Your Inner Seven

Packing to be at Ghost Ranch for two weeks teaching and writing, I decided this time to travel light – one bag of clothes, one sack of books, one bulging file of handouts/exercises, flashlight, and homemade (thank you, Margaret!) cookies to lure friends to my room for happy sugar hour.

I also carried with me, like a lucky penny, a shiny bit of wisdom which came unbidden from my oldest granddaughter, Laken.

Why do you always have to go to Neww Meexxico? she complained, and rightly so, since I was going to miss her soccer tournament.

I have to see my friends, and also teach a class.

What class?

Not to complicate matters with words like sense of place, landscape, open genre, memoir, I kept it simple: I show people how to make a poem.Silence. Furrowed brow. Wide-eyed wondering. Incredulity.

Grandma, I write a poem nearly every day…all by myself.

Oh, for the capacious mind, the confidence and intuitive powers of such a seven-year-old. Oh, for the gift of truthfulness and sudden ego-thumping.

It was enough to make me consider for just a second staying home and yelling for the North OKC Reds. (It turns out those girls took the trophy and didn’t even need my extra cheering.)

My Fall Writing Festival class was actually called: This Land – Writing Out of the Places We Know. Laken’s reminder that we probably all have an inner landscape where language is not inhibited by someone else’s sense of form and beauty was more important to me last week than clean underwear or a nighttime flashlight.

Like seven-year-olds on the cusp of reason but clearly committed to imagination, all the writers who joined me at the Ranch this year took Laken’s exclamation to heart and revisited that place where, as Sandburg said, we were first given a song and a slogan to sing.

The Spanish have a word : Querencia – the place where you feel you are your most authentic self.

These talented students mined those places and found ways to revision them– the forest, the creek, the flood, the chine, a sandy parabola, the grain elevator, the dogs in the street, the deadly wave, even the Amazon forest, where one woman had lived, was brought into our small room with the most vivid description of clear cutting I’ve ever heard. Among this group of ten was demonstrated both the child’s wonder and the mature woman’s braided complexity. Trust ensued. Generosity flew around the room like party confetti or at times like Kleenex. Oh, not “like” Kleenex. It was Kleenex.

In the end, the wave that broke a girl’s neck was given a name, a woman waiting for her lover in the airport made place out of that placelessness we call a terminal, an ancient mother was given voice, a flood was brought to life, erosion was honored, green was deepened and made real, a family that didn’t seem containable was poured into a fine container, the Continental Divide rose up nicely, a raven shook things up, and then at the end of a street where you would think nothing was going to happen, profanity found the perfect place to speak, and speak she did.

Oh, and that poem which got the whole Ranch laughing on the final night’s performance, The One Good Thing, the one about the passing of the girdle, I know it wasn’t exactly about landscape and sense of place, but the point was taken: let’s not constrict our bodies and separate ourselves from all that moves and jiggles and breathes. Let’s live in the world full of every kind of contour.

And let’s make sure our granddaughters ask us: what’s a girdle? Incredulously.
Thank you, Jeanne, Louise, Marilyn, Rosemary, Susan P., Susan J., Jane, Kathy, Dorothy, and Helen. You are my favorite ten each with a lovely inner seven.

A Letter



Plaza Blanca



A Letter : with special thanks to the writers who joined me for a week of hellos and goodbyes, classic letter writing, and wonderful experimental letter poems. If any of you are responsible for this winged letter of note, I thank you.



Sarah Atlee, Terrye Bullers, Sylvia Karcher, Alice Byrd, Debbie Allen



Dear Friends,

Yesterday I had a haunting visitor. A large moth had pressed its body against the screen door and it spent the day there in complete stillness. I think it was a Pachysphinx Modesta, a nocturnal creature which should have spent the day sleeping on the bark of a pin oak or poplar.

Its presence made me do things a little differently -- enter and exit through the back door, shoo the birds away, dig around in the nearby Hosta beds, meet the mailman at the curb so he would not disturb. I paced the day by a different clock as well -- abruptly stopping whatever I was doing to check on the welfare of this napping symmetrical pattern.

It had startled me at first because from afar it looked like a Halloween bat. An early omen. Up close its wings were perfect twin paintings of desert mesas, what we call the painted skirts out in the canyons of Ghost Ranch. They matched the pocket rock I borrowed recently from the wet stream bed of Plaza Blanca. Those paper-thin wings could have been picture jasper in another incarnation. The quietude was that of chimney rock. The wasps buzzing around it in the afternoon made me nervous, the little buzzards.

