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‘Tis the season to write poetry

A conversation with Sage Cohen

author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry

As the holidays approach in a down economy, Sage Cohen proposes that poetry can provide a meaningful way forward. Author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry, Cohen sees poetry not just as an art form, but a way of life. Following is our conversation about the possibilities of poetry today.

It’s the holiday season. Why poetry? Why now?

In today’s economy, many people are seeking alternatives the typical holiday spending frenzy. The good news about hard times is that they challenge us to find creative new ways to give, share and create meaning. Poetry can be a powerful instrument for conjuring such alchemies.

These days people have less cash than usual. How can poetry help?  

Poetry can’t change our bank statements, but it can change the way we think about wealth and prosperity. In fact, it is my lifelong relationship with poetry that has taught me that income is one thing, but prosperity is frequently something else.

For example, a few years ago, I heard Mary Oliver speak. She reported that a critic of her poetry complained that she must be independently wealthy to have so much time to lie around in the grass and ponder nature. This made the poet laugh, because the critic was reporting in an underhanded and confused way about a truth that Oliver tapped into long ago: the act of lying in the grass and listening to the world IS wealth.

The truth is, we don’t need to go anywhere special to tune in to poetry. Our lives are already inundated with sensory information that is the raw material of poems. All we need to do is slow down, pay attention and write down what moves us, intrigues us or stirs our curiosity. This does not require an inheritance or a 401K. It simply requires a willingness to welcome the abundance that is already ours, and to follow the golden thread of language wherever it leads us.

What poetry can give us is something far more valuable than money could ever buy – it gives us ourselves. Poem by poem, we write our souls into existence. Weighted in words, the spirit that animates us becomes palpable. By the same token, each poem we read offers a small window into the human condition, in which we may better recognize some glimmer of our own being.

The world seems to be falling apart around us. Why should we be focused on poetry when it can’t help change anything?

You’re right; poems may not stop the clubbing of baby seals, domestic violence, child trafficking, dog fighting, genocide, conflict in the Middle East or whatever it is that feels most difficult on any given day. But as the motorcyclist must lean into the turn to prevent a fall, poems become a kind of machinery of transport, giving us a context for leaning into the pain that we meet and safely navigating through it.

My father always said, “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” And poems are the treasures that can be exhumed from those undesirable experiences. Just think all of the great, poetic opportunities for understanding that lie coiled at the heart of every mistake, heartbreak, disappointment, and regret.

What if you were to literally look to your poetry practice as a way of moving through what pierces you to the core? What injustices might it help you examine unflinchingly? What epicenter of pain or grief might it help you enter and consider? How might you relax into the universal truths of divorce, death, intolerance, and change, and make a poem offering that illumines these truths with compassion?

How do you recommend that readers get started with their holiday poem-making?

I always remind people that their ordinary lives will offer more than enough source material for poetry. The following exercises are designed to get folks mining their own daily experience to see what inspired thoughts and language might be awaiting them below the surface.

1. Choose an activity you do regularly that is the absolutely most routinized, unremarkable event of your day. (Mine would be doing dishes.) Write down the answers to these questions about it:

• Notice the physical feeling of this routine. Which muscles are involved? What kind of rhythm or tempo does it involve? Are you cold or hot, energized or depleted?
• How do you feel emotionally when you do this?
• What are the smells associated with this activity? (I use lavender soap, so my sink smells like a French garden.)
• What do you see when engaged in this routine? (I look out at the butterfly bush and magnolia tree in my back yard. I enjoy watching meals erased from plates and glasses.)
• Pay close attention to your thinking. What images and ideas bubble up as you are doing this activity?
• How does the time of day or weather or location (indoors vs. outdoors, your home vs. someone else’s home, summer breeze or snowfall) affect your experience?

1. What wildlife, plants and trees do you see out your window at home, at work, or en route? What do they look like, feel like, sound like? What are their names? What are the visual cues and references in your home and/or workspace?

• Make a list of the 20 things you come into contact with most.
• Write down something else in the world that each of these 20 things remind you of. For example, The red teapot reminds me of the robin red breast. The worn wood of the mirror over the sink reminds me of the door to Grandpa’s barn. The curlicue pattern on the silver platter makes me think of storm clouds.

