smelling of lavender. I am wrapped in a soft cotton towel. I focus on my breathing. The air here smells of fresh thunder, approaching rain. When the wind moves through the trees, I hear the sound of papers rustling, all those poems I’ve written fanning out their pages behind me. Soon the lightning comes, signing its name across the sky.  I imagine I am alone in the woods with the ghosts of all the clothes I’ve ever worn. The person who wore those clothes doesn’t fit this landscape.

Some native peoples burn the clothes of the deceased a year after their death in an elaborate bonfire. Such a ritual comforts. Such a ritual is the dividing line between lives. I realize I need to burn away the longing for what cannot be replaced: a mother, the lover who used to undress my heart. Yes, I must burn away the old masks, the frayed costumes, the scuffed shoes.  On the next stage of my quest I begin barefoot, naked, alone and writing in a dark wood, a new voice rising above the thunder, ascending to the stars.

On Sunday, September 18, Pamela Hart, Natalie Safir, and George Kraus will read at the JCC in Tarrytown, New York—please come! Details:

Sunday, Sept. 18, 2:00-3:45 p.m.
Toadlily Poets Reading
JCC on the Hudson
371 South Broadway
Tarrytown, NY 10591

by Andrea Bates

“We have 62 senses at my last count.” – Paulus Berensohn

In July, through a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I attended the week-long program Black Mountain College:  An Artistic and Educational Legacy in the beautiful mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. On day three of the program, Paulus Berensohn, poet, potter, weaver, bookmaker, dancer, teacher, and author of one of the seminal books on pottery, Finding One’s Way With Clay, presented his workshop Soul’s Kitchen: on making and keeping a craft artist’s journal.

Paulus took our group through the process of making our own writing journals. “Remember what you came to do,” he said. “Other artists—potters, painters—have a place to go to do their art. For writers, you need to recognize the journal as your studio.” We nodded, ogling the table nearby with all its pretty paper, kaleidoscope of colors and swatches of varying textures.

We couldn’t wait to begin. We folded heavy white paper into folios and selected colorful thread to hand-stitch the binding. We chose endpapers, a cover, papers we would collage or stitch onto the front. As we crafted, Paulus told us the story of the bowerbird, how the males decorate the nest and the females get to choose which bird they want to mate with based on their attraction to and approval of the male’s decorative skills. “Making a book is like building a nest,” Paulus said. “Think of yourself as the male bowerbird. Make a journal cover that woos you.”

I couldn’t resist the bling. Perhaps I am more crow than bowerbird; I like shiny things.  Most empty journals simply languish on the shelves, waiting for me to fill them. But a journal that you have made to woo yourself into writing is something else entirely. Your intense concentration in the act of bookmaking imbues the journal with your personal essence, your unique magic. “When my students make a book, they fall in love,” Paulus said, and I was reminded of a bumper sticker I had bought the day before in a downtown Asheville store: “If not for love, then why?”

As I cut and arranged and pasted and collaged my journal’s cover, I thought:  As artists aren’t we always seducing, casting a spell, whether with words or paint or clay? We want our audience to flirt, to swoon, to tumble into the sensory—to fall in love—with us and our world. We are the illuminators of the unfamiliar senses; we give voice to the mysteries of the soul as it lives through the body and as it lives through our art.

Later that night, back in my room, I mused over Paulus’s claim of there being 62 senses at his last count, and I wrote this inside my bowerbird journal:

The sense of the spider, where to cast one’s web.

The sense of the storm, how close lightning is to the house.

The sense of the dog’s watchful nose, 6 a.m., before you even open your eyes.

The sense of the golden cord that links you and the beloved, how heavy the telepathy.

The sense of bees, which flowers will yield the most nectar.

The sense of ripened fruit, how color and fragrance and weight deliver their juice.

The sense of secrets, how the curtains blow at opened windows.

The sense of flamingos, when to wear pink and where to stand pretty.

The sense of gravity, when the light of a full moon is a glass full of insomnia.

The sense of past lives geography, when as a tourist you effortlessly navigate city streets.

The sense of pheromones, how you know he has been sleeping on your pillow.

The sense of circadian rhythm, how dreams are tomorrow’s metronome.

The sense of the breathing line, how you know a poem is alive.

by Andrea Bates

If you have an ear for language, and if you pay attention, then you often notice when a certain word or phrase becomes the hot new cliché. I’ve noticed a few lately:  at the end of the day; really? (said with a sarcastic lilt); and, of course, it is what it is. I’ve managed to avoid those three in my daily parlance, but there is one word that I confess has crept in and which I secretly love using as an adjective:  epic! (it deserves an exclamation point).

