Blog #14- Some reviews of cutting-edge chapbooks

In a departure from regular “blog format,” I thought I would post some brief excerpts of a few new chapbooks I had the pleasure of reading this week.  All of them relate to the natural world in mysterious ways.  The first is Hannah Kreitzer’s Marrowbone, which has been described as a collection of “myths and fables” by the publisher: “These three stories will whisk the reader to arcane and mysterious lands, but the darkest journeys take place within the human heart.” 

Indeed, Marrowbone delivers to the reader a strange world of stories filled with unusual narratives and creatures, including one of the most intriguing characters in this slim volume, a bony animal-like figure who befriends a fellow traveler:

"That night the sun gave swift surrender to the butter-pale half moon. I fell asleep with ground squirrel and cold water in my stomach, the bonebuck’s ribs bracing my spine, and I dreamed a sky full of crows layered dozens-thick between the clouds and earth. Bones were strewn all through the field around me—ribs and limbs cast askew like forgotten omens. Snow came down through the crows’ wings, stacking up around the bones and settling on my boots…"

The stories in this book lead the reader to some fascinating and unexpected places, and we never lose our confidence in Ms. Kreitzer’s vision and skill as we journey along with her characters.  Chelsea Ardle, one of the publishers of Marrowbone and co-founder of Beetnik Press, shared with me her impressions of Ms. Kreitzer’s take on the natural world and of the chapbook itself:

"Marrowbone" takes the reader to places unknown, and yet, emotionally familiar—a woman going through her time of the month, trying to find some comfort; a girl trying to find her rhythm on a path unknown; a love lost. In her fictional tales, Kreitzer uses subtle symbolism to tell old stories through new eyes. In her descriptions of place, I think it is easy to recognize the author's own ties to land. I will tell you here that Kreitzer is a strong supporter of being barefoot for as long as it is possible during the year. Her feet are calloused and knowledgeable of the places she has walked, the land she lives on. This fact, shows through in the chapbooks stories to me, especially "Threefold."

As I read this volume, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the way Ms. Kreitzer distills the mysterious into concrete terms.  A native of Maine, she cites as one of her writerly influences John Prine, “who is a quiet master of earth-stained truth and humor,” and has said of her own connection to place: “I love the woods and the dirt and the shared heritage of stoicism. Being from Maine means knowing something about space and silence.  I’m grateful for that.”  Ms. Kreitzer has proven herself an expert in those very topics via the earthy yet elusive stories in this collection.

Read on to learn about a few more chapbooks…

After hearing Lorena Williams read from her new nonfiction chapbook Relic last week in Braddock, PA, I quickly became enamored with the honest resilience of her prose.  While she is currently a writing teacher at two universities, the bio on the back of the book also tells me that she has played the roles of “Wilderness Ranger… wildland firefighter…and…whitewater guide,” so by the time I open her chapbook to the first page, her well-wrought descriptions of place don’t surprise so much as thrill the restless wanderer buried somewhere within me.  Her descriptions of the natural environment are shot through with a quiet kind of beauty:

“My jog takes me along the ditch road past rolling hills of sagebrush, the windswept Oregon desert silent but for the tee-dee, tee-dee of pygmy nuthatches huddled together in the morning sun. The crunch of my shoes through crusty snow disturbs the tiny blue-gray birds into a chattering departure, only for them to alight on the very same branches moments after I pass.”

Ms. Williams displays a finely tuned sense of place in these tales, as befits her biography on the back cover.  I find myself intrigued with this description of the author’s roots:  “A native of the American West, Lorena Williams has long preferred rock to brick, sage to streets.”   Released by Appaloosa Press, Relic displays the tension between the Oregon landscape of Ms. Williams’ roots and the Pittsburgh cityscape that is her more recent home:

“Content with the reasonably unchanged vista—the cows, the distant tractor making its way up Graham Boulevard—I turn toward home and prepare to lie.

“No—I actually really like living in a city,” I say through a mouthful of scrambled egg. “It’s great being so close to everything, you know? I ride my bike pretty much everywhere.”

Throughout Relic, Ms. Williams confides in the reader as she explores a kind of longing for the land of her childhood, and we can only respond with appreciation for the beauty of both her landscapes, real and longed-for, and her words themselves.

And finally, Shannon Hozinec’s chapbook Unbridaled, a book of poems, makes its debut this week.  According to her bio, Ms. Hozinec is a Pittsburgh poet who “is powered by an oft-lethal combination of whiskey and hairspray!”  I appreciate the humor in this description, though the majority of poems featured in the book are of a more serious nature than this brief blurb. 