Modesta showed no fear. Her day was night. She seemed alright with that. Nothing seemed amiss except that I had a giant moth.

This is how it is when I return from the Piedra Lumbre Valley. Notes arrive, letters of no advice, no big news really. They are written in cloud script, to the tune of rain, or, as in this case, a bit of moth borne hieroglyph. Then they disappear like invisible ink on onion skin, and I am happy to be home again.

Sincerely (wishing this were written with a fountain pen)

Jane

A place for you in the circle

DEAR FRIENDS

It's officially spring, and summer will be upon us soon enough. What are you going to do with your beautiful summer? Or, as Mary Oliver asks, your wild and wonderful life? There is a chair especially for you in my class during Creative Arts Week at Ghost Ranch, July 29 - August 4. 

I usually try to lure you out with a landscape photo, the valley of shining stone being a on-going siren song. The picture I offer you today is of Ghost House. This has been my classroom for many years because it's small and perfect for six or seven writers. It is an intimate space but outside those windows is the famous mesa, Pedernal, sometimes called Spider Woman or Changing Woman, and later seen widely in the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. "God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it"  she said. Whatever bargain they made, fortunately for us, the living can still enjoy it -- that and many of the other natural gifts of Ghost Ranch. A room with an inward perspective and calling to look outward nurtures the creative spirit.

Consider coming this year. My classes offer a circle of shared insight and also provides new vistas, challenges for fresh and unexpected writing.


Back by popular demand this summer is Where Truth Is Told: the Art of Letter Writing, a class I offered a few years ago during the Fall Writing Festival.  The link to the Ghost Ranch catalog will give you all the particulars of living on the Ranch for a week. Here is the course description but I would like to add that we will study and experiment with the letter as a contemporary art form not simply a mode of communication.  

Where Truth is Told: the Art of Letter Writing

Workshop ID: G13W753

Dates: July 29, 2013 - August 4, 2013 Price: $350.00

Reading the letters of both famous (Ansel Adams, Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, Woody Guthrie perhaps) and ordinary people (maybe your mother or grandfather) we will discover the way letters rise to the level of art and enrich the lives of both sender and receiver.  Through letters, daily routines and deepest desires intermingle.  The art of letter writing is not entirely lost to us yet.  Come prepared to compose letters worth keeping, the ones you have been meaning to write. While we still have a mail carrier, let’s write some beautiful letters.

 

Return to Reading

I used to think I wanted to be a librarian. It all started at the Perry Carnegie Library which had some daunting steps for a four year old in a smocked dress. A woman stood on the lean-to ladder pulling down a book. I want to work here, I told my mother, after I began to know the scope of a day in the alcoves of the library. Along with the numbered volumes, I loved the sunlight, wood, ceiling fans. It was a temple in our mundane little town.

I made it through many tests and tight places by the book. In the presence of a book, I was safe from awkwardness. If I’d had a better book on sex, that would have helped a lot. As it was, I married young and read the Russians when my babies took a nap.  I read the Beats. I read the war resisters and the early feminists. Eventually I had to get a job. To avoid the rigors of the cash register, I went back to school. I thought I would make a good librarian.

My grad school application essay spoke of search engines, venn diagrams, Boolean logic. I’d been warned: these days, for heaven’s sake, don’t expound upon your love of books; that’s démodé. Linked bibliographies, collection development by algorithm, self check out scanner, pro and con. People used to say: how fun to be a librarian with all those books. Books were deep background. Information was on the rise. 

So I became a librarian just in time to usher in a multitude of databases, a cyber age, techno savvy research, reading with an eye to cut and paste.  I made a living. I still liked the sunlight coming in the atrium and the cart of recent acquisitions. Eventually I had a nice big office.

Now I am a recovering librarian, recovering my lifetime love: novels, poems, histories and geographies good enough to read cover to cover more than once.  I have a great support group, my avidly irreverent, funny, and opinionated book club. I have wonderful book buddies. I can be completely random in my reading. And if I get too compulsive, or heavy on the you-have-to-read- this-book, my friends forgive me. I’m a recovering librarian and a reader born-again.

Good News!

The Lady Victory

Poems by Jane Vincent Taylor
is available from Full Circle Books in Oklahoma City and at Amazon.com.

The Poetry of Home

a week long workshop at Ghost Ranch
has spaces available. July 30- Aug 5, 2012. Register soon at Ghostranch.org.

