Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
              Yansan
 The Afro-Brazilian Goddess of Storms

Yansan strums the bare trees 
plays the piano key pyramid steps
river ice cracking
snake strings crawling
feet stamping the earth

plays something being sacrificed
something being born
plays breath in
breath out
breath of a tornado
sweeping out of a green glass sky
breath of the whisper you hide in your lover's ear

Yansan plays the wind   the silent
rapture of fog   and always behind her you can hear
that back-up girl group twang of limbs
singing along   beating against one another
like a thousand rushing hearts
  

    
Mary, I don't think we've had a chance to dive into Neruda and later
magical realists in Latin American literature and their impact on
your writing.  Can you tell us a little more about that?
  

    
Also, as a teacher, a professor, what kind of advice would you give
a writer starting her or his journey as a poet?  What is your poetic
touchstone of creation?
  

    
Here some suggestions for writers just starting out (and maybe also
for those of us who have been at it for a while):

First: don't worry about publication or about what kind of poetry
is in fashion at the moment. Write for fun, because you enjoy it,
because it consoles you or helps you express your strongest thoughts
and emotions.

Second: It's okay not to know what you're doing. No one writing
poetry really knows what they're doing until they've done it.

Third: I've had students tell me they wanted to become poets so
they can find romantic/sexual partners.  This has never worked as
far as I know and it doesn't work now. You'd  be better off
learning how to play a guitar.
  

    
Fourth : Write
It may seem crushingly obvious, but the best thing a writer can do
is write. So sit down and go for it.  If you don't have any ideas,
don't worry about it. Write about how you can't write and go on
writing about it for at least an hour. I've found that when I do
this, I get so bored with telling myself that I can't write, have
no ideas, can't come up with a good idea, etc. that ideas do start
popping into my mind. Some will be silly, some will be bad, and some
will be good enough to consider. 

When I was teaching Creative Writing at CSUS, I used to keep all my
published books in a bookcase in my office on the first two shelves.
On the top of the bookcase I kept approximately fifty manilla
envelopes filled with pages and pages about how I couldn't write.
I was lucky they never toppled over me, or I would have been buried
under them like the Wicked Witch of the East was buried under
Dorothy's house in "The Wizard of Oz."

You can also try a technique used by the French Surrealist poets
called Automatic Writing: Sit down, take out a notebook or some
sheets of paper, and write as fast as you can for 20 minutes about
whatever comes into your mind. Don't worry about making sense.
Don't worry about punctuation. Just write *fast* In fact if you
start making sense and being logical, start the next sentence with
the final letter of the sentence before it. What usually happens
when you do this is that you stop remembering what you've written
almost as soon as you've written it. You hand will seem distant,
moving almost automatically with little input from your brain. 

When the 20 min are up, stop. Sit quietly for a moment or two and
then read what you've written. You will almost always find a few
strange, unusual, interesting lines, metaphors, thoughts, ideas and
words that you might use in a poem. Circle these and consider them
raw material for your poetry. You will now have to use craft; logic;
thought; your education, life experience, and reading to craft this
raw material into poetry. (I usually do about 12 complete revisions
of any poem I write).

(Note please that writing like this on a computer will not work. You
need direct, visceral contact between the page and your hand.
Cursive is best because it is the fastest way to write by hand; but
printing will also work. Computers have too much interface and
distraction.)
  

    
Fifth: Don't give up. Don't ever give up. You are already a
writer as soon as you start writing, but the road to being
recognized as a writer can be a long one. Be stubborn. Be
persistent. Some of the greatest writers--like Emily Dickison,
Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville--were not recognized until after
they died. (They even spelled Melville's name wrong in his
obituary.) Write because you want to and don't worry about your
audience. Writing isn't a career. It's a vocation. If I were
marooned in Antarctica, I would probably write for the penguins.
  

    
Mary gives excellent advice--and I never knew that about Melville.

I feel as you do, Mary. My version of your penguins has always been:
alone on a desert island, I'd write on the sand the ocean would
erase each high tide.

But I don't think that's true for all poets. There are so many ways
to come to poetry, to be a poet. Some people, it's all about
speaking for and to a community, a set of readers. And that's fine
too.

Wherever the urgency comes from--or the curiosity, playfulness, come
from is fine. That persistence, the wanting to do it, is what
matters. 

Why you want to do it, maybe the poet themself doesn't even know.
I've always loved a Donald Hall essay, "Theory X Theory," in which
he proposes that poets make up reasons to give themselves permission
to write that may have nothing to do with the actual reasons they
write. T.S. Eliot not admitting perhaps even to himself that The
Wasteland was a working through (at least in part) of his personal
life, things like that.

But of course in this conversation, what we're interested in is why
you want to do it.
  

    
> Write about how you can't write

I ran across one of my best college papers the other day. The
assignment was to write about Hamlet, but I was stuck, so I wrote
about being stuck trying to write a paper about Hamlet. I realized
as I was writing it that I could make an analogy of my being stuck
to Hamlet's being stuck. The professor loved it.
  

    
Interesting that you see a qualitative difference between automatic
writing on paper and on a keyboard, Mary. 

I agree, and not only for automatic writing. I still take notes
during interviews by hand, even if I am also recording. And I edit
students on paper, too.
Something happens to the brain when your hand is writing, and it
doesn't happen when you just press RECORD or type. Whether you're
writing poetry or something else. 
  

    
>Wherever the urgency comes from--or the curiosity, playfulness,
come from is fine. That persistence, the wanting to do it, is what
matters. 

This is lovely, and helpful for a person who has at times questioned
her motives for writing poetry.