1. Think of someone you see regularly in passing but do not know well, like your mail carrier, barista or neighbor. Write a poem that imagines what their life might be like:

• Who do they love?
• What have they lost?
• What do their pajamas look like?
• What are their aspirations?
• What do they eat for breakfast?

1. Explore your holiday archives:

• What was your biggest holiday surprise?
• What holiday is most meaningful to you and why?
• Who do you yearn to see during the holidays?
• How has Santa (if you have a relationship with Santa) satisfied you and let you down over the years?
• What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened around the dinner table with your family at holiday time?
• What outfit comes to mind when you think back on past holiday celebrations?

This should give you a foundation of source material to start playing with. Circle a few words or phrases that interest you, and let those be the kindling for your poetic fire.

Don’t know where to go next? Freewriting can be a useful way to take your ideas and language a little further into the realm of the poetic. Set your timer for 10 minutes, sit down with your notebook, and keep that hand moving across the page, no matter what, without stopping, for the entire 10 minutes. You’re not trying to be brilliant here – just to get loose and let words start coming without thinking too hard. The more you practice, the looser you’ll get. And the looser you get, the more your language will surprise and delight you.

I’d like to send readers off with a thought about poetry and holiday cheer

Egg nog, move over. Rudolph, there’s a brighter light guiding our sleigh tonight.

I’ve never experienced any holiday cheer that rivals the state of grace that poetry invites into our lives. That is why I often give poems I’ve written as holiday gifts. I print them on pretty paper, place them in an attractive frame and presto – the most treasured holiday gifts I’ve ever given only cost me the time I spent creating them.

Try it! You just might get hooked.

Wishing you all a peaceful and poetic holiday season.

* * * * *

Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World (Queen of Wands Press, 2007). An award-winning poet, she writes four monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been awarded a Soapstone residency. She curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. To learn more, visit www.sagesaidso.com. Drop by and join in the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!

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Author interview with Deborah DeNicola

Deborah DeNicola’s memoir The Future That Brought Her Here is from Ibis Press 2009. She has six previous books, including the anthology she edited. A new collection of poems, Original Human, is scheduled for 2010. Among several other awards, she received a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Deborah studied dream work at The Jung Institutes in Boston and Zurich and trained with Robert Bosnak. Her web site is: www.intuitivegateways.com

1. Tell us about your latest book.

My latest book is my spiritual memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here; Memoir of a Call to Awaken. It’s the story of a normal, struggling, single woman who finds one day she has new senses, can see through her closed eyes, has visions and senses changes in energy. I have been meditating for over 20 years and when new senses emerged, I began a quest for what was behind our 3-D reality. This quest consisted of reading, going to channeling sessions and asking spirits what was happening to me as well as traveling through  synchronicity to other countries. My excursion to Southern France to follow the mystery of the Black Madonnas takes up the latter half of the book.

The book contains medieval history, science, and occult mysteries as well as a personal story of healing from my father’s death when I was an adolescent. It’s also about creative process and dreaming and dream image work.  At the end I come to some conclusions about where human evolution is going and ways to be in the world, living the ideals of A Course in Miracles. It actually took me 8 years to write and I started it as a novel because I was an “academic” and didn’t want to step out of the metaphysical closet. The story and writing the story helped me come to terms with some of these experiences.                     

2. How did you get started as a writer?

I’ve written every since I learned to write. I think it might have helped that I had an older brother who wrote and he was like my mentor/tormentor. He’d assign me certain books to read and I just accepted him as my  teacher. We subscribed to the old “Classics Illustrated” which were wonderful comic books of the Great Canon.  As a kid I used to write mostly stories and didn’t start writing  poetry till adolescence, of course, love poems came first.

3. What does a typical day look like for you?

Currently I’m busy marketing my book and my dream process workshops as well as my mentoring new writers. I do two things: I help people process dreams, discover meaning, amplify their dreams, and relate them to issues in their current life. I also help writers develop material, create their book with exercises in writing, edit their work, and find the order and sequence of their experiences. My days vary considerably depending on what I’m working on.

I had a schedule when I was writing the book steadily and teaching. Almost three years ago I came to Florida from Boston because my mother was ill. I ended up staying because of her. All my belongings are still in storage in Boston. I moved in with her to help her. I realized it was a time I could also move to change my career. I’d been an adjunct professor teaching as many as 6 courses a semester and going away to writing colonies on fellowships when I had some breaks.

