Three plus one: four poems for a birthday

TORCH
I was born the day my mother stopped being pregnant
a full-baked warm wetness taking its first breath
flame flickering, a miniature torch; a moth fluttering
against the pane, the porch. She held: a curved moon-nail,
thistle-like lock, darkened milk; and the clarinetist curled
slow circles around the moon


WISH
the crack of eggs, the weight of flour, chocolate powder

Proving We Exist: Sorting Out How to Write and Parent at the Same Time

by Ellyn Lichvar

Every writer has an occasional dry spell—those periods of inactivity that bring on strong feelings of doubt/guilt/frustration/fill-in-the-blank. We know we should be writing, we wantto write, but nothing will come. We walk around the block, read, make a sandwich, have a drink or a nap, and tell ourselves tomorrow is a new day.

            In late 2009, I got pregnant. In anticipation of conception, I’d gotten my body ready the best way I knew how: I hit the gym, ate well, took handfuls of vitamins. But I never thought to prep my mind as rigorously as I prepped my body. Feeding my brain with the food I knew it needed—poetry, above all else—never occurred to me. I read the What to Expects and the Birthing from Withins but never once sought out what I now know I craved: poetry (or fiction, essays, anything) that had absolutely nothing to do with having children. After my son was born, my body, the one I’d spent so many hours cultivating for the blessed event, returned to [mostly] its original shape. My mind, however, was a different story. Four sluggish years later, I feel like it might be coming back. Might.

            I know I am not unique. Every parent feels this at some point. Regardless of career, gender, or social status, most of us put ourselves on the shelf in some capacity in order to parent to the fullest of our abilities—whatever that means.  For me, doing so amounted to the driest dry spell I’d ever experienced. So dry, in fact, that I barely realized it was out of the ordinary. I didn’t read. I was tired. I’d forget to feed myself for feeding the baby. How could I write anything, let alone string together metaphors and images about motherhood—because, let’s face it, what other subjects could my flabby mind conjure?—in a way that was exciting for anyone to read besides my mother? Breastfeeding is beautiful and natural and everyone would love to read seventeen straight poems about the dimples on my son’s precious hands as they squeezed every last drop from me, right? Of course not. And that was the best I had. So I just stopped.

            Without discussing time constraints and schedules and balancing acts, how does one relearn how to write from her bones when her bones feel like they belong to someone else? The simple, paradoxical answer is simple and paradoxical: there is no answer. No one can tell you how to do it, you just have to start doing it. In the end, it comes down to the old cliché of balance. You can’t turn off one light in order for another to shine brighter. You can’t stop being a parent in order to be a better writer any more than you can stop writing to be a better parent. Each are integral parts of life and each informs the other.

            Now that my writerly brain has [mostly] returned, I got to thinking: do men have this same issue? Do writer-fathers deal with the same mental blocks that I experienced? In order to answer these questions, I turned to good my good friend and fellow parent-poet, Dave Harrity. His answers to my questions drove home one important point: every parent has to “make it work” and making it work is likely different for every parent because, well, every parent is different. The trick lies in the how you make it work, the balancing of lives and the reorganization of priorities.       

 Dave Harrity is most recently the author of Making Manifest: On Faith, Creativity, and the Kingdom at Hand, a book of meditations and writing exercises about contemplative living, peacemaking, and community building. He is also the founder of the formation/literary organization ANTLER (thisisantler.com). He lives in Louisville with his wife and kids.

Ellyn: My writing came to a complete standstill during my pregnancy and only returned in the last year or so—save some spurts here and there—yet I know several people whose writing absolutely took off the second they became parents. Where do you fit on that scale?

DH: I think I was steady all the way through, but I was never carrying a baby, so I won’t pretend to know what that’s like. The process of becoming a parent and becoming a writer are very similar, but maybe all processes of “becoming” are similar. If there is a way to measure my becoming, it would be in the pages of my journal, which I don’t typically go back and read. I had my big-time freak-outs like everyone who's ever had a kid.

How does the concept of “balance” figure into your life both as a parent and a writer?