And I agree about the power of writing by hand.  I recently switched
to fountain pens and find them better for longer sessions because
little pressure is required.
  

    
I'm glad my advice is both helpful and encouraging. Encouragement
means a lot when you're trying to write. 

 I think all people who start writing at no matter what age, should
be told that they become writers from the moment they begin, and
that they don't need to worry about why they write or even know
why they write. All they have to do is write.

I think creative, writing and creative writing manuals often try to
reduce the process to some logical sequence of actions; but the very
nature of poetry, and the very nature of drawing on both your
conscious and unconscious mind, on both craft and inspiration does
not follow rules and is different for everyone

I used to have the following sentence on the wall of my study: W.
Somerset Maugham -- 'There are three rules for writing a novel.
Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.'

I think we can say the same thing about poetry. There are definitely
rules about how a poem should proceed if you're writing fixed
forms like sonnets,but otherwise I believe "there are three
essential rules for writing a poem, but unfortunately, nobody knows
what they are."
  

    
I knew a guy with a T-shirt that said
"Even if it's crap, get it down on paper".
  

    
We ask our guests to commit to two weeks of discussion, and today is
the last day of the two weeks we scheduled for this one. But we
don't have to end the discussion: if Mary's up for it, we can
continue.

Meanwhile I want to thank Mary, Sean, and members of the WELL who've
contributed to this great conversation. *The Goddess of Burning
Hair* is published by  Women's Spirituality Studies press. You can
find links to purchase the book at 
<https://wsspress.org/the-goddess-of-burning-hair/>

the egg inside me cracked 
I rose and created a new creation 
I invented animals 
I organized the clouds 
I swung the moon around 
in a pause between two breaths 

this is a true story 
I know 
I dreamed it

(The Goddess of Burning Hair (p. 68). "On the Dark Side of the Moon")
  

    

I'd be happy to continue this discussion, Jon. For example, if
anyone is interested, I'd be happy to talk a bit about the wonderful
and sometimes very unusual experiences I have had thanks to"The
Goddess of Burning Hair," and some of my other collections of poems.


For example, this past Saturday, I had to go to PetCo to buy myself
a dog collar, a tag, and a pair of dog ears because I had been
invited to play the part of a dog in an amazing epic poem that a
well-known poet had just written about a conference of gods,
goddesses, villains, and oracles from the late Neolithic to today.
It was big fun and I got to bark, growl, and recite poetry. 
  

    
Please do continue! What other post-publication experiences stand
out?
  

    
Another interesting Post publication experience was an invitation to
be the first-- or at least one of the --poets to be officially
invited to Reed at the August 2025 SOLCHA conference in Rio de
Janeiro. 

SOLCHA is the Society of Caribbean and Latin American, environmental
historians, but since there are three languages involved (Spanish,
French, and Portuguese) in that configuration, English was the
common language of the conference


It was a surprise and a pleasure to speak to a gathering of
environmental historians from all of Latin America about the poems
in "In This Burning World" and how those poems deal with the
problems of climate chaos and other environmental issues, including
the burning of the Amazon

I was also surprised at the number of people who came to my
presentation since this was not an academic presentation at a
conference that was highly academic, drawing scholars, not just from
Latin America, but from all over the world. I was also happy to be
able to talk about the arts as a method of communication to a larger
public -- a public that does not ordinarily read scientific and
academic reports and articles

Also, on a simple personal level, Rio de Janeiro is a wonderful
place to be, and I had a very good time. 
  

    
Sounds like a blast! Speaking of Brazil, you've spoken about
Brazilian music and Candomblé drumming influencing your poetry. How
do rhythm, repetition, and silence help a poem become an experience
for the listener?
  

    

Rhythm and repetition tend to make a poem feel like a chant or a
song ( "lyric poetry" can be like "lyrics" or a chorus). The allow a
poem to flow in ways that ordinary conversation doesn't flow. These
qualities are obviously most apparent when you hear a poem read.

There are many kinds of poetry.  Some are made for the page--like
the poems of e.e. cummings. Come are meant for the mind and aren't
particularly involved with human emotions--like Language Poetry.

I write poetry that combines alliteration, repetition, moments of
silence, unexpected line breaks, blank spaces where your eye comes
to rest (which can be experienced as silence). But, frankly, I never
think about these things when I write a poem. I don't scatter them
around like oregano in a salad. They come with and out of the poem
itself as it forms in my mind. Like surf singing against a stone
wall. Like the dip and swoop of birds. Like a dream that can be
revised using craft and logic, but not conceived by it.
  

    
> meant for the mind

I recall a classic distinction between "head poetry" and 
"heart poetry".
  

    
> make a poem feel like a chant or a song

Have any of your poems been set to music, or have you ever written a
poem with the intetion that music will be added and it will become a
song?
  

    
>have you ever written a poem with the intetion that music will be
added

Or would you like to? ;-)
  

    
None of my poems have ever been sent to music. A couple people have
approached me and even asked for poems which I've given them, but
they never got around to sending them to music. If anybody ever
wants to set some of my poems to music I'm up it. 

That said, a while ago, my sister and I want to contest in
Bloomington Indiana for the best Blue song. I wrote the lyrics and
she put the music behind them and sang the song. My favorite part of
the lyrics was: happy birthday baby. I'm leaving you. You asked me
to surprise you and that's the best I can do."
  

    
That's a good one!

You've focused on ecological destruction. What can poetry offer
someone who feels overwhelmed by ecological loss? 
  

    

> If anybody ever wants to set some of my poems to music I'm up it.

Please send me a likely candidate or two and I'll see if I get inspired!
  

    
I love that an Inkwell conversation is likely to inspire a hit
record...!