Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

“I have not written these poems, nor even read them; this is a spoken book,” declares my friend Diana Neutze on the back cover of her latest collection, AGAINST ALL ODDS. The title refers not just to her illness—she has battled Multiple Sclerosis for well over forty years—but to the difficulties inherent in transforming poems from her mind to the printed page. As MS closed down her body, she progressed from longhand, to one finger on the computer, to voice recognition. “But now I dictate to Gabrielle, my editing carer. Even the editing has been done by voice, backwards and forwards in the air.”

I was privileged to receive a copy of this handsome limited edition. Written over the past three years, the poems chronicle the poet’s recognition that her death is imminent and her determination to live each remaining day in the beauty of the moment. The poems are rich with images such as: …a tangle of branches/ peremptory against a crystal sky. She asks:

If I died tomorrow, what would

happen to the poems in my head?

Christchurch, New Zealand, where Diana lives, has suffered a series of devastating earthquakes and aftershocks that figure in many of the poems. In “Elsewhere” she writes:

…the earth where I thought

to lay my final bones

is writhing like a wounded snake.

The earthquake draws her mind outward to share a communal grief:

I mourn for the lost, the mained, the dead.

I mourn for our grieving city.

The experience of working with composer Anthony Ritchie on a song sycle of her poems draws her to a new awareness of the importance of people in her life. The final poem in the book reworks “Goodbye,” the final poem in the song cycle. Keeping the opening lines:  If this day were to be/ my last …,  she traces the trajectory of her preparations for death, from spiritual and inward-looking to a recognition of a fear in which …I relegated/ my friends to the outer suburbs. The poem ends:

If tonight were to be my very last,

I would be desolate

at leaving behind

a lifetime of friends.

I have been friends with Diana since our freshman year at the University of Canterbury, fifty-four years ago, where we met in English Literature class. During school breaks we worked as kitchen hands at the same remote fishing camp. We lived next-door to each other as young marrieds, and shared survival tips as penniless expatriate parents of small children in London. Over the years and across the globe we have stayed in touch, supporting each other as best we could in times of grief, commenting on each other’s poems, occasionally visiting. I honor this lifetime of friendship as I read AGAINST ALL ODDS.

For more than forty years, my friend Diana Neutze has endured the relentless thefts of  multiple sclerosis and grief for a son lost too young. Throughout that time, she has continued to write powerful and moving poems. Recently, her body closing down, she commissioned the New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie to set some of her poems to music. The cycle of seven songs, “Thoughts from an Inner Garden” premiered April 2011 in a performance at Diana’s house in Christchurch, New Zealand. Diana recently sent me a CD of that performance. I’ve been playing it over and over, overwhelmed by the beauty and intensity of the work.

From Diana Neutze’s published collections, A ROUTINE DAY and UNWINDING THE LABYRINTH, Ritchie selected poems that express the poignancy of the poet’s sense of connection with the tangled garden that surrounds her house, a garden that has become her world. Transcending the nightmare of her chronic illness, she finds meaning in the details of the natural world: the play of light and shadow, the song of a bird.

The cycle opens in a minor key, an ancient, timeless sound that describes a day of wet greyness without wind when the garden is holding its breath. In “Bridal,” the second song, the poet, showered by autumn gold, imagines the roses and smoke bush as witnesses to a marriage between herself and the garden. The mood changes in “Chronic,” where Ritchie’s urgent rhythm reflects the tick-tocking of illness/ relentlessly. “And the Birds Sing” is a meditation on the cycles of life and death. “A Scent of Water” offers a fragile hope in the face of grief:  a frosting of growth/ a shivering of buds in the morning light. The rhythms of an old folk dance come to mind in “Meaning.” A moment in late afternoon, a blackbird singing in a weeping elm,  and the day is flooded with meaning. The cycle closes with “Goodbye.” The poet recalls the garden images she will die loving. The theme of a Bach partita enters the music as she describes its architectural splendour … arch after musical arch soaring upwards.

A small group meets at my house once a month to talk about poetry. We take turns to choose the topic and lead the discussion. Yesterday’s topic was haiku, a classic Japanese form. We considered the arguments about Robert Hass’s poems in recent issues of Poetry, and agreed that the small fragments quoted have to be considered in the context of the whole poem. They should not be thought of as haiku. We read translations, by Hass, Jane Hirshfield and others, of the great Japanese masters. We pondered Gary Snyder’s comment:  “I do not think we should even ‘think’ haiku in other languages and cultures. We should think brief, or short poems. [Haiku] has elements that can indeed be developed in the poetries of other languages and cultures, but not by slavish imitation. To get haiku into other languages, get to the ‘heart’ of haiku, which has something to do with Zen practice and with practiced observation—not mere counting of syllables.” We read some of Snyder’s haiku-like fragments and some of Hirshfield’s “Pebbles,” her tiny poems that she describes thus:  “A pebble … is seemingly simple, but also a bit recalcitrant: it isn’t quite completely present until it has been finished inside the reader’s reaction.”

We also talked about some of the rules of classical Japanese haiku: the “turning” that often occurs, from outward observation to inside the poet’s mind, and the use of kigo, words or phrases associated with a particular season. We decided it would be fun to come up with a set of season words that would fit the environment of the Mendocino Coast. Here’s the start of our list. We’d welcome additions.