Any time the public can be made more aware of even the merest whiff of the poetic, I’m all for it. I doubt the creators of television car insurance commercials or sexual performance-enhancing drugs had the Odyssey or Beowulf in mind when they decided to use epic to describe their low rates or the efficacy of their little blue pills. The word has become the go-to adjective of choice for so many – and is, as Urban Dictionary states, “The most freaking overused word in the English language. It has in fact been used so much that there is really no reasonable definition …”

…Which is kind of cool, when you think about it.  If there is no longer any “reasonable definition,” then the rules for writing 21^st century epics can be re-envisioned—if we even consider writing an epic at all – and perhaps we should. As modern life continues its relentless compression of expression into bread crumb bits, trails of 140 character croutons, don’t we ever long for the entire luscious loaf? Why not, as the epic Walt Whitman proclaims, “loaf and invite [the] soul” into a merging of cosmos and quotidian, the Herculean with the confessional, as defined by Frank Bidart: “the earnest, serious recital of the events of one’s life crucial in the making of the soul.”

Isn’t each person’s life an epic – a narrative in couplets, stanzas, sections with clear demarcations between the action and the pause, the growing and the learning – all that living interspersed with periods of dying – the falling away of what no longer serves our purposeful, soul-full evolution. Why not let the hero/ine be extraordinary in his/her ordinariness; let the hero/ine be us with “every atom of [our] blood, formed from this soil, this air” (Whitman). Instead of invoking one of Zeus’s nine daughters, let’s invoke the Muse of our choice – perhaps the piquant bitterness of 72% cacao or the changing sky of Paris. Let the setting be the view from our bedroom window, or our bedroom itself. Let the deeds of valor be won on the battlefield of acknowledging consciously—and with gratitude—every lovely, simple thing: tomatoes from the garden; a comforting friendship of twenty years; a glass of cold water on a hot day; the visitor at the door we’ve been waiting for; the poem that comes to us in the deep night, waking us from sleep, the one that demands we turn on the light, pick up the pen, and write.

Although the word epic has been embraced perhaps a bit too enthusiastically, I don’t see it as a bad thing. I think of it as a mantra of gratitude for those moments when the poetic infuses the every day, when we stand in awe at the simplest of things and acknowledge, with an exclamation point, how epically happy they make us.

By Andrea Bates

To mow my backyard is to stir up a bowl of dust. To view my notebook is to see pages of blank. No grass. No poems. No rain. No Muse. It’s time to pray to the gods of rain and poetry. We’re in a drought.

There’s something about the rain that makes for good writing. Maybe it’s the white noise: the cascade of water off my gutter-less roof, the swish of spray against the leaves of the dogwoods that dot my yard, raindrops big as tossed quarters ringing the metal water bowl I leave out for the cat. Or maybe it’s the feeling of being wrapped within a cocoon of grey sky, a mood and color that goes with everything. Or maybe it’s the way the lightning in southeastern North Carolina can help punctuate a line with extra drama. Or maybe it’s the thunder, the loudest I’ve ever heard anywhere, a noise that can shake me out of my boots of complacency, my reliance on the dead metaphor or my favorite go-to vocabulary.

I know it’s like this sometimes. I know that life is tidal, climatic and climactic, beset by upper air disturbances, dips in the jet stream, and the vagaries of those fickle weather Muses–El Nino and his sister, El Nina. I know that patterns come and go with a twist of the kaleidoscope or with a spin of live Doppler radar. Weather, like much of life, can be maddeningly unfair—the extremes of tornadoes and hurricanes and floods and wildfires and droughts at the very least try one’s patience, and at the very worst, leave behind a destruction that tries the soul with questions that often have few, if any, answers.

The homily of “this too shall pass” is dry comfort. I want rain. I want it now. I want my words to once again saturate the page. But the rain, like all Muses, has its own agenda, its own timeline. And all I can do is accept that “The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait/ In the dark room…” (Conrad Aiken, “Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise the Rain”).

As I sit in the coffee shop writing this blog post, I turn to look out the window. A sky of hope: a mass of gray, low clouds fills the horizon. Perhaps it’s finally time for the retention ponds to fill, for my roots to be soaked so that I can do my work. This is my prayer: to dance again in the deluge, sweetly embraced by my beloved “in [whose] heart I find/ One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,— /Orion in a cobweb, and the World.”