According to the publisher, this intriguing collection of poems “examines what happens in a post-apocalyptic society after a pseudo-human creature corrals a horde of lostlings under his wing. It engages with bloodlust and dominance, sacrifice and self-preservation, gender relegation and destruction – with what is earth, what is meat, and what is unalienable within us all.”  An earthy kind of premise, indeed!  While this description sounds terrfying to me, the poetry itself is a gift of surprising images and juxtapositions such as this one:

                           The sky ate and ate, clutching
         the open spaces in our jaws where
         it flashed through and became the world.

and this one from later in the same poem:

        Past the hungry days, gathered,
        a collective--
                           
                        shudder as we remember how it felt to eat our least favorite dogs.

On the whole, I found Ms. Hozinec’s use of language to be thought-provoking and often astonishing.  Witness for yourself in an excerpt from "The Melting Town": 

                        Besmeared with mud as we were--
      as we walked, we created the ground.  And oh,
      we are such a wooden bunch, 

      wearing gristle-grain proudly on our chests--
                        each step turned old beasts to ash.

Her images resound and linger, long after the words have been read and the book set down.

Ms. Hozinec's chapbook is available through Valium Vixen Press.

Blog #13: The Hum of Music Beneath the Traffic

11:06 a.m.

A daytime blog, at last...but something doesn't feel right, though it's beautiful outside.  What feels off, I wonder?  I stop and use my ears.  I hear the ubiquitous traffic noises, the sounds of humans doing human things outside, and the calls of birds, all mingled together. I realize that what I need today is silence.  Why is it so much easier to hear this silence at night?  There is a stillness at that hour that makes it so much easier to think. 

But then, there is something else happening in my mind today, a kind of distraction I can't escape.  It hums just below the surface of everything, until the distraction itself becomes my sole focus, flipping my world and its priorities around.  All other noise becomes bothersome, intrusive.  It is the strain of a song I have been working on for several months, and it is the only sound I want to hear right now.  Maybe it is not complete silence I need today, but simply the ability to hear this music, underneath it all.

I have an upcoming concert with several choirs in Pittsburgh, and with the Symphony, yet I've been unable to really inhabit the space of the music all semester. Something to do with being too busy, and putting my graduate school homework first, methinks--music is always the thing that's getting put on that proverbial back burner, since I don't need it to graduate.  I am doing it for the love, as they say.

But something has shifted in me this week.  This shift has something to do with a few two-and-a-half hour rehearsals at Heinz Hall, spent in the presence of an inspiring musical trainer, who gives us bits of wisdom such as "The professional gives--the amateur gets. Do it for them, not for you," and "Music is the consistent eternal march."  Somehow, I've started to internalize that last one this week; I've awoken these past several days mid-song, as though I'd nodded off in the middle of performing a concert the night before, with the words (in German, no less) still lodged in my throat.  It is a strange sensation to wake this way, as this kind of focus usually takes many hours to achieve instead of being built-in to one's morning--but it feels right to me, somehow.  I think of Bing Crosby, of Rosemary Clooney and Billie Holliday--all my vocal heroes from the old days, from my grandfather's day--and wonder how often they woke up singing.

Perhaps every day should begin this way, with the promise of a song on one's lips.

"In the arts," Bob says, "do not divide your own attention between many things.  You think of only one thing."  This lesson seems so applicable to everything else in my life right now.
Of course, we don't always have the luxury of handling only one problem at a time, but if I can manage to maintain my focus out there in the world, until the first of many problems is solved, I feel more accomplished, less divided amongst warring factions of my own psyche that want to do everything, and want to do it right now.  I am surely a product of my generation, of this high-speed moment in our culture.

I wish I could hire Bob as my personal musical guru, but I'm sure he costs a lot.

                                                                         *

"Auf-er-steh'n," we sing in German, "ja auf-er-steh'm, wirst du mein Staub, nach kur-zer..."  He has some of us hum the words.  Those in our choir born from May through August sing them, so that between the two groups we nail the pianissimo just right.  A tremulous sound echoed throughout the hall before; now we seem sure of ourselves, sure of this language most of us don't speak in our daily lives.  Some of us hardly even know what we are singing, but nevertheless, we are certain of our voices, now.  Bob has done his job. 