Whales swimming south

Whales swimming north with calves

Blennosperma spreading gold over Glass Beach Headlands

An essay by Tony Hoagland in the September 2010 issue of Poetry finally clarified for me why I find some modern poetry confusing. It’s meant to be, Hoagland says. In the essay he lays out two views on the function of poetry. The first suggests that poetry constructs perspective for the reader. He cites Wallace Stevens for the alternative view: “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully.”

“It’s the gong of recognition versus the bong of disorientation,” Hoagland says. He attributes the sense of vertigo aroused by reading poems by Stevens or John Ashbery to the complexities of modern life. “After all, our economic culture specializes in two things: surfeit and counterfeit. …Add to that our drastically increased sense of the corruption of commercial and political speech, and the instability of language—surely our resulting collective dizziness is a fundamental symptom of modern life, one to which poems naturally refer.”

When I showed the essay to my friend Jeanette Boyer, she commented: “When I was a little kid, I used to love spinning in circles, stopping, and finding the world all topsy-turvy. Now that would make me all too dizzy. Similarly, I find I prefer poetry that brings me a sense of stillnesss rather than a sense of vertigo.”

I agree with Jeanette. I’m much more attuned to poems in which the reader and the poet share a moment of recognition. At the same time, we both appreciated Hoagland’s essay for the clarification it provided.

I’ve just posted a piece  on the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference blog about working with my editor, Andrew Todhunter, on revisions to my memoir about my sister Evelyn. The draft is finished, and out once again for comments. It’s always so valuable to see one’s work through another’s eyes.

Now I’ll need to write an epilogue. Just this week we learned that the New Zealand Geographical Board has assigned the name Stokes Peak, in Evelyn’s honor, to a peak in the Kaimai Range, between Tauranga (where she was born) and the Waikato (where she lived and worked). An impressive end to the story.

Such a long gap of time between posts. But now this year’s Mendocino Coast Writers Conference is over and, as I always do after a major project is completed, I am attempting to clean up my midden of a desk. I’m reminded of a novel I read back in the 1960s. The author was Michael Frayn, and the somewhat forgettable plot was about a bunch of hack journalists in London who were bored with their jobs.  It’s the title that stuck in my mind: Against Entropy. The notion that our lives are a constant struggle against disorder and decay.

The surface of my desk is now visible in parts. I still have files to sort, both computer and paper. But I no longer despair of restoring order.

The conference was a success. Not financially,  in this economically troubled year, but in the quality of instruction and the spirit of community the participants felt. Their glowing evaluation comments made our efforts worthwhile.

Now on to planning the 2011 conference…

Countdown to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, which starts next Thursday, July 29.  Amazingly, I’m caught up for the moment on co-director tasks. Time to take a deep, relaxing breath and think about the wealth of wildlife with which this place is blessed. Last evening, on the hill behind our house, we saw our first California gray fox of the season.  A cottontail scampered out of sight as a pair of angry scrub jays attacked the fox. Later, the stags emerged, two of them, both with magnificent six-point racks of antlers. We’ve been watching the new season’s fawns gradually lose their spots. A jack rabbit family shares the front garden with the quail family. Hummingbirds and bees have discovered an exotic treasure from my native New Zealand: a young Metrosideros excelsus.  It is commonly known as New Zealand Christmas Tree because on the northern coast of New Zealand its spectacular clusters of red flowers bloom in December. Here on the other side of the world, where summer is on the other side of the calendar, it has been brightening our gray July.  We call it by its Maori name, Pohutukawa.

Thirty-five years ago, a bunch of hippies in Mendocino started a tradition of getting  together to read their poems. Many of the original group were at the Hill House last Sunday, to reminisce about the old days and to read their work at the 35h Anniversary Mendocino Spring Poetry Celebration. Produced by Gordon Black and hosted by Sharon Doubiago and Dan Roberts, the event drew 46 poets, of whom I was privileged to be one.  I felt I was part of history.

A fat issue of Poetry Flash, the literary journal and calendar out of Berkeley, CA, arrives in the mail. I’m pleased to see that the listing for our upcoming Mendocino Coast Writers Conference made it in.

I have a special fondness for Poetry Flash, from when I lived in the Bay Area and was responsible for submitting announcements for the Waverley Writers readings in Palo Alto. As I skim the “Some Information” column by editor Joyce Jenkins, I smile as I see familiar names: writers I have met and worked with, writers whose work is familiar from readings or books.  Poetry Flash now has an extensive online presence, but its purpose is still the same: to build community through literature.

I browse one of the lead stories, an interview with Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani, and am struck by a comment he makes: “You shouldn’t try to write with any kind of community in mind. You should just write. And if you strike the right balance in your work, a community will assemble around it, and the community will be something you never expected.”

This is what I never expected: that I would feel so connected to a community of writers, here on the Mendocino Coast, in the Bay Area, and even throughout the world who share my joy in the uses of language.

I received my first copy of a new subscription to Poetry yesterday.  (I read this magazine regularly years ago, and had let my subscription lapse, but couldn’t resist a promotional offer.) Along with the magazine came a letter from the Poetry Foundation president, John Barr, a five-years-on report on how the Poetry Foundation is spending Ruth Lilly’s momentous gift. The Foundation’s desire, Barr said, “was to challenge the perception that poetry is a marginal art by making it directly relevant to the American experience.” It makes exciting reading: the tripling of Poetry subscriptions, the millions of people reached by television and web, The Poetry Out Loud high school contest, in which I was involved locally a week or two back, programs to introduce young children to poetry. Read it and be encouraged.