One week away and the forest has changed by Jennifer Elise Foerster
“One week away and the forest has changed. / Measured wind, consistent in its image. / First frost, day’s ghost, chattering red-toothed leaves.” A poem from The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster.
“One week away and the forest has changed” from The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster from The Song Cave
Pastoral before Decomposition + The Grief Artist by Traci Brimhall
My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,
so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes
and leaving again
Pastoral before Decomposition
I imagine it lovely, the place he was killed
imagine darkness as clear as it was before God
learned to speak, imagine the Milky Way burning
through the light-stained night, imagine trees blacker
than the sky, and then imagine cicadas grating April.
The cold was crisp, I imagine, and scooped out stale
carbon dioxide from his lungs. One of those good pains.
My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,
so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes
and leaving again—not the knife. No. I will only imagine
the way the cars versed themselves in curve and velocity
through the arterial streets. Not how the men took turns.
not the way his body proved to the medical examiner
that he struggled, lifted his hands to defend himself—
no, I imagine the grass, how it must have nodded along,
how his phone lit up with a blue light blinking, blinking
at the driver who stayed behind, his thumb brushing
the red END from the screen like wiping an eyelash
from his lover’s cheek. I imagine her, only hours away,
letting the spring salt into her sleepless room, Atlantic
waves curling in on themselves, red tide creeping toward
shore, and the suffocated fish with bellies like moonlight
doing what is surely required of all the dead and rising.
—from Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall.
Like many people, I’ve spent much of 2020 and 2021 thinking about and processing grief. Individual and collective, minute and global, cellular and generational, past and present. This week, I read Traci Brimhall’s poetry collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod from Copper Canyon Press and found myself challenged on my own beliefs about processing grief. If this book is a woven piece of art, the warp yarns are made of taut grief and loss and the weft shot through—over and under, over and under—is made of joy, wonder, curiosity, and most surprisingly to me—imagination. Through every poem, Traci makes clear how intrinsically linked grief and imagination are. Often grief and loss are the result of violence, whether it is violence enacted by another (such as what the main character of this poem faces) or enacted by our own bodies (miscarriage, cancer, chronic pain, etc.) the two are often companions.
To process violence we have to access imagination. We have to imagine how such a thing can happen, we have to imagine why it continues to happen, we have to imagine ourselves as part of that violence and ask “Could I? Do I?” In opening our imaginations to the violence, we also open our imaginations to its opposite—what can I do to create instead of destroy? Living through grief. Surviving violence. Rejecting violence as a choice. All of these require imagination.
Reading Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod wasn’t enough, so I sought out more from Traci. In the essay “The Grief Artist” at Guernica, Traci writes: “The body has instincts for grieving, though I’ve always had trouble understanding them.” Traci’s poems in Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod explore how the body grieves, works through the process, imagines more and different ways of being. In short, the poems in Traci’s book provide a guide for how we can move through grief and violence, not with grace or patience as is often called for in grief literature, but with imagination. As a way to soften, reshape, remember, relive, pave a new way forward. Traci understands grief does not have to be graceful or fluid—“In art and grief there are days you’re not proud of, days the emotions turn ugly, days the images don’t turn out the way you want. But that’s the human in us, and it belongs in the process.” These poems contain the human, the ugly, the hard, the process. And they are better for it. And I am better for reading them.
For more on Traci Brimhall’s thoughts on grief and imagination, read this interview.
On Narrow Paved Paths by Dorthe Nors
“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did".”
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
Waiting Tide by Carrie Swim
“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did. As she sat there at the foot of Einar’s bed and talked about her father, who’d been a dentist, about her devoted years as a schoolteacher, about her deceased husband, and about her son, who’d been sweet as a child, her fingers were busy pinching and patting. The big tom that always hung about Einar was easy enough to shoo off the bed. Then it stalked up around the bed and glowered at Alice, while up on the bed she spoke of the future. “I for instance have my funeral completely sorted,” Alice told Einar, who floated in and out of a schnapps fog. “I know precisely which songs they’ll sing,” and Einar opened an eye with difficulty and said, “But I still have long to live.””
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
“And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter…”
“And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter to his father is apple blossoms
left lying where they fell.
The son who comes to wake him by kissing
the crown of his head is so many things:
Love succeeding.
The eye of the needle.
Little voice calling the flowers to assembly.”
The Four Seasons by Mavis Gallant
“Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater”
“Carmela had never been anywhere except her own village and this house, but Mrs. Unwin had no way of knowing that. She pressed a cracked black change purse in Carmela’s hand and sent her down the hill to the local market to fetch carrots and not over a pound of the cheapest stewing beef. Carmela saw walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ocher walls and black licorice balconies. Near the short, work had stopped on some new houses. One could look through them, where windows were still holes in the walls, and catch a glimpse of the sea. She heard someone comment in an Italian more precious than her own, “Hideous. I hope they fall down on top of the builder. Unwin put money in it, too, but he’s bankrupt.” The woman who made these remarks was sitting under the pale blue awning of a café so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea, small round tables and colored ices in silver dishes. All at once she recognized a chauffeur in uniform leaning with his back to a speckless motorcar. He was from Castel Vittorio. He gave no sign that he knew Carmela. Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater.”