DH: Balance is a tough thing for any parent to find, I think. And balancing parenting with writing is especially tough. Before I had kids, I would write for several hours each day—some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some at night—and would balance that with my original baby, teaching, which was far more simple. Once I had kids, however, I was determined to continue writing so I went about redefining what my writing schedule meant to me. I started writing in the morning, and did so with my daughter next to me in her little basket. I’d wake up at about 5 am and go till about 7 am. Once she was old enough, I got her a journal and we’d have “writing time” together. She was maybe 2 and a half when this started. She’d color, I’d write. It set a precedent that morning time was creative time. It’s still holds today. She’s 6 now, has a little brother (who went through similar training!), and now they do journal time together, or simply play.

Explain a little bit about your writing habits. Has your process or approach to writing changed since becoming a parent? 

DH: The process hasn’t changed, but my approach to what I make is different. I don’t feel the pressure I used to, for the most part, to produce, publish, etc. I try to redirect my energy into the process of creating. The frustrations and blunders of parenting seem quiet when I’m writing, distant and small. So I use the daily writing time to work out my personal crap and move on to making poems. Rarely do I write about my children in poems, though, which I still find odd.

What specific difficulties and benefits have arisen for you as a writer since becoming a father?

DH: The benefit is that the pressure is off. There’s simply bigger shit to worry about. The difficulty is the letting go of how you used to love/value a thing (writing) and allowing it to evolve into a new form, a new way in which you interact with others and yourself. But I suppose there are benefits to that, too. I’m glad that I’m a different man than I was 6 years ago. I'm glad for the new meaning.

What advice would you give to an artist/writer who is about to become a parent for the first time?

DH: Remember that the time you have with your children can’t be relived, so take it while you have it. There will always be things to write. Human beings—your human beings—are more important than your writing. Figure out a way to make a little progress with your writing each day and be content with it (it should be noted that that advice is right from the Debra Kang Dean playbook). Good things all take time, children or poems.

Your children are still young. Do you imagine them one day reading your work? If so, does this inform your process in any way?

DH: Oh god, I’d guess they’ll read something I’ve written, though hopefully they’ll be over me by the time they’re of age to care. Ha! I tend to spend a lot of time in my journal, which will be the evidence to damn me or exonerate me should I ever be imprisoned. I do think about what I write and know that they may read it, if they can stomach the boredom. But I resolved myself long ago to the idea that the truth (about anything) sets a person free. And the truth about me—I have to trust—will be no different. They will see the good, bad, ugly, and beyond; some of it shameful, some of it lovely. And, well, that’s who I am and I won’t let it be another way. If I’ve raised them right, they won’t want it another way either. I’d like to think they’ll get a more complete look at the relationship I have with their mother, with them, with friends, family, etc. I like to think they’ll mine the ore rather than fuel a grudge. All in all, I think about myself reading something like this that my father wrote (though I don’t think he ever journaled once in his life) and feel like it would be compelling and enriching for me rather than revolting or damaging, so that keeps me going as well.

What do you feel is the most import thing parent-artists can do to keep their creativity fruitful?  

DH: The reality is this: you can’t chase two rabbits, not well anyway. There’s an ebb and flow that is both necessary and appropriate to transitioning between roles in life. I chose to try jui jitsu with writing, using what many people see as destructive to the time aspect of creative life (having children, that is) and turn it into my strength as a creative—my lesser weight against the titan of having kids. I made writing part of their life, too. Mandatory journal time was my little experiment that happened to work. Other writers I respect made similar adjustments, William Stafford and George Oppen are two that readily come to mind.

Parent-writers need to adjust their standards of what can, should, and needs to get done. The children are the important thing, and a gentle touch with them is what really matters. Rane Arroyo once told his students, myself included, to live first and write second. For me at this point in my life, this means be a parent first and a writer second. Not a sexy idea, really, but raising kids is more important to me than publishing poems. I take my vocation as a parent as seriously as my vocation as a writer and a teacher, and I’ve found that the three work pretty synchronously almost all the time—they inform one another in a really lovely way.

Explain, in a nutshell, why it is you write poetry.  What compels you?