"Arise, yes thou shalt arise, my dust," the translation reads on the first page of the Mahler, "after brief rest. Eternal life... To bloom again thou shalt be sown.  The Lord of Harvest goes to gather sheaves of us who died..."  But we are not capturing it, just yet.  "I will arise," Bob tells us, by way of translating the translation, so that we can understand not just the meaning but the purpose of the words. "My death will give life to something."   A Resurrection Symphony, they call it.

On page 6, Mahler's own text appears: "O believe! My heart, Believe! Nothing will be lost to you!  Yours is, yes, whatever you longed for.  Yours-whatever you loved, fought for!"  Enthusiastic exclamation points aside, his words seem beautiful to me, accessible.  It is as though I could have written them myself, though he composed them between 1888-1894 when he was about my age.  "O believe: You were not born in vain! Have not lived, suffered in vain!" 

I think of the meaning we try consistently to locate, the purpose we must determine for ourselves before we die, lest we feel we have lived unfinished lives.  Mahler felt it, too: "What has arisen must pass away. What has passed away, Arise! Cease to tremble! Prepare! Prepare to live! O pain, you all-piercing one! O death! You conquering one! Now you are conquered!"

                                                                        *

Bob is speaking from above, perched at a music stand on the stage, while hundreds of us listen from the audience, in a reversal of the usual setup that places choir singers up high and the teacher down in front.  The reversal seems appropriate, as everything Bob says is the opposite of what it seems to be when he's not in the room. The girl sitting next to me frantically writes down every witticism and piece of advice he utters with her pencil, on the last page of her choir music, lest something get lost in the shuffle of pages and singing. 

"Our modern technology keeps us from communicating. It does not help us communicate," Bob tells us from the stage, and I know in an instant that he is right. It makes me wish I had turned off my phone during rehearsal, that all these girls sitting around me to my right had turned theirs off, too. Some of them are sending text messages during Bob's talk, including the one with the pencil, even though she ceratinly seems to be paying close attention to his words in other moments. 

I think again of what Bob said before: "You think of only one thing." I wonder how we will ever find a cure for ourselves, for this inability to do just one thing.


                                                                     *
"With wings that I won for myself in fervent strivings of love, I shall spar to the Light," we sing in German, "to which no eye has reached! I shall die that I may live again."

My world is filled with music, suddenly.  I don't want to go back to a world that isn't. I've been waiting all semester to wake up singing, to fill the bathroom with the sounds of German and Latin, Norwegian and French while I hum in the shower.  To know the music well enough to recall it from memory.  To let the voices fill my head, to give them accompaniment while I empty out the trash, take my dirty dishes downstairs, brush my teeth.  All I want to do is sing, and the singing follows me to the bus stop, onto the bus, on the sidewalk. It is with me in every moment.  The songs I carry with me become my life's soundtrack for a day, for a week, for a month.  When the concert is finished, when the last strains of 2,000 voices have hushed the audience and the applause recedes, the songs will fade from my mind.  I will try to hold onto them, but they will lose some of their magic until next fall, until the next concert.  I will live in a world where music is here only sometimes, like before.

But for now, the boundary between these two worlds is permeable, a "thin place" like St. John's Cathedral or the entire city of Edinburgh, a site of transformation and possibility.  The songs bleed through.  The world is music, one endless song uttered in all languages at once, meant to be sung in the shower, on the bus, or anytime at all.

Blog #12: Reflections on the Varied Species of Boxwood and the Creepiness of Stephen King's Brain

12:20 a.m.

What has this backyard project meant to me over the past 15 weeks? Though I've reflected on this idea elsewhere in earlier weeks, I continue to approach these recent outdoor sessions and the effect they have had on me with something approaching wonder. I wrote last week about the "unsayable," and I believe that still holds, for me, in relation to some aspects of nature.  But I have tried my best to put words to the often mysterious forces that accompany me out here in the yard, and will probably continue to do so for quite some time, until I move myself to a new place at the very least. 

Over the past several entries, I've looked at the spiritual bridge offered to those of us who watch closely birds and ladybugs in particular (though the experience could apply to any animal at all, really).  I've thought about the paradox of loneliness one feels when in nature with no one else around to point things out to; I've reflected on how important these twenty minutes have come to be for me each week, as they seem to balance out everything else, somehow. I am not sure how this works, or why this works--only that it does indeed work. 

There are plenty of experiences of "flow," as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls it, in which time disappears and one is left floating in a sea of focused attention and forgetfulness of common everyday worries.  (The technical definition: "the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.")  For me, I experience flow when I am writing, and when I am in nature, once I have settled in--whether this finds me lying under a tree or in a green chair I have dragged outside from my dining room.  Thus, this blog has me on double duty in terms of flow.

