Beauty to Memory: A Micro Reading

Neither the mosquitoes (skimming our arms in droves) nor the chill (brought on by the sun's fair clip at descent) deterred our first tiny recording session. Liz's husband came to the rescue with four yellow rockets of incense (which he tucked in disarray into the perimeter of our wicker table) providing enough cover for us to record our collaboration, "Beauty to Memory" while the feral cats romped in the knee high grass.

Transformative Blogging for Women Bloggers

Thinking about finally getting around to launching your blog? Or want to spruce up your existing blog, recalibrate, re-invigorate? We will cast a large net and write fiercely and freely and eventually winnow down to crafted posts. Come join a growing group of like-minded women in a supportive, dynamic on-line classroom setting (offered through Story Circle Network--members and non-members welcome). Starts next Monday, May 14, 2012. Visit here for course description and testimonials: Transformative Blogging.

Strange Attractors: Absence of Presence and A Choice of Wings live at Perhaps Maybe

I mentioned last post my writing companion Liz Brennan and I decided to collaborate, using her mobius strip format, call and response, each of us positing a “perhaps” stanza and each of us answering with a “maybe” stanza. Here are another set of prose poetry collaborations (parked on Liz's blog):

1) Absence of Presence: Perhaps it is the absence of presence that leads us to question the coin….

2) A Choice of Wings: Perhaps chivalry, hive and liver belong in the same vase on a fur-lined mantle.

And I can’t help but invite you down this rabbit hole, come with me…

In the poem, “A Choice of Wings” the phrase “three-winged birds with indigo feet” found its way to the page. Liz, large of heart and granting me far more intentional acuity than was present, looked up “three winged birds” and here’s what she found: a woman run company using an image of three wings, bearing a link to an interview with author Margaret Wheatley, which lead Liz to find, and hand me, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe.

The three wings appear on the cover, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread, the nested string (all one?) coheres as a shape to the mind’s eye, though with space between each layer (solid when viewed from a distance like Saturn’s rings). Wheatley writes about this three-winged image in the context of positive restructuring of organizational process (business, institutions, etc., in Leadership and the New Science) via messy (but ultimately productive) collaborative processes in which each member of the organization brings their skills to the table.

A few lines from the paragraph of text beneath the image inside the book read, “Three-Winged Bird: A chaotic Strange Attractor: This image records the journey of a system in chaos…Chaotic strange attractors reveal the order inherent in chaotic systems, order that is only visible over time and history—" Mario Markus and Benno Hess, Max-Planck Institute, Dortmund, Germany.

Could we stop there? Of course  not…so Liz generously placed additionally into my hands, a second book (written by Wheatley and Myron Keller-Rogers) titled a simpler way. The book opens with images of light and dark, shadow and sun, outlines of children cartwheeling on the ocean shore, the zig and zag of a thicket of zebras from an aerie’s eye view, the close up of the tines of the underside of a mushroom.

Prose follows, though I’d argue the book is more like a prose poem. Wheatley and Keller-Rogers marry image with idea, positing that we might have Darwin’s assumptions backwards, that we in fact live in a world that supports surivival of the widest diversity, not survival of the fittest after all. Doesn’t that drop your shoulders down away from your neck? No need to strive. Just be. True? My body says, yes, yes and yes.

Beauty to Memory and The Scarf Prose Poetry Collaboration with Liz Brennan live at Perhaps, Maybe

Poet Liz Brennan (who I’m happy to claim as my writing buddy for the last five plus years) and I have finally gotten around to collaborating with poetry, thanks to Liz’s gentle invitation and perseverance (I’m eternally grateful as I’ve been suffering from a poetry lull, having allowed the hats of editing, blogging, interviewing, teaching, to eclipse the midnight muse).

Liz’s blog reminds me of a mobius strip; she’s arrived at an ingenious structure, each week posting a tiny prose poem that begins, Perhaps….Followed by a second prose poem that begins, Maybe…

Here are our first two collaborations, with others in the wings:

Beauty to Memory

The Scarf  (here, the obsession with Amelia Earhart—how could it not—goes on, so if you liked this poem and you haven’t seen the photo poem montage yet—a prior collaboration with photographer Robyn Beattie, check it out here: Amelia

Rescue of Ophelia and Nefertiti Among Us live at Stone Canoe, Online

Painting by Christine DeCamp

I’m happy to announce two poems up at Stone Canoe, Online. I’ve given you the url to the table of contents, in hopes you’ll give the whole line-up a read, for such line gems buried in the poems of my fellow contributors as “the sculpted mothers/who stood on the lawn amid maple leaves/ in fetal denial” (Nikolae Babuts, Lockerbie), “farm roads are clothes on other people” (Paul Doty, Pink Barn Eye), “jonquiled moon” (Gayle Elen Harvey, In Praise of the Dark), “Color your hair, darling, if you must” (Jay Rogoff, Dyeing), “calling the girl I was” (Kathleen Tenpas, The Calling), “Often I’m as helpless as a sleeping cowboy” (Thom Ward, And There is Beauty in Cracked Sidewalks).


Poem 1: The Rescue of Ophelia was inspired by one of Christine DeCamp’s paintings. I lived with the image in my house for several years before writing the poem (an earlier blogpost chronicles this process). Between then and now, DeCamp embarked on the journey of creating her own tarot deck. Ophelia now features as one of these cards. Visit DeCamp’s site to learn more about this beautiful project.

Poem 2: Nefertiti Among Us under-girds a parallel project as well. Robyn Beattie and I are fast at work making the companion photo poem montage, featuring Steve Pryputniewicz on the piano with another Bela Bartok selection and as always, Robyn’s mesmerizing and intricate photographs (featured in our three prior movies).