DH: Other than loving to play with words, I like the idea that poetry is the little proof that I exist(ed) in the world. Most days that’s enough for me, though not all days. On days I feel anxious, isolated, or anything like that, I take extra time to be with my family and reengage my own purpose. Over the years the meaning of writing has changed from a thing I do for a job—for relevance, for spectacle—to a thing that helps me stay rooted in the world, conscious of the people around me that need my little presence to feel safe, or whole, or happy. There are a few people like that—family, friends, students—and I see writing as a way to root me in their life, in my own life.

Dave's book, Making Manifest, is available here: http://store.seedbed.com/products/making-manifest-by-dave-harrity/

Ellyn Lichvar, of Louisville, KY, holds an MFA from Spalding University. Her poems have been published in Poem, Blood Lotus, The Furnace Review, Ars Poetica, Silenced Press, and others. She has been awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the Assistant Managing Editor for The Louisville Review and works on the staff of Spalding’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. Her spare time is spent reading, writing, watching horrible TV, and being mama to her son, Otis, and their chubby beagle named Jovie. 

Poem-a-Thon: Are You Up for a Challenge?

Could this be the year you take on the 30-day challenge for April? Take a look at this one from the journal, Tiferet. Your participation will help raise funds for the journal. If you see the project through to the end, publisher Donna Baier Stein will send you the gift of a free copy of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Read the information here. Then send your response to: editors@tiferetjournal.com

Similar to other fund-raising marathons, you get other people to commit to a dollar amount per poem. If you complete thirty poems during April, you send the pledged amount to the journal and receive your free copy of The Crafty Poet. Then you can use that to keep on writing in the months ahead. Your poems do not need to be finished, polished poems. According to Stein, drafts are fine. And if you can't complete the challenge, so what? At least you will have tried and helped support a worthy cause.

Good luck!

Origin of Birds: Circles Within Circles

A new net-art installation will be at the Prøve Gallery in Duluth. The opening is on April 11 at 7 pm with live music by the Cosmic Pit Orchestra.  "The Origin of Birds" is created by Kathy McTavish: it features her new film generator, text, and music. For more information: http://originofbirds.blueboatfilms.com/  and and http://www.provegallery.com/
 
Circles:

In the creation stories, both the bird and its egg arrived before the earth was made. According to an ancient Greek story, the god χάος (Chaos) was the first to emerge at the creation of the universe. Soon after her came Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the Underworld) and Eros (Love). In many versions, Chaos then gave birth to the Birds. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God created birds of on the fifth day of creation.  

In the creation story of the Kalevala, in the beginning when the universe is only sky and water, a bird flies over the ocean looking for a place to build her nest. Ilmatar, the spirit of the air, has been swimming in the ocean because she had become bored in the sky. In addition, the wind or waves have made her pregnant. She has been pregnant for a long, long time. The bird —perhaps a Common Pochard, a medium sized duck known for its diving—needs a place to build a nest.  In order to help, Ilmatar raises her knee and shoulders above the surface of the water. The duck mistakes her for an island and builds a nest. When the duck broods upon the nest, the heat becomes so intense that Ilmatar can’t help but twitch her knee and this upsets the nest, and the eggs break. Here is an excerpt from the Kalevala Runo 1:  

            In the sand they do not perish,

            Not the pieces in the ocean;

            But transformed, in wondrous beauty

  All the fragments come together

  Forming pieces two in number,

  One the upper, one the lower,

  Equal to the one, the other.

  From one half the egg, the lower,

  Grows the nether vault of Terra:

  From the upper half remaining,

  Grows the upper vault of Heaven;

  From the white part come the moonbeams,

  From the yellow part the sunshine,

  From the motley part the starlight,

  From the dark part grows the cloudage;

After the fragments transform into earth and sun and sky, Ilmatar begins to shape the earth beneath her feet as if it were clay. She forms the rocks, reefs and deep parts of the ocean. She makes the shores and headlands and forest pillars of the sky.  After this work, finally her labor begins and she gives birth to an old man, a magic singer named Vainamoinen. This story was in the north.