—from “The Four Seasons” by Mavis Gallant in The Collected Stories.
Pair with this audio documentary with Mavis Gallant from CBC. A true delight. Like colored ices, that do indeed come back around.
The Short Story — Deep Work, Patience, + Meditation
“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
In reading Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, it became clear that she calls, again and again, for the short story writer to think deeply on their story, to be patient with it, to meditate on the subject, form, style, and characters before launching into its telling. The short story requires the writer to know the story inside and out, to know exactly how and why it must be told. The way she writes about it, Wharton seems to see the short story as an act of meditation and deep work, not just on the story being told, but on the person telling it. As she writes early in the book: “One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.” And how can we have hearts without deep thought, reflection, and the patience to live the life set before us?
"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. … Vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.”
“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
“The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak…”
“The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of the genius’s chief reliances in communicating itself.”
“Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected.”
“True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation.”
Quotes from The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton. I highly recommend pairing this book with the George Saunders episode of the podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell.
Unsolaced by Gretel Ehrlich
Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true
To read Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is by Gretel Ehrlich is to be reminded of all the ways we fail personally and globally. But it is not disheartening. In fact, it’s the opposite. It may be titled Unsolaced, but in Ehrlich’s stark and unveiled truth telling I found solace. In her stories about people living on the brink and moving ahead with their chins up anyway, in her stories of the people working to restore our planter for decades before climate change was a part of our vernacular, her stories of her own resilience in the face of unending loss—the heartbeat of this book is keep going, keep trying.
“Loneliness is a lie of the ego, though sometimes the absences mount up into an ache that can’t be ignored. Loneliness ended that night, whooshed away by the embrace of strangers. Unknowingly I had entered an obscure ranching community in which I could keep a writer’s distance but still be included. I could “cowboy” and write. Shell became my heart’s home.”
“Yesterday I was young. Today I’m trying to find a place to live where, as temperature increases, I will be able to find water, grow food, feed animals. I lay out a map of the world and see immediately that the choices are limited, yet I have a choice. Many don’t. Soon, perhaps, such a privilege won’t matter.
Our deep inflexibility seems a kind of foolishness, or worse, suicide, as we rock between acts of heroism and greed, self-discipline and self-indulgence, and at the drop of a hat we can easily persuade ourselves to go either way.
“I guess we’re a failed species,” an acquaintance said after exclaiming there was no such thing as climate change. We’re a failed species despite our unrivaled intelligence, we indulge in delusional behavior to protect ourselves from painful realities. We talk but don’t act. We ask to be spoon-fed, but only the things we want to eat, and make demands on the earth without ever inquiring what the needs of the earth might be.”
“Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true.”
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans
Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and s0me whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.
-Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak
Acts of barbarity can happen fast and on a large scale not when more people turn immoral or evil, not necessarily, but when enough people become numb. When we are indifferent, disconnected, atomised. Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion — the lack of emotion.
Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux. in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will.’
I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom.
Do not be afraid of complexity.
- Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris
The first time I read Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris, my house was, for the first time in months, blissfully silent. My husband had taken the children on a bike ride, to donuts. It was not yet 8 am and the dog, cat, and I sat on the couch and I read the book cover to cover, pausing only 3 times. Twice to cry, once to refill my coffee. My pets were audience to the lines I couldn’t help but read aloud. The sunlight and the silence and the animals nearby created a perfect atmosphere for reading these poems (the only detractor was a distant weed-whacker, and even that brought contrast to the poems).
When I decided to read it again, I knew I needed to make it another beautiful moment. Aside from finding myself valuing these moments during a pandemic and worldwide pain, this is a book that deserves intention in its reading—though I believe that about most books. It doesn’t need intention or a beautiful moment (it would be incredible even read in a dirty bathroom stall at the world’s worse airport), but it deserves the reader’s intention, slowness, focus. I read this book for a second time on a 107 degree day, bright California light casting across my kitchen table, a cold cider at hand, a bowl of passion fruit picked from the vine outback nearby, watching my own garden wither in the heat while reading of Danusha’s lush garden, loss, grief, desire, and that bigheartedness that great poets bring to the page, to their readers, to the world. These are poems not just about seeing the world beautifully, but living beautifully in the world.
Below are two poems which stuck with me after both readings. Though, if I am being honest, this whole book is with me lately. Read it for yourself, let me know what you think.