I found a huge holistic and spiritual community in Florida (of all places, I was quite surprised!) Then I found a publisher here, so in many ways, though I still miss Boston’s intellectual community, I feel I was led here . I’m living completely in the moment now. Every day I network, spend many hours on the computer but I also dance three hours a week, go to the ocean frequently and try to stay balanced. I’ve had another book of poetry accepted since I’ve been here; Original Human is coming out in 2010. And an earlier chapbook, Inside Light, was published the year after I arrived.  Florida’s been good to me. I am somewhat free to pursue writing and marketing and somewhat tied down with an ill 93 year old mother. (Another book to write!)

I have been working on a book of essays on Dream Image Work and I think it’s halfway finished.

4. Describe your workspace.

I have a wonderful red bookcase from Ikea that is the center of my study. I have a MAC laptop and desk and several filing cabinets. I try to keep conscious of the concepts of Feng Shui so I get the maximum out of my work hours in energy. I’m very aware of energy in a room and how clear it is, how supportive. Here’s a tip, keep your north-west corner uncluttered as it’s your money area. I have, of course, piles of clutter elsewhere.

5. Favorite books (especially for writers)

Let me start with favorite writers. Oh, so many. I love contemporary fiction, read all nationalities but I am also a classic scholar. All the Greek material; I read and taught Ovid, Homer, the major Greek playwrights. I compiled and edited an anthology of contemporary poetry on Greek myths called Orpheus & Company, published by University Press of New England. It had some course adoption which was nice for me.  The Harvard Review called it “An important book.” As much as I could I taught what I loved or was interested in, the poetry of Rumi and Rilke, the Romantics, the Moderns, poetry being my first love.

I designed and taught a class on the literature of war which deeply moved me. It struck me that Homer’s Illiad , the first book in Western Civilization, says everything that’s ever been said about war, it’s glory and it’s horror. I have been troubled to understand this dichotomy. I read a lot of Viet Nam novels, a lot on the Serbo-Croatain tragedies, and the literature of the Holocaust.

For some reason I was drawn to try and understand the concept of evil. In many ways, my book looks for answers to that question. I believe we are all One, living in the illusion of separation. I’m a Course in Miracles practitioner. Fear and ignorance of our true spiritual connection are basically the reasons we don’t treat each other well. The lack of understanding that everything we think and feel has a frequency that attracts situations to us is probably to blame. I think however, that as bad as the world looks, these ideas are spreading exponentially. Spirituality has exploded into its own industry. Then of course there is the topic of religion, man-made institutions that have failed. Okay, so I’m off-task. Naming favorite books . . .

Tim O’Brien’s The things They Carried is a wonderful book on writing as much as it is on war. It’s about story telling, how to tell a war story. And as addicted to drama as humanity is, this book teaches so much. I was a French major in college so I love a lot of the big nineteenth century French novels by Zola, Balzac and Stendhal. I recently read a wonderful novel by A Mexican author, Thomas Louis Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter.  I love all the South  American poets, Neruda being the be-all and end-all for me. And as for South American novelists, no one can top the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Then for Americans, oh, the whole lot of Fitzgerald, some of Hemingway, and their short stories. The short story form in general, is so unappreciated by the public, except, of course, for M.F.A. students . . . Flannery O’Conor, Cheever, Updike,  Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield that whole generation . . . then Ann Beattie, Joyce Carol Oates (although I o.d.ed on her) Tobias Wolf, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a book I’ve read several times.

I could go on an on, but I’ll just add that one of my favorite contemporary novels is Ann Padget’s Bel Canto and I recently read and loved the story collections of  Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies and  Unaccustomed Earth.

6. Tell us 3 interesting/crazy things about you

(A) Well, I do dream work. I think it’s one of the most important things we need to do. The unconscious mind is a treasure trove. And if we can take back and own our projections, and realize everything in our dreams, atmosphere, landscape, objects, figures, are ALL US, we will see we all have the same fears and complexes. When we make those conscious, we have more compassion for ourselves and others. We can’t change others, we can only change ourselves, change our reactions to stimulus of our separation. I fervently believe this. But it is so difficult to change our neuron pathways because our unconscious mind does not always believe what we consciously want to create. We do create our reality, but we create it unconsciously a lot of the time and therefore we project and have conflict and war and injustice. Working on your dreams and making them conscious shows you what you really are feeling, what is sabotaging your plans, as well as what you could become. The unconscious is extremely wise. But it speaks a different language. We must learn the language. It is universal. We all dream and dreams take us out of our reality to another reality. If we live to be 80 we’ll have spent 20 years dreaming. It only makes sense to try and make sense out of our dreams.