Farther south, I found another creation story involving a bird and an egg.  In the Slavic story Песни птицы Гамаюн, The Song of the Bird Gamayun, creation begins with a golden egg.  Inside this egg was the supreme God, the parent of all life on earth, from his body comes the sun, moon, stars and earth. However, the earth sinks beneath the surface of the ocean and cannot be found. The Supreme God sends a duck to search for it. Three times she attempted this.  The first trip took a year, and she came back with nothing. The second trip took two years, and still nothing.  But after the third trip, which took three years, she came back with a branch from the earth. The supreme God rubs the branch inside his palms with an invocation. The wind blew and the branch fell into the ocean, and the sun shone, heating the water.  As the ocean evaporated the earth emerged and the moon cooled it off.

In these stories of lost and found, the earth is formed. In the first story, the eggs break accidentally. In the second story, the egg follows the normal course of development. A circle inside a circle forms the egg, two lines without beginning and end, but both breaking.

There is another circular story in our cultural history, the Buddhist tale of karma. The word karma means action, the sum of actions in a person’s life (and past lives) and the results. In other words, what goes around, comes around:  

Once there was a bhiksu [monk] who lived in the mountains and practiced sitting Zen. Every day at his noon meal he would give some of his food to the birds. The birds, therefore, always flocked around him. One day after the bhiksu finished his meal, he cleaned his teeth, washed his hands and picked up a pebble to toss. There was a bird on the other side of the fence where the bhiksu could not see him. When the bhiksu threw the pebble, it hit the bird in the head and killed it. That bird was reborn as a boar, which lived on the same mountain. One day the boar happened to climb a ledge above the bhiksu's hermitage and dislodged a boulder while grubbing for food. The boulder fell down and killed the bhiksu. The boar intended no harm. The boulder killed by itself.

The circles are linked vertically and horizontally. One circle, that of a person’s life from birth to death begins again at rebirth. The actions within this circle impact the lives of others. The intentional or unintentional action both circle into the world. According the Buddhist tale, “Doing good and setting one's sights on bodhi [enlightenment] is the behavior of one whose heart is awakened.” This tale shows that what comes first is not as important as what comes next.  

Sources: 

Buddhist Karma Tales.  See this website: http://www.floweringofgoodness.org/buddhist-scriptures-41.php

Lönnrot, Elias, compiler.  The Kalevala: or Poems of the Kaleva District. Translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr.  Harvard University Press.  Print c1963.  Another version is available as a free e-book from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5186.

Songs of the Bird Gamayan.  Slavic Creation Story.  Information available at http://russophilia.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/slavic-creation-myth-translated-from-songs-of-the-bird-gamayun/

On Lyric Essays

There's a vase of daffodils on my table, and snow on the ground outside: welcome to DC's confused, confusing spring. One of my students in the University of Tampa's low-residency MFA program is interested in using the "lyric essay" as a drafting mode. In rounding up resources to help her out, I thought I'd share my findings here as well. 

To begin, where does the term originate? Although both "lyric" and "essay" are concepts visited by generations of many writers past, the coinage conflating the two appears definitively in a 1997 issue of the Seneca Review. In an introduction, editor Deborah Tall and associate editor John D'Agata elaborated on the phrase this way:

The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. 

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form. 

The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, "It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive." It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film. 

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

I would summarize thus: The lyric essay values the tension of juxtaposing objective and subjective material. The lyric essay emphasizes language as a means of engagement, equal to or exceeding its value in conveying information. The lyric essay does not emphasize argument or traditional closure. 

Since I published first in the genre of poetry, then in nonfiction, I am sensitive to the explanation the lyric essay is merely a compromise or indulgence--a "poet's version of prose." It's true that in moments when others report, poets meditate. Poets such as Sarah Manguso and Nick Flynn have written masterpieces of the lyric memoir. But that's a choice, not a default. Plenty of poets have written cogent, journalistic pieces or chronologically coherent personal essays over the years.

So why turn to the lyric essay? On a pragmatic level, here are some circumstances in which the lyric essay might prove advantageous:

-The essay concerns a personal episode in which the author lacked power. Lyric moves, particularly fragmentation and passive voice, enact a lack of agency on the page.

-The goal is to use a received form or numerical formula, e.g. The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous or the Five Stages of Grief, and comment on its efficacy.

-The author does not have access to sources for key aspects of the traditional "story." Lyric moves, particularly litany and stimulative truth, bridge these troublesome gaps. 

-The language and images are the driving motivation of the piece, and stream-of-consciousness observation, sacrificing traditional narrative, is the only way to go. 