By Andrea Bates

I’ve been on a tear the last few weeks, spring cleaning my little house and I’ll admit, I’ve been ruthless in my de-cluttering. Using the two key questions asked by de-cluttering pros (do I love it? do I need it/use it?), I found it fairly easy to determine what had to stay (the dog) and what had to go (the dead lawnmower). Like all good procrastinators, I saved the most daunting task for last: spring cleaning my writing room and sorting through the papers that seem to sprout up overnight like a mutant strain of wild mushroom. Not that I’m complaining. I happen to adore mushrooms and so does my Muse, apparently. The poems came in bushels the first quarter of this year and they were mighty tasty.

Asking myself the “do I love it” question, I found it simple with the last few months’ worth of poems to determine which were the keepers–they all were. These recent poems mark a shift in my poetic voice– its sureness has taken on a new urgency, a fresh desire to–as they say—bring it.  But here I was staring at a thick stack of work dating back two years. Should any of these poems remain in the “keep” pile– hole punched and slid into a three-inch white binder I use for work I am currently sending out? How would I know what was a diamond in the rough, what was fodder for the shredder? Could any of the old stuff hold its own against this newly emboldened voice?

Some writers believe you should never throw out one single word you’ve ever written, that all should be saved for one day, just in case. It’s a hoarding mentality—as if a stockpile of words will somehow insure you’ll never go hungry again for an idea. Some writers hold onto ancient manuscripts out of sentimentality–all those unpublished poems giving us warmth like our favorite twenty-year old, coffee-stained sweatshirt with the ragged cuffs. They were bright and shiny and fresh once. They loved us and we loved them.

What if we could just spring clean our poems? What if we could embrace the idea that holding onto poems from several selves ago is like trying to hold onto an echo? What if we could be ruthlessly professional and let it all go?

As if.

The best I could do was take a huge binder clip, fasten the stack together, and place it in the basket behind my desk. Do I love these poems? No, but I do like them. Do I need them? No – I always have faith that new experiments will be made. Will I use these poems? I may still send a few out, but I don’t imagine spending much time reworking or rewriting them now. They are what they are: a creative impulse committed to paper, a voice I used once, an outfit put together for an occasion.

De-cluttering works wonders in the main rooms of the house and garage, and in the closet of your psyche. I highly recommend it. You’ll feel a sense of hope and promise afterwards, released from an energetic burden you didn’t even realize you were carrying. But if you’re a poet you’ll probably fail miserably to de-clutter your desk of poems. You know why. There’s always a chance that maybe, one day, someone will need the very poem you wrote. And it will be right there, in your pile, waiting just for that bright moment. And that one person will love you for bringing it. And that someone might even be you.

By Andrea Bates

So it’s once again the cruelest month, but we poets should be celebrating. After all, we have a whole nationally recognized month to tout our cause for beauty and justice and word play and well-formed lines and images that hum themselves off the page and into the ears of our readers.

But the gorilla on my office desk is not happy. Not happy at all. In fact, he’s frowning. Does he want a banana split? Veggie cheeseburger? Glazed donut from the coffee shop across the road from campus?  I always think he’s hungry (which he is). This time, though, he has confided he is perplexed why he was not chosen to be the poster child for the Academy of American Poets poster commemorating National Poetry Month. (See the poster here:   National Poetry Month Poster 2011 )

Yes, my gorilla admitted that he’s none too pleased to be dissed by the Academy. Why, he wants to know, did such a line—“Bright Objects Hypnotize the Mind”—upstage his cute countenance. He sees the merits in Elizabeth Bishop; he likes her attention to detail, her fascination with animals, her surprise endings. And he admits that he has been hypnotized by the glitter of hummingbirds’ wings, the rainbows of the waterfall, and, when he is taking up residence on my desk, my own smile. (He likes to make me smile and flatter me and distract me from my writing and essay grading, bad gorilla).

Why, my gorilla laments, did Emily Dickinson’s iconic white dress get a whole poster to itself with a quote from her letters: “Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted”—yet Bishop’s line floats eerily on a scaffolding erected in a swamp without one ape, monkey, or cockatoo in sight. How is that poetic? How is that symbolic? The poster this year is just words taking up space in a swamp, Gorilla complains, his jaw jutting, pouting, a little spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth.

I agree. Poor Gorilla. But I don’t have the heart to tell him: back at home I have that Dickinson poster framed. He’d probably go gorilla-ballistic if he knew.  And as Bishop advised:  I’d have to try playing with my ring to calm him down (bright objects hypnotize the mind)—or flash him my smile. That gets him every time.