The print version of Stone Canoe just arrived in my mailbox; last weekend waiting for my daughter to emerge from an Easter Egg hunt, I sprawled out in the grass under a no-cloud sky and immersed myself in a rich field of poems, interrupted only by the occasional misjudged hops over my midriff (the two sons, 6 and 9, heavy enough now to efficiently knock the wind out squarely out of me…"just…let me…

…finish…this stanza…")

(after I’d said to my husband, “Why don’t you put away the iphone and just Be With Us…”

…the 6 year old slyly remarked, “Mom, why don’t you put away that book…and…

 …just Be With Us…”)

AROHO Speaks, Writer to Writer: Interview with Jan La Roche

A Room of Her Own Foundation is gearing up to accept applications for its 6th Gift of Freedom Award. The most recent Gift of Freedom Award winner, Summer Wood, (author of Wrecker) speaks about the award on She Writes this week here.

Here’s the latest gem in our series of interviews celebrating A Room of Her Own Foundation's Summer 2011 Retreat (from the interview team: Lisa Rizzo, Marlene Samuels, Barbara Ann Yoder and yours truly). In the following interview excerpt, writer Jan La Roche turns her poet’s eye on a brief history of photography and explores how the metaphors of photographic process lend inspiration to her work.

Jan La Roche

Can you describe for us what you’re currently working on?

For the past four years I have been working on a manuscript titled, Vernacular. It is a title with two meanings. Most people first think of this word associated with language currently being spoken in a region of the world. Being a photographer who has studied art history and photo history as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, I first learned the term vernacular as a turn of the twentieth century reference.

Kodak introduced the Kodak #1 camera in 1888 with a 100 exposure roll of film inside it. Americans went wild shooting snap shots of everyone and everything around them. Simple everyday moments of life in pictures were done for the pure joy of something new without restrictions of art trends, commerce or advertising. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband, started the Photo Succession and Pictorialist movements in rebellion to the random pictures of the masses. As an advocate of the aesthetic, he made photography into an art form.

My poems are written for the pleasure of discovery. I never know how they will turn out until written on the page. My spiral notebook is a playground where all ideas run free. Margins have more points and additions scribbled in. The surface of the page is covered with possibilities. It all hangs out there until transcribed on the laptop into stanzas. The process is similar to pre-digital photography because back then I knew what I was trying to capture, but didn’t know if the picture was successful until printed and scrutinized for detail.

Over the years I have added more poems to Vernacular that pertain to different aspects of the photographic process such as when I managed a one-hour lab in the ‘80’s, “loads of film piled up/on my left like linguini.” When I described using a camera that “memoirs light” and “sees what is invisible,” I transformed a technical object into a magical art form. In the darkroom tray “an idea floats on water” and those pictures “outlive their biological cameras.” Another poem talked about conducting light as if it were music in an orchestra. The photographic poems emerge when the muse develops another idea. I cannot rush this collection, it would show. As it continues to grow, each poem is a nuance of photography that was, or is, a part of my life. Read more here.

Poetry of Fatherhood On-line Workshop with Tania Pryputniewicz

Heavy in pursuit of building the life of my dreams, I've spent a month teaching our first ever on-line course at Mother, Writer, Mentor: To the Cradle and Beyond, Writing and Excavating the Poetry of Motherhood. The course exceeded all expectations, for me, as an instructor, because these women wrote fearlessly and held nothing back and came up with some beautiful poems. I am so grateful and so moved to have had the opportunity to share their process. Beyond that, it was a gift to mine the poems Jessica and I have published at The Fertile Source, to stop and appreciate the work archived there and to use it as inspiration for present work. We are working on ways to showcase student work at Mother, Writer, Mentor. More on that shortly.

With a  month's breather inbetween (to sit in on Jess's Sexy Mommy Stories: Writing Romance Back into Literature course,), I will be teaching The Poetry of Fatherhood in April. Jess and I shortly figured out at The Fertile Source that the planet-sized domain of pregnancy, labor, birth, fertility, abortion, miscarriage, adoption and related tangential topics related to sexuality (obviously, right?) is not solely occupied by women. It took awhile, but gradually, I was receiving a fair number of submissions from male writers.

As we prepared to launch Mother, Writer, Mentor, while we wanted to offer writing mothers some respite on our blog and in our on-line classes, we again realized that we share this room with our male contributors and wish neither to exclude nor overlook them. In looking for teaching materials for The Poetry of Motherhood, I came across material for The Poetry of Fatherhood (the course had already written its outline, once again, in archived material at The Fertile Source). I hope you'll come out to write with me for the month of April. Perhaps by next year we will have ourselves in sync, offering Poetry of Motherhood in May in time for Mother's Day and Poetry of Fatherhood in June in time for Father's Day. This go around, the poems celebrating each came a month early.

Excavating and Writing The Poetry of Fatherhood

Instructor: Tania Pryputniewicz
Dates: April 30- May 25
Fee: still at our opening discounted rate of $100 (from $125)

You’ve watched the wife’s body transform before your eyes, witnessed first-hand her incremental emotional, psychological and spiritual migration to places you may or may not be able, though willing, to follow. Your own metamorphosis, while less physically apparent, is in actuality no less arduous or multi-layered. Or you and your partner have gone through longer gestations: reams of applications, false leads, interviews and further scrutiny while attempting to adopt. Or you’ve chosen not to father, but find the words of your own father coursing through your mind. Join this on-line poetry class for a chance to mine poetry of the past as well as contemporary poems (including those we’ve published at The Fertile Source) for structural and thematic inspiration towards the writing of a new crop of poems reflecting the continuum of experiences that comprise fatherhood. Sign up here.