And there's the simple--not to be underestimated--sway of aesthetic appeal. Lyric essays offer a space in which an author can weigh a topic without passing judgment. The critical thing is that adopting the mode not be seen as a kind of "almost poem," nor a "pseudo-essay." I like Lia Purpura's take in this interview for Smartish Pace:

Laura Klebanow: It seems you came to write poetry first, and prose poetry and essays next. Is this correct, or has your work in each genre developed less compartmentally? For example, do you ever start a poem and watch it become a prose poem or essay, or vice versa? 

Lia Purpura: The issue of how one discernible genre grows from another is utterly mysterious to me. I’m certain that I’m writing prose, though my essays are called “lyric essays.” In fact, I’ve just written an essay titled “What is a Lyric Essay?” for Seneca Review. In it, I’m making a plea for allowing the form to remain as mysterious as possible. I do mean “mysterious” though in the best way – challenging and magical and able to work on a reader and knit up above the page. I don’t mean at all “unclear” or “sloppy”. The language ought to be as precise as possible in order to affect the most unlikely moves. When I’m writing, an impulse makes itself known as a prose itch or poem-itch. Some failed poems have extended out into prose and found their musculature that way. I don’t think a derailed essay has ever turned itself into a poem.

In the last fifteen years, lyric essays have come to be more accepted in mainstream publishing, and as they have become a more frequent sight at the workshop level. Subsequently, teachers and editors have developed a vocabulary surrounding their craft. These are some of the models I consider most useful when recognizing a lyric essay:

-The Collaged Essay - Collages embody an emotional, intellectual, or historical experience without unifying explanation. They may freely incorporate photographs, poems, maps, or other multimedia modes, including texts "found" elsewhere, e.g. Reality Hunger by David Shields. Asterisks often denote section breaks.

-The Braided Essay - Unrelated topics, perhaps set in different eras, develop a common theme. Brenda Miller's "A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay" is an apt explication. I like her analogy to french braids, in which patterning renders slippery, homogenous materials--e.g, strands of hair--more interesting by adding texture. 

-The Hermit Crab Essay - An author responds to an external cultural product (a well loved album), but gradually reveals an internal landscape (the relationship that corresponded to that album). As Dave Hood says, "This type of lyrical essay is created from the shell of another." These essays are sometimes masked as reviews. 

These are trends, not sole categories. Lyric essays also tend to be particularly rich in litany, parallel structure, and what I call "stipulative truths," which include imperative voice, grafted images, or invented tableaus. 

Below are some favorite or oft-cited examples of authors working in the mode of lyric essay. I'd recommend them to any student looking to assemble their toolbox. 

- Michael Martone's "More or Less: the Camouflage Schemes of the Fictive Essay" - This essay toggles between iterations of camouflage and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; the sections are described as being in "arbitrary order" and in a signature move, the author's bio is a contributing creative text. 

- Priscilla Long's "Genome Tome" - This essay uses a received form (the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up a typical DNA strand) to structure Long's mediation on personal and inherited identity, weaving in scientific case studies. 

- László Krasznahorkai's "Someone’s Knocking at My Door" - This essay uses a circular structure, with slippage between observer and observed, to enact the state of anxiety or, as he put it, the "terrible meeting between boorishness and aggressiveness."

- Maggie Nelson's Bluets - This book-length work itemizes meditations on "blue" as a color, a term, even a musical mode, looking across cultures and time periods. 

- Eula Biss's "The Pain Scale" - This essay uses a visual construction (advancing from 0 to 10) to pace her exploration of suffering; Biss spikes a particular domestic setting with outside references to Anders Celsius, Dante, and Galileo Galilei. 

- Kiese Laymon's "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance" - This essay juxtaposes the author's own experiences against news stories of black youths killed under questionable circumstances; note the rhythmic use of standalone sentences, defiant of normal paragraph organization. 

- Ander Monson's Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir - This book-length work interrogates the privilege of fact versus fiction; Monson's website complicates the notion of "reading" as a linear act, and includes the wonderful "Essay as Hack."

- Jenny Boully's The Body - This book-length work's text is posited entirely via footnotes that might take the form of assertions, postcards, Mad Libs, and so on.