Summer Rituals

I can’t decide if this summer calls for a new routine, or no routine. Where are the new poems, I ask myself. I hope they are in this unadulterated notebook I’ve just unwrapped, dating the first page, performing my secret blank-book ritual. Routines and rituals, what would we do without them?

When I was a child we routinely went to Sunday Mass, ate fish on Friday, and gave up mostly chocolate bars for Lent. We churned ice cream on 4th of July, sprinkled the clothes with water before we ironed them, fried an August egg on the hot sidewalk, and during the stickiest nights of summer slept outside on cots under a net of fireflies.

Routine. It’s French : for route -- a path, a road to travel. Both ritual and routine offer ways to get from one place to another. A map or recipe, orderly and prescribed perhaps, but pointing to an unknown door. Rites have always moved toward a threshold.

One of my favorite childhood journeys was one where we kids, all dressed up, walked from the portico of St. Joseph’s school to the church, St. Rose of Lima, at the far end of the street. It was May, post-Easter-death-and-resurrection. This, a softer feast, we just called Crown the Queen. With blasts of Spirea in our arms we walked two by two. One child loaded down with boughs, the other in charge of a paper-collared candle. The tapers were lit the moment it got dark enough to make a sparkly show. We were flame and flower moving in song toward our goal: to place a wreath of roses on the painted blessed virgin and make her come alive. Actually, it was we who came a little more alive, even if the cloying churchy atmosphere could make a few girls faint away and have to be revivedwith cardboard fans and smelly handkerchiefs.

Perhaps you, too, were raised on lovely ceremonies. Some of ours brought comfort; some were full of contradiction, irrationality, and fear. But mostly they fed our need for beauty, amazement, and a dose of transformation. Looking back it seems that for routines to become true rituals they need to jolt one off the common path, offering, if only briefly, an awakening.

Last week, for instance, to break the monotony of Tinker Toys, I took my granddaughters (aged 3 and 6) for a walk around the neighborhood. It was ordinary: curb walking, rock collecting, bird watching, dog visiting at various fences. At each corner we decided which route looked the most promising, surprise-wise. Nearing home an oddly brindled cat came bounding out in front of us. A miniature tiger/panther mix, we decided. The girls were convinced it had escaped from the zoo. For about a block we were in the wilderness, a very small wilderness, but still. A walk had turned into something extraordinary.

I think it doesn’t really take that much. Sometimes we escape routine by walking further into it and letting imagination run wild a bit. I’m hopeful for new poems because summer, queen of rituals and not- that-much-routine, is almost here.

Work

Today I’ve been thinking about work, my work, and also the tradition of work I come from. My father was a telephone man, a lineman; later he ran the switch room. These days one would say he worked in “communications,” as does my oldest son, and in fact, do I. Hey, as you read this, are we not watering the fields of communications, cyber-wise, blog-wise?

A few years ago I retired from a career in librarianship (which is very fine work, indeed) and am now a writer and teacher. I consider this my full time work though I admit to taking lots of long lunch breaks, yoga breaks, and weeks off to garden or paint the kitchen. If I had a union contract it would have to honor the time a writer needs in non-desk activity in order to find the hot wire, the live switch. But if I had a union contract now in the State of Oklahoma I’d be considered communist, a weakling, in cahoots with a leftist devil.


You see, now that my days have elasticity I sometimes find myself  reading the local paper. The current legislature is anti-labor and to make that clear is proposing changing the Oklahoma State motto from “Labor Omnia Vincit” established way back before statehood to “Oklahoma: In God We Trust”. In other words they want to dump the quote from Virgil’s poem Georgics (originally calling on more of the Roman people to take up farming) to a well-worn dollar-begging pious cliché. Shall I tell you what I think? I love Virgil. And though I don’t think we should fall for imperial propaganda and all move to the countryside, I like honoring people’s work.

My mother worked at home for years, sewing our clothes, upholstering chairs, refinishing furniture, canning (though she hated that) ironing, and doing many of the things a 1950’s wife did to very little fanfare. Later she worked as a waitress (I still love the sound of tip change in an apron pocket), and off and on as a seamstress. Once for a while she drew newspaper fashion ads for our local department store. She also trusted in God though she didn’t insist that everyone around her do so. I don't think she would have put it on a bumper sticker.


On a happier note, I also read in the news that the Oklahoma Book Award nominees have been announced. Congratulations to all you poets and writers. Your labor may not have conquered all but it has won the heart of a State that perhaps still knows the value of a seed well sown. I’m thankful for that. Keep up the good work, everyone, whatever it is.