As I sit outside with an online field guide, trying to isolate which of the 70 kinds of boxwoods are proliferating in our backyard on either side of the fountain--are they, for instance, of the wedding ring or north star variety? --I realize that I am still as hopeless as ever at identifying plants.  But I suppose that identification hasn't really been my focus, after all, these past 15 weeks. 

According to Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening: The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener (which was edited by Bradley, Ellis, and Phillips and has a ladybug on its cover), "Boxwoods are healthiest when protected from direct sun and wind."  I suppose this is why they survive so well in usually overcast Pittsburgh, in this protected corner of my backyard.  Is my temperament opposite the boxwood's, then, as I relish the natural elements of sunshine and wind?  If I were a plant, I'd be much more likely to be a cherry tree or a daffodil or something colorful that withers easily in poor weather.  Though I, too, wilt in the extreme heat of a July day, so perhaps the boxwood and I are not all that different after all.  (Honestly, who isn't miserable on a 100 degree day during a Pittsburgh August?)

My roommate insists that these boxwoods are either buxus sinica or buxus sempervirens, and I am inclined to believe her.  I continue to read that the boxwood is a favorite of plant enthusiasts when it comes to topiary, as "its slow growth and tolerance of severe pruning allow gardeners to trim it into fantastic shapes."  This knowledge is far from comforting in my case, and gives me the chills, since I lived in Estes Park in the summer of '09 while reading The Shining and regularly hanging out at the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King's book.  I watched the film from inside the Stanley, in fact, and tried not to look at the super-creepy bathtub scene or the super-creepy hallway scene or the... well, any of the other creepy scenes.  It doesn't help that I stayed up late last night, watching the appropriately titled Creepshow, another of this prolific author's film adaptations.

So far, the boxwood and I do not share an easy kinship.

But I read on.  Wikipedia tells me that boxwood can be used to make white chess pieces and stringed instruments, and it is also ideal for woodblock printing. This seems a romantic notion to me, that the musical arts and the thinking man's (and woman's) pursuits could be so closely tied to the earth.  The usefulness and flexibility of this plant begin to seem admirable, in a zen-like way.  I imagine the plant giving way to the gardener's skilled and supple hands, bending to his or her will in a show of cooperation;  I imagine it putting up no fight when the Japanese carved it up to make woodblocks.  I imagine the wrinkled hands of the men in the park who play chess every Sunday, moving their knights and rooks back and forth, as the game demands.  I try not to imagine the boxwood becoming topiaries in the shapes of creepy animals, if I can help it; nonethless, I try to appreciate the many ways it makes itself useful, available, and open to the whims of the human spirit, the way we all should do. 




For more on the positive psychology of "flow," see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
For more on boxwoods, see the guide mentioned above, as well as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buxus

Blog #11- The Powers of the Unspeakable

12:00 a.m.

There is a tiny cut on my hand, a spot I must have missed with the moisturizer a while back, which becomes irritated whenever the weather gets colder.  It is a small but insistent kind of pain, and as I sit in my green chair contemplating my backyard in the dark once again, I can't think of anything else but this small annoyance. 

It has been a good day, a productive day, a day filled with writing-talk, dinner with friends, and even a film festival which is pretty much my favorite event all year.   And yet, this tiny cut is demanding all my attention right now, the way that pain always tries to do.  The weather, though recently beginning to warm up, has left its mark on me. 

The feeling of winter is still with me, too; I haven't managed to shake it just yet.  The days are warmer now, but the nights retain a chill that makes me shiver most nights at the bus stop.  I know, with all the sensibility of my logical brain, that we are on the cusp of spring, but my body refuses to accept it as real, until there is steady proof, until it can be counted upon in a more consistent way. Until then--until every day brings the same, reliable promise--I will remain just a little suspicious.
                                                            
                                                                     *
Lately, a friend and I have been getting together to write haiku poetry. We take our time about it, 5 verses between the two of us per session.  We are following, as closely as we can, an adaptive form that requires us to build on one another's poetry in a collaborative effort.  We use an old yellowed book of experimental poetry in mixed-language translation as our guide.  We rely upon this format: Stanza 1- mention or reference a particular month; Stanza 2- reference a season;  Stanza 3- introduce a new idea; Stanza 4- no mention of the season here, so the author has a bit of freedom. Then we wash, rinse, repeat. 

