friday roundup: to collaborate, “I work and I pray,” and The Blue House

Monet: Das blaue Haus in Zaandam (wikimedia)

Hello, Reader, and happy Friday. Did you survive April Fool’s Day? I confess, I almost didn’t.

One of my darlings swapped the sugar and the salt.

Let me tell you something: when you take your first sip of tea at five a.m. in a dark and silent Wee, Small house, you do not want to have put salt in it.

And later as you are trying your damndest to be good natured about the salt in your tea, and when you poach eggs for your darlings big and small and line them up on the counter and break the yolks and people take their first blessed bite of a rare, hot breakfast, you do not want to have shaken sugar on them.

The truth is, I’m not over it yet and may never be. But I will soldier on. Now for the roundup:

to collaborate  Earlier this week, I went with a po-friend to a very cool event a few towns up the Peninsula. It was a reading/discussion/Q&A with Jane Hirshfield and Ellen Bass. Hirshfield read from her two recent books Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (essays) and The Beauty (poems). And Ellen asked her questions about particular passages or poems, a bit about process, etc. I loved the format, and both women are such authentic and generous people, so the room was brimming with warmth and good energy.

Also, if you ever have a chance to be in the same room as Ellen Bass, take it — because she will laugh at some point, and her laugh is the most amazing laugh, and it will heal your soul. But I digress…

Here are a few treasures that Hirshfield shared, and that I hastily jotted down in my little notebook of grocery lists/scraps of language/hangman games from various waiting rooms/notes from the urology clinic, etc.:

On process:

“A phrase arrives with its own rhythm, music, and tone. My job is to collaborate.”

On the preponderance of objects in her work: Hirshfield noted that the vocabulary of objects and things is a vocabulary that everybody already has. Everybody has relationships with a chair, a table, a spoon, a tree. Although she didn’t say this verbatim, my sense was that she feels objects have a context that can enrich a poem just by having appeared in a poem, and without a lot of extra words around them. Duly noted.

On the transformative power of writing:

“If you can write the poem, you are not flattened, and writing the poem is a way to unflatten yourself.”

“I work and I pray.” Earlier this week on Facebook, I linked to an interview with Cecilia Woloch. There are so many hundreds of interviews, videos, poems, articles, etc., linked to on Facebook that one cannot possibly read them all — but I’m so very glad I took the time to read this one. In case you haven’t seen it yet, or can’t take the time to read it for yourself, here are some gems (you can read the whole interview here at Speaking of Marvels):

On how her chapbook manuscripts came together:

“In retrospect, at least, it seems as if both manuscripts came together kind of magically, but I think the creative unconscious is hard at work when we’ve been working hard, and it knows what it’s doing.”

On process:

“No prompts, no strategies, no tricks. I work and I pray.”

On reading work aloud:

“I think when we listen to our own poems, when we hear them, we engage the body as well as the mind; and, when we’re not privileging the mind, we get a better sense of the music and the dance.”

On aspirations:

“Aspire to make the best poems you can make and then see what happens.”

(Quoting James Baker Hall), “‘Don’t let your worldly ambitions drive a wedge between you and the work that’s most sacred to you’.”

The Blue House  This week, I’ve been reading Tomas Tranströmer, who died last week and left us the poorer. I’ve been reacquainted with his poem “The Blue House,” which is the one that reminds us that “our life has a sister ship, following quite another route.”

I don’t know about you, but I am always scanning the horizon for that sister ship (not very Zen of me, I know). And also, I’m kind of obsessed with the fact and concept of: a house. So this poem has been nipping at my heels all week, asking to be read again and again.

I found a lovely reading of it set to music, and the link also has the text if you’re more of a reader than a listener (as I sometimes am). Find it here.

I am amazed by how that final image — the one just past the sister ship — flames at the end. I mean, how did he know to push through for that? He already had a sister ship, for goodness’ sake! I suppose that is why he is (was) Tomas Tranströmer.

And that’s all for today. My deep, sincere wish for you is that you never take your first sip of tea at five a.m. in a dark and silent house of any size, and find that you have put salt in it. Amen.