- Roxane Gay's "What We Hunger For" - This essay opens in response to The Hunger Games before accessing a harrowing, firsthand experience of gang rape. 

- David Foster Wallace's "Ticket to the Fair" - This essay's structure is a variant on journalistic chronology, but what distinguishes it is the extravagances of DFW's attention; he freely telescopes between minute details and vast cultural intuitions.

Subsequent proponents of the form have not always agreed with the terminology. At the most recent AWP Conference in Seattle, Kathleen Rooney argued for the phrase "Open Form Essay." In a 2012 Black Warrior Review interview, Maggie Nelson resisted the label in part because of its connotations with "pretty" writing:

BWR: You are a writer that is often associated with the Lyric Essay. I find that term to be quite useful, but I’ve come to realize that many people use that term to mean wildly different things. Do you use Lyric Essay to describe your, or other’s, writing? If so, how do you characterize it? 

MN: I don’t use it to describe my work, because I’ve never written anything that I thought of explicitly as an essay. (I’m trying to write more essay-like things now – it’s very different, and I don’t really have a clue how to do it.) On the other hand, I conceived of both my books The Red Parts and Bluets as continuous flows, albeit jagged up into titled or numbered pieces, and so treating them each as one long essay also seems kind of right. I don’t mind if anyone calls my work “lyric essay”; I don’t care much about classification, as it comes after the fact of the writing. “Lyric essay” likely covers a lot of writing that I like, but honestly, and I’m just speaking personally here, the words themselves kind of bug me. They make it sound like the pieces have to be self-contained and pretty, song-like. Whereas some of the work I like the most is more chafing, awkward—ugly, even. And sometimes sprawling—think of Wayne Koestenbaum’s recent Anatomy of Harpo, for example. That’s why I usually stick with the broader, albeit pretty boring, moniker, “creative nonfiction.”

It might be counterintuitive to include a quotation that questions the very usefulness of the phrase. But "lyric essay" is admittedly a fledgling term. In the absence of rules, the author of lyric essays must summon more self-discipline, not less. Each word choice counts, because you've asked your reader to be primed for every conceivable motif, pattern, tense shift, found text, or other linguistic switcheroo. Traditional indicators of priority on the page have been stripped away. I'm wary of the lyric essay draft in which stylistic meandering is costumed as "figuring it out." That's laziness. Even if the writing suspends judgment, the writer must have clarity in his or her understanding. 

Do we need this term? One of the clearest distinctions between poetry and prose, in my mind, has always been that prose is assigned a truth value--fiction or nonfiction--while poetry is not categorized in such terms. Does attaching the "lyric" modifier shift our expectations, allowing the essay to straddle truth values? Can an essay contain fictional conventions, or does that mean it has become a short story, albeit one rooted in fact? Readers of John D'Agata's The Lifespan of a Fact or John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead, specifically "Violence of the Lambs," might find this a resonant question, and in a brief piece for The Lit Pub, Roxane Gay argued that the perceptible "playfulness and manipulation of a world" is at the very core of the lyric essay's appeal. 

In poetry, we use the word lyric to denote a particular attention to the "I"; the speaker's thoughts and perceptions are the central draw, rather than the culmination of a story. The poem's energy spins around a fixed point, rather than arc-ing from A to Z. Is a blurring of reportable fact the inevitable consequence of emphasizing the "lyric" in an essay? 

I'm fascinated by the texture of truth, the way we establish authenticity and authority on the page. Regardless of whether the "lyric essay" is taught one hundred years from now, the term is a potent description of contemporary American aesthetics toward the last two decades of personal writing and, I suspect, for at least the next decade to come. All the writers mentioned above are worth your time, consideration, and consternation. I'll leave it at that; these are just some notes toward a larger discussion. 

Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range

"I excavate these words from a vein of iron….” these poems are “test drills and core samples” — a weave of memory, archive, dream, song, story — drawn from the history and people of the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. These pages sound the whistles and roar of the mines, the dust in the lungs, the dangerous crossings into a new language, the accordion’s
breath. Culled from violence and tenderness, bone and ash, ore and light, they map a place, a time, a journey through love.”

Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD and co-editor

The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home

Holy Cow! Press

CELEBRATION! THE BOOK! CELEBRATION! THE BOOK


Wildwood River Press announces the publication of Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range.  ISBN: 978-0-9843777-7-0  Available at bookstores. http://www.wildwoodriver.com/

This collection of poems draws from the rich geologic, mining, Native, immigrant, and women's stories on the Iron Range. The book has two sections, Track I: Night Train and Track II: Red Dust. Night Train is a narrative about travel and immigration. Red Dust is about derailments--of many kinds including labor strikes, cancer, violence, accidents, and relationship splits.  The project Night Train Red Dust is also more than a book. It's a work of transmedia and it forms a multiverse: the poems are in the book, several essays and articles about the poems and the Iron Range are on the Red Dust blog (linked on the book website, nighttrainreddust.com) and live music and video are done in theater or installation settings. The essays and articles offer literary explorations of writers, influences and Iron Range history. 

The book uncovers and excavates layers. It asks the questions: are we using everything until it's gone? taking from another body?  The characters in these stories are metamorphosing, dealing with overburden, effluence, and tailings. They walk on the Divide, like the Laurentian Divide, and they are rivers flowing in opposite directions. The stories reflect the lives of the people who built this community: Mary Bassett Bray, MD; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, union organizer; women miners in WWII; Meridel LeSueur, writer; Rev. Milma Lappala, Unitarian minister; Viola Turpeinen, accordionist. This is a working class story of the midwives, farmers, miners, immigrants, and many others with iron in their veins. 

The Iron Range is economically supported by and environmentally damaged by mining.The poems provide strong images of the beautiful landscape of open pit mines and ore dumps, the Boundary Waters, and the wildlife. My grandparents arrived here because of the employment opportunities: one grandfather was a lumberman, and many relatives worked in the mines. My aunts worked in the iron mines during World War II, in the war effort. I have tried to present the music and the frictions of the Iron Range. 


The poems are inspired by family stories and the rich archives of the Iron Range Research Center and the Minnesota Historical Society.This project began when I started to look for information about my grandmothers. In the archives, I found many stories of women who deserve to have their memories preserved. This book reflects the community where I grew up, and the place where my grandparents built homesteads. 

KUMD Radio feature:  poems from the book: (audio file): http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kumd/.artsmain/article/17/392/1955818/Women's.Words/Women's.Words.September.22..2013.Sheila.Packa

Poetry video: http://vimeo.com/wildwoodriver/bonfireofroses

Sample poem

Vermilion Trail

I am leaving

the Mesabi Iron Range

on the same trail

that a gold prospector

came in on,

with a compass gone awry

and red dust on my boots.

Me, the daughter

of a cat skinner

born on the Divide.

I can say we got by.

In my pocket

is the copper penny

of my childhood,

once I reforged it

on the DM&IR

track south of Biwabik.

My father hung

a lead pipe between

two pines in the yard,

the somersault around the pole

was “skin the cat.”

I was good.

I never crossed

a picket line, never

scabbed. Worship was

in the union hall.

In the open pit,

if we got a raise,

that was why.

Payday was playing a

jukebox in the bar,

dancing with a pool stick.

Whiskey was a life

waiting for somebody

to marry it.

I laid myself off,

packed my trunk,

picked up where

my immigrant past

left off —

This poem "Vermilion Trail" was originally published in Ploughshares and it is in the anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-territorial Times to the Present. New River's Press.   

Bio:  Sheila Packa, the granddaughter of Finnish immigrants, grew up near 
Biwabik on the Iron Range. She has three previous books of poems (The Mother Tongue, Echo & Lightning, and Cloud Birds). She is the editor of Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions, an anthology of seventy-five Lake Superior regional writers. She received Loft McKnight Fellowships, one in poetry and one in prose. She has also received three fellowships and other funding support for projects from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council. In 2010-2012, she served as Duluth's Poet Laureate.

To find more information about Iron Range history and link to the URLs used in the research for this project: http://www.scoop.it/t/vermilion-trail/curate

To read an earlier article about the development of these stories for a live multi-media performance at the Fringe Festival in Minneapolis August 2013: http://bit.ly/1h8FxOA

See the website www.nighttrainreddust.com and www.wildwoodriver.com