this a semi-regular mostly-textual handout: a container for what's on my mind & heart // a space to practice talking about & sharing my art // an opportunity to share the work of others who have shaped/are shaping me
Everyone. I’ll admit it. I’m scared to write again. I didn’t expect this feeling. It has been so gratifying to begin writing poetry this past year - to realize I enjoy the process and to share it and have it received with tenderness and affirmation. It’s not that my poetry isn’t personal - it is deeply informed by my particular experience - but I get to hide behind metaphor and be a little mysterious (a deep desire despite being a person who thinks and speaks at the same time). There is more up to interpretation. You can’t hold it against me as easily. In this kind of writing (what is this kind of writing? am I blogging? writing a personal essay? a newsletter?), I feel that I must speak more plainly and specifically. I guess I’m just afraid every word will miss the point.
A friend recently commented—upon me recapping a few key events from the last three years—that I’ve “had a lot of life happen.” It does feel true that I’ve lived through a few lifetimes since the pandemic shut down seminary life just before graduation and we all fled to our respective homes. I still don’t know if I have adequate language to put to these lifetimes and what they’ve meant for me. I’m throwing words against the wall and praying they stick.
Recently I watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (a past partner used to poke fun at me because some cultural moments just escape me & I find out about them years later) and at the end of the movie Marcel sits in front of the open laundry room window looking out onto the beauty of the world, listening to the sound the wind makes as it moves through his shell, and says about the experience, “It connected me, I felt, to everything. Because if I wasn’t there the sound would never exist. I felt like everything was in pieces but when I stood there, suddenly we were one large instrument. I like to go there a lot. Because it reminds me that I’m not just one separate piece rattling around in this place, but that I’m part of a whole. And I truly enjoy the sound of myself connected to everything.”
Like Marcel, I also like the sound I make when I’m connected. I like who I am when I’m curious and attentive to the wonder of my surroundings. It is my intention for this space to be a container that holds what is keeping me alive. An archive of beauty! A record of wonderings! An encyclopedia of feelings! A map of my little world!
Shira Erlichman ends her poem Somewhere Real by saying, “Dead family, get in. I want to show you something: I had no map when I started and now here I am, somewhere real called loving you, get in.”
In the poem Shira imagines she is in a car headed somewhere, inviting in everything that has made up her life: a rainbow parachute, her exes, Pema Chodron’s forehead
and everything behind it, turquoise, death, and time. To name a few.
In the end she has arrived in a place, but it’s “loving,” a present participle, a continuous tense. It’s not the end of the trip, but a new way of being in the world. This tense is about dynamic action. It describes actions that happen repeatedly, are currently happening, and that will be happening in the future.
Shira puts language to my lifetimes. I had no map when I started. I floundered many times as I painstakingly cobbled together a road as I walked it. I now find myself in a land I recognize. I dreamed it up. This place in which I’ve arrived is not static, but I have a map I can rely on, discern by. You guys, I’m telling you, I didn’t know I was drawing a map. That doesn’t change the fact that I did.
i’m thinking about:
the fact that Lent (my favorite liturgical season) will be dropping later this month
bringing back things I once loved, namely: buying a camera that isn’t my phone & taking pictures, and collecting rocks
how safe and loved i am feeling in the world these days
Ross Gay’s newest book Inciting Joy. i don’t actually know where to start with this one. no review can capture the magic and delight of Ross’ words and i also don’t claim to be great at reviews. i will claim, in writing that will be published on the internet & remain forever in some mysterious code, that Ross Gay is a modern day prophet
everything that has to do with Jenny Slate. particularly these interviews that i listened to in order on the Talk Easy podcast: 2017, 2020, & 2022. my favorite part is hearing Sam (the interviewer) play back clips of her talking in past episodes and witnessing how deeply moved she becomes hearing herself. it reminds me of the Marcel quote :) one more thing: i’m currently reading Little Weirds. it’s my Jenny era!
this NYTimes article, More and More, I Talk to the Dead, by Margaret Renkl and her book Late Migrations which i just finished. the book is a braided narrative that traces the lives of her parents from birth to death using alternating micro personal essays and observations of the natural world from her home in Nashville, TN
the movie Women Talking. i’ve seen it twice in theaters and it has stuck with me more so than anything i’ve watched recently. the film centers around a small group of women in an isolated religious colony who are reconciling their faith with the reality that they’ve been drugged and raped by men in the colony. through language - putting words to their experience, asking a lot of questions, witnessing each other’s rage, singing, laughing, praying - the women are slowly and subtly changed and settle on a decision that they believe is most in integrity with their faith. the most striking aspect of the movie for me is that they blame not God but the men in power who have misused the name of God - throughout the movie they sing hymns of praise and pray together and the director Sarah Polley doesn’t trivialize their devotion. it is a genuine display of faith in the midst of a brutal reality portrayed on screen in a way that isn’t cheesy or cheap or inauthentic
And in the spirit of this being “a space to practice talking about & sharing my art,” a couple of my poems found a home this year. Here’s to more submitting in 2023!
Two Poems in Stone of Madness Press.
xoxo,
Riley