I find the comfort of structure an enjoyable way to write; having an unseen force to push against in my writing is helpful.  And yet, when consistently juggling seasons and months becomes tiresome, we try to find a way to "say it," establishing the "when" of our verse, without actually saying it.  This is an old, well-worn technique for most poets, but non-fiction writers are accustomed to truth-telling, and sometimes I find it difficult to hold back on the tell.  In my classes, professors ask us to write about grief without the word "grief" itself, to prune our writing back in a way that hardly resembles the old academic writing, with its need for clear thesis statements and literary evidence at every turn.  It resembles instead the way my roommate might attack the boxwoods in our back yard with pruning shears whenever they get out of hand.

All this has got me thinking about the power of the un-sayable, and how it so often seems to overshadow those things that we have no trouble speaking aloud.  Once the words are committed to the page, or to a listening ear, is it possible that this act alone can lessen their power over us?

                                                                         *
When my grandmother passed in 1998 from a brain tumor, I found the process of her dying an excruciating one to bring up in conversation. The first person I spoke with about it on the day of her death--a music teacher of mine--seemed sympathetic, but later insisted that I should stick around for rehearsal.  I could not do that, I told her.  Who could make music at a time like this?  She insisted that times like this were indeed the most appropriate for the creative arts.  But I couldn't bear to bring my grief to the stage, to my friends and peers.  I couldn't lay it out in the open like an unwrapped gift.  I couldn't feel her logic, and I felt betrayed instead.  I didn't want anyone telling me how to mourn. 

I stopped talking for a while.

Fast-forward 15 years.  In December, by the time we lost Nana's husband, I had changed.  Once again, I learned of the news on my way to choir practice, as though the universe had waited until just this moment by design to tell me of his passing.  This time, though I didn't tell anyone just yet what had happened, I came prepared to sing.

 And later on that night, when I needed to talk about it with someone this time around, there were a few friends in Pittsburgh in whom I could confide. We drove around town looking at Christmas lights and got coffee, talking around the subject at first, but when I was ready to rehash my indecisiveness over and over about whether I should return home in the middle of finals to attend the services, I was supported fully by a set of listening ears.

Of course, this was not easy terrain for me to navigate; but speaking about Poppop to others and soon after composing a brief essay about my visit to say good-bye helped me to keep on going even after I'd returned home.  The act of expression seemed to lead me out of the darkness, this time around.  This is not something I could have known in 1998, but I'm sure glad to know it now.

The ramifications of Nana's passing still seem mysterious and strange to me, after all this time, perhaps because of the difficult circumstances of her death, or perhaps because I was so much younger and more immature, then.   The power of the unspoken won out, then, and the effects of this continue on for me. Yet here I am, letting her husband go with all the grace I can muster.  Putting a voice to the unseen turned out to be the most liberating thing I could do, under the circumstances.

                                                                 *
Lately, I've had many opportunities to be heard in the ways that I desire, to say the thing I am not sure I want to say, but which needs to be said.  Professors are recognizing my writing with thoughtful comments more often than before; my blog is about to get more exposure due to my partnership with another site; and I can call up a few of my closest friends whenever necessary to talk about the big-ticket things in our lives, the stuff we all need advice about once in a while. 

And yet, I sit here in the darkness of my backyard, the dining room light glowing through our picture window and casting shadows in stripes on our lawn, and I find that the brightness makes me both uneasy and grateful, all at once.  It is nice to be able to see my words on the page, for once, as I sit out here.  But I feel exposed, too, as though any neighbor peering out a window or even my own roommate and her guests might catch me in the act.  The act of what, you might ask, and it would be a good question, a pertinent question.  The act of putting the un-sayable to paper, I suppose--of speaking things aloud which make me uneasy, of steeling myself for truth-telling in a way that even a degree in Nonfiction Writing has not prepared me for. 

It probably looks just like thinking, from the outside.  It leaves me feeling vulnerable, nevertheless.

On the page, we're not always meant to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  We are meant instead to lead our readers there of their own accord, to act as guides.  But in our lives, sometimes this is not enough, and that is the different between living and writing.  What brings me truth and clarity on the page may keep me muddled elsewhere in my life.  The un-sayable has the power to overshadow a person--I must try to bring it to life, to light, or risk letting it bury me alive.  Luckily, I have a few tools in my toolbox I didn't have before.

This is why, if we merely feel a little clearer about things at the end of a day than we were when we began it--even if we have done nothing else of note--it is enough.  We have already made a start.