An idea from the Surealists for revising poems - from Shadows on the Snow Part 2

Last Monday night a group of poets gathered to read poems and explore how to find guidance to write our own new poems. And then how to re-enter a draft and discover what might have been hidden from you in your writing process, until now? 

Here's one technique I've played with to discover the heart of a poem in revision. Sometimes the poem branches into two poems.

“I’d propose that…intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech also creates another subject,

which is the character of the perceiver. It’s a kind of perceptual signature, a record of a way of an individual way of seeing. This is one of the central things which poetry is: a vessel of

individuality, a distillation of the way one person experiences the world, knows herself in time

and in place.” - Mark Doty, “Speaking in Figures,” Poets.org

Automatic writing: Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious, influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

Prompt: Write an antonymic translation of your poem draft. Notice how the process requires you to define each word as you mean it before you then have to choose from an impossibility an opposite word. What words are the hardest to translate? What do you discover about what your poem is about through this translation?

Antonymic Translation – write the opposite of each of the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs OR by each general idea. For example:

·       To be or not to be: that is the question

·       To not be and to be: this was an answer

·       We had more important things to worry about than suicide

A Display of Mackerel (by Mark Doty - just the first few sentences)

 

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

 

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales'

radiant sections

 

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

 

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

 

think sun on gasoline.

Here is my translation of the first few sentences of Mark Doty's amazing poem A Display of Mackerel:

Antonymic Translation (my own)

I stand myself a column

Under fire, foot nor navel,

Not an inch of matte dark-

Solid, a lighted hole

Undivided, and skin

Invisibled

Not any indication

Of my making.

Gravity, dirt,

Inward: know tubor,

Domestic celery

Bulb buried within itself,

Know moon and cheese.

 

Explore your poem by listing some images that stand out from your antonymic translation or your poem you have written. What are the possibilities they create?

·       Study these details you have written. “…they aren't "neutral," though they might pretend to be, but instead suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being seen”

·       Inquire what this stance or place of viewing within an image or world could be?

Shadows on the Snow: what is a winter poem?

In tonight's poetry workshop, we asked each other what is a winter poem? We read many poems with themes that seem winter-ish. We questioned assumptions of winter meanings. We wrote new things that will become poems as they grow. Next week we will review techniques to play with the content in different forms, maybe long lines or short lines, maybe by addressing some wintery force, or by asking can winter shield us from what we know is coming over the horizon?

Read this winter poem by Hayden Carruth for inspiration in your own writing. 

Prompt: Can you describe a moment of your own experience that contains the duality of safety and imminent threat, the comfort of a murmuring fire and the suffering you know continues?

The Curtain By Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.

We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.

But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window

We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,

We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees

So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost

With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,

We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet

Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom

Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months

Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs

In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives

Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.

We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.

For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,

The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,

Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,

We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.

No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never

Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,

Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,

May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.

Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

EOY Roundup for 2024 - how participating as a literary citizen recharges my inspiration

This morning I'm surrounded by the remaining clutter of 2024 - unmade bed, unpacked suitcase, unopened emails. This past year's accomplishments can appear hidden when I try to look back at my work. 

To prepare for setting my goals for the new year, I've gathered a list of  public events and presentations, workshops and readings that kept me busy in our literary community in the past 12 months:

• Tangled Roots Writing offered 4 sessions of Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop 6 week series in 2024.
• In the winter of 2024, the three-part Publication Workshop Series shared with workshop participants the wisdom and advice learned along various paths to publication by nine professional writers.
• First Fridays in October 2024 through March 2025 Moments in Memoir creative writing workshop: this free workshop continues through the winter for all levels of writing experience at the Truckee Library 10031 Levon Ave, Truckee, CA 96161
• Writing Wednesdays June - September 2024 at the Truckee Library: Memoir. Community members of all ages and experience levels write their life stories. Thanks to a minigrant from Truckee Cultural District and Nevada County Arts Council. The three-part series ran every third Wednesday in July, August, and September. 10031 Levon Ave, Truckee, CA 96161
• Tahoe Literary Festival in Tahoe City Oct 11 & 12 - I read at the open mic Friday night. On Saturday I co-presented a workshop with Dr. Kim Bateman titled “Forbidden Fruit and Persephone’s Pomegranate”
• Sept 8: Presented a poetry workshop for Sierra Arts Literary Community at the Sierra Arts Foundation at 17 S Virginia St., Reno, NV.
• July 8 and Aug 26: Presented Creative Writing workshop under the stars called Writing in the Kiva: Embrace the Night Sky. Olympic Heights, Truckee
• August 15: Presented as a local artist at the Truckee Cultural District booth at Truckee Thursdays.
• Aug 3: Performed at Tahoe Literary Festival Art Salon Fundraiser open to the public. With Kim Bateman, Aimee Lowentern, Priya Hutner, Alice Osborn, and others. At a private residence in Tahoe City, CA
• June 12, July 10, Aug 14: I performed new poems each month at the Open Mic this summer at Tahoe Backyard.
  
• 
  June 6: Performed with other poets and singer/songwriters at Arts in the Parks event at Gatekeeper's Museum, Tahoe City.
• May 23-26: Attended Mountain Words Literary Festival, Crested Butte, Co
• April 13: Performed a new poem on stage at the Sierra Poetry Festival at the Grass Valley Center for the Arts.
• April 11: I performed new work and won a spot on the main stage as part of Community Voices at the Sierra Poetry Festival - Open Mic Slam Competition Lottery at the Iron Door in the Holbrook Hotel in Grass Valley.
  