I have learned a process that reveals meaning rather than “interprets it.” It is experiental and emotional, and it works.

 (B) I’m a poet. Everyone knows poets are crazy. No one pays them. We agonize over whether to put an “and” or a “but” for hours, days maybe and no one cares but us. But poetry, like life, contains ambiguity. And poetry resolves paradox; it holds the opposites in tension where they can produce a reconciling image. It’s the ultimate healer. It’s also greatly expressionistic of our most intense emotions. Poetry heals, especially its dark side, heals. We get to experience in the moment, which is where we need to be. It’s actually not that crazy, though mainstream people have no idea what it’s about. But when someone writes poetry, to be in the act of it, puts you totally in the moment and the unconscious delivers. it’s like channeling. One is given so much solace. Poetry is addictive, in a good way. And it has correspondences with dreaming, so it seems natural to me as I love imagery.

(C) My third eye is open. My book goes into this. I’ve been meditating over 20 years and one day during meditation I saw an eye looking back at me. I also became aware of invisible presences around me. This awakening is at the heart of my story. The Future That Brought Her Here  is a quest to understand what had happened to me, is happening to me. I’ve acquired senses I never had, although I did have imaginary friends when I was very young, and now it makes me wonder . . . I was never interested in the occult, always frightened of it actually. However, I was led on a fascinating journey, calling me to different locations where I had different experiences, Israel, Colorado, France. I read a lot of history of the occult and then quantum physics. I studied near death experiences, the world between worlds, and I believe my visions are related to past lives. I found a British physicist , Rupert Sheldrake, who writes about the Presence of the Past. I came to some amazing conclusions and then found that there are thousands, maybe millions of people on similar spiritual journeys, different symptoms but we all agree that humanity is evolving and we are in for great changes of our whole civilization. I will leave it al that . . . hopefully tempting you to read my book.

7. Favorite quote 

C.G.Jung:  “Unless the unconscious is made conscious on the inside, it will happen on the outside, as fate.”

8. Best and worst part of being a writer

Best—it’s so enriching, so satisfying to feel you’ve expressed what you intended, such a healing release. And then the added bonus—other people like it!

Worst—it’s lonely. Although I’ve been in a lot of writing groups, the ultimate work is done alone and requires long hours. Two other worsts, (“worse and worser” . . . ) very few writers make a lot of money, even if they’re good. And the “worser”, it’s hard work.

9. Advice for other writers

Read. Read before you write. Read and write every day. Don’t become a writer unless you can’t help it.

10. Tell us a story about your writing experience.

Well, I once drove 300 miles to read to one person. But that’s a reading experience? Hmm… I once stopped making love, to jot down some notes . . .  how’s that?

Where can people buy your books?

You can get my book online through my distributor, http://www.redwheelweiser.com/ just put in the title or my name in the search box. Also on amazon.com and bn.com. My publisher’s web site:

http://www.nicolashays.com  I’ve read at Borders here, but not every Borders may have it, though you can order it. And the same with Barnes and Nobles. If there’s a spiritual bookstore near you, they should have it.  My web site www.intuitivegateways.com lists my books and blurbs, will direct you to them although I don’t sell them from there.

**

Deborah DeNicola is the author of five poetry collections and she edited the anthology Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology. Among other awards she won a Poetry Fellowship in 1997 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Deborah has been a recipient of many writing colony residencies. Her most recent book is her spiritual memoir published by Nicolas Hays/Ibis Press, The Future That Brought Her Here. Another full collection of poetry Original Human is forthcoming from Custom Word Press in 2010. She teaches dream image work and mentors writers online at her web site www.intuitivegateways.com.

For a limited time, you can purchase The Future That Brought Her Here from Amazon and receive bonus gifts. Click here for details: http://www.thefuturethatbroughtherhere.com/bonusoffers/ To learn more about this virtual blog tour, please visit: http://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2009/10/future-that-brought-her-here-by-deborah.html

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