• April 3: Creative Writing Workshop: Gratitude at the Truckee Library June Sylvester Saraceno and myself presented a poetry reading and workshop featuring Ross Gay's A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in connection with the Nevada County Common Read for 2024 and the Sierra Poetry Festival. 
  
• April 2: Performed a reading at Sundance Books on California Ave in Reno, NV  along with Ann Keniston and Steve Gehrke.
• March 16: Attended the Business of Art Symposium in Grass Valley on Sierra College campus.
• March 1:  I was featured in a new podcast episode about my open mic performance at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The Art Box podcast, a lively and engaging discussion about creativity and humanity in the Virgin Valley of Nevada and beyond, out of Mosquite, Nevada. You can listen: https://vvarts.podbean.com/e/the-art-box-episode-160-tangled-roots-meet-karen-terrey/.
• February 26: Open mic performance at the Spoken Views Collective Open Mic at Shim's Speakeasy. Another inspiring evening performing along with a strong showing of writers from Truckee and Tangled Roots Writing.
• February 8: Read my new essay about traveling on a family mission to northern Slovenia, Sierra Writers Conference Reading @ Sierra College, Tahoe-Truckee campus.
• January 31-Feb 4: I performed at the open mic Cowboy Poetry Gathering 2024, hosted by the Western Folklife Center in Elko, NV.
  
  
  
  

 

I am nostalgic for my attention

 "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." - Simone Weil

I feel nostalgia for my attention. For the last generation that grew up without internet in their childhood. A childhood in which I could truly leave school when I left school. I could come home to be a girl feeding her chickens and taking her rabbit for a leashed walk in the backyard.

I'm reading a beautifully printed edition of essays by Willa Cather. She titled the collection Not Under Forty (1936 Knopf) because she believed no one under 40 would be interested in these subjects.  The essays are character sketches and impressions of fascinating people she meets visiting friends in France and Boston, in 1870 1905 1915 1922, in hotels and at farms and homes.She runs into the niece of Gustave Flaubert in a hotel lobby (somehow people used to move into hotels back then for extended stays) and spent evenings talking with this Frenchwoman in her 80's.  When they weren't attending operas, the woman shared with Cather her memories of Turgeniev offering his edits of her personal translations of Faust. Imagine spending your time sharing memories with new friends and reading and translating for the fun of it!

People had time for each other. Reading Cather's essays, I feel I'm leap frogging back in time many generations following the thread of writer ancestries, writer influencers. It's a relay of time.

It's been a quiet week for me because I was sick with a gastroenteritis virus that hit me hard. I cancelled all my nightly networking events and classes. Less distractions, no coffee. I get a sense of Willa Cather in her essays, how she perceives and what stands out to her in her circle of the world. Even she has nostalgia for the quieter life before the war. WW1, for her. She writes, "Just how did this change come about, one wonders...Was it at the Marne? At Versailles, when a new geography was being made on paper?" (74)

In 1928, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own wrote about a similar sensation of feeling a difference in the world after the war, that something was missing now in a gathering of people over food and literary topics of conversation. She wrote of a certain unconscious "hum" beneath the dialogue and conversations of people sharing ideas. That something was missing from the shine even of ideas that existed before the war, and shared now, they just didn't hum or shine as they used to, even if they were not any way changed from before.  Listening at a dinner party, Woolf writes, 

"Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only - here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it - the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded differently, because in those days there were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves."(12)

Can it be that the change in experience of the world around them in those times was of the magnitude in their experience as the increase of noise and chaos experienced by so many of us today? We find ourselves desperate to shield ourselves from the overload of information coming at us from all directions, much of it crucial knowledge for living an ethical life. Much of it misconstrued and swiss-cheesed with  cognitive biases. 

I am trying to manage my intake of information so that I can live intellectually and creatively, finding a community of fellow revelers of words and discovery and science and wonder and magic in this world. Also in order to live with an ethics that prioritizes the well-being of all of the beings, living and inanimate, that depend on an interconnectedness for survival.

I am also nostalgic for a world where I used to live in which the accosting nature of the internet was not interrupting my absolute attention to presence in human nature, each time and place.

 

Finding Inspiration in a Creative Community

By the time Scott Green introduced our first poet to the mic last Friday night (Oct. 11), I estimated about 80 people or more crowded into the sparkly Tahoe Wine Collective wine bar in Tahoe City. Scott was our MC for Poetry and Prose, the open mic event opening the Tahoe Literary Festival. This new festival is the brilliant brainchild of Katherine Hill of Tahoe Guide and Priya Hutner of The Seasoned Sage. 

The wine bar crowd tingled with the good will of friends gathering to celebrate creativity and to revel in the humanness that is our connection. I greeted old writing friends joining from Marin, Carson City, Reno and Tahoe, as well as met new writer friends from all over. The mingling creative energies filled my reservoir to motivate new work, and to keep on writing. 

I find inspiration from engaging with other artists and watching them share their inspirations. In fact, this is why I created the Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop series back in 2008. 

I invite writers to gather for 6 Monday nights to explore writing craft and write new work with unique prompts. The next series begins October 28th and runs for 6 weeks through December 2. This workshop series is for all genres, (fiction, memoir, poetry, and anything else) and all levels of experience in writing. it can be especially productive for artists who want to cross over from other mediums.

Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop Series Hybrid (online and in person)

October 28- December 2

Monday nights 6:30 - 8 pm

$180

Reach out to me by email or phone to sign up. We meet in person as well as online so you can join from anywhere.