Goodness, more news already! The sap really is rising.
I was delighted to speak with Radha Marcum, the creator of Poet to Poet, about my process and journey with Far Country, which celebrates its first birthday this week.
Radha and I talked about what I discovered about this book after it was finished, poetry as an act of devotion, and how the greatest breakthroughs happen for me when I think I’m already done. Also, my theory of the Earth as the original poem gets put on the record.
As we spoke, I felt alive, connected, and in awe of the poetic imagination as it moves through us all. It is so precious, this business of being in creative community with others. In that spirit, welcome to my kitchen table. Enjoy!
Ps, Radha has an amazing backlog of other wonderful poet interviews, so please keep exploring.
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If you haven’t yet found your way to the pages of Far Country yet, please come visit me there! Order here or from your local place. Seriously, a book of poems is the cheapest and safest way to travel between worlds that I can think of, and I’d hate you to miss the adventure.
I can feel in my bones this moment 15 years ago, freshly delivered of my second tiny babe. That tender mama sits halfway between the age my daughter has become, and the age I am now. Oh time, beautiful and terrifying friend!
I’m aware of the world’s unraveling, and also: standing amongst five hundred robins flocking and singing along the Rio Grande; the way my breath merges with my patients’ breath when I check vital signs at the hospital and we merge for a moment; walking through the shifting light over the course of a day, light that is like a great ark I climb aboard, or a book whose only line reads, We will survive this season, we will be changed by it, we will change the world during it.
I am making a little book of collages as a visual arts practice, writing as wildly as I can as I compose my own version of Four Quartets which has me drawing from the deep well of female mystics, and also being inspired by the Divine Imagination by keeping my tiny toe stuck into that river.
A handful of the more photogenic books that fight for my attention these days–all so good. Annie’s book Singing Under Snow wins my favorite book of the winter award, as well as best collection of love poems to mothers, lovers, fungi, and the wild. I am not sure I have ever cried so much over a collection of poetry. It is one of those books that makes a poet want to renew their vows to poetry forever, just to continue the practice in order to see what unexpected wonder might come next, like a handful of chanterelles popping up when the conditions are just right.
Here is a poem from late fall I included in a little chapbook called Archive of Lives Left Behind . It was generously created when I participated in a local reading series called Floating Words.
Keep playing your song, friends. Underline what you love. Be well.
First came the aspens, and now the descent of gold infused light down the watershed like a slow burning fire.
Cottonwoods and willows along the river have been set aglow.
I imagine my soul, or to use the beautiful Japanese term, my Kokoro (heart-mind-spirit), filling up with this light, becoming the lantern that lights the way through winter.
She writes, “Far Country is a gathering place, a confluence between humans, between human and more-than-human, between land and those who live on the land.”
I hope you’ll check the rest out, and if you don’t have it yet, Far Country, too.
Poetry as confluence and meeting place remains the invitation I can’t refuse, the practice I return to day after day.
In that space may we find sustenance, may we be less alone, may we imagine our way forward.
And may the light we fill up with shine out to others, a prayer for the world and humanity.
I often find them in a field that exists here in our world with its grains of sand, its cups of steaming tea, but also in a place well beyond us. A place that is invisible, ineffable, numinous.
The question being where (how) (why) do poems come from?
Poems come from the land itself, the original book written in its syllabary of image, elements, light, shadow. A field where we can wander freely and gather what is given. Where we can search for what lies beyond what is given. What has no words, yet.
The field yonder / Basket it away
Or perhaps poems come from a long river upon which we travel in small boats, dropping lines to varying depths, never knowing what we’ll catch.
Vessel of W O R D S
Do poems come from a place, or are they born of attention? Are they a way of being present? Of seeing? Or are they a way of hearing? Of calling out?
I sing atop, within the poem and it Gathers (me) into its arms, like
Jungians say each of us has a Dream Maker. I think we also have a Poem Maker—a self that knows how to see, how to listen, that walks that “field” out yonder and fills baskets to the brim.
One answer I can give to what the Far Country is, is that it is the place where the poem maker lives. The Poem Country. Where the field is an open page, and the empty basket waits.
Something green and lovely
See you there.
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Also: I could see you on Zoom! You are invited to Terrain.org’s Earth Day Reading Monday April 28 at 6pm Mountain time. I will be joining poets Mark Irwin and Chaun Ballard for a reading and Q&A.
Just back from visiting a friend on Bone Mesa on the far side of Colorado, where snowy peaks towered over the mesa. Deer grazed on grass shoots at twilight. Blossoms from wild apricots blew along the dirt road like fallen stars.
A poem practically wrote itself, in that moment. Except I didn’t write it down, but rather wandered around inside it, as happens when we realize we are actually walking through a poem, we are the poem, that the mesa is really bones, and the bones are poems.
My friend served lentil stew and fresh bread. A fire roared in the woodstove. The night grew transparent as a veil that the wind can lift, revealing that we aren’t in this world at all, but in the place where imagination lives, where we are fed on earth and stones. Where bones speak.
Bones more or less open Far Country, and in an invocation that may or may not have to do with every word that follows, we are reminded in the first poem that it is “Better to ask / what these bones will hatch, what lies, / curled, inside the shells of the dead.”
In “Blood City,” the ground we walk upon cobbled in fossilized snakes curled into balls, which turn to eggs. I can’t say that I always understand what the images that enter my poems say, but I trust and obey them. My friend and fellow writer Jennifer Ferraro read those lines as a call to perceive more deeply, to open our field of awareness to the memory of the land.
When I check my copy of The Book of Symbols, it says that bones suggest that something “hard” within psychic life endures beyond bodily death, and that a structure of ancestral experience supports us. In the Orthodox Church, the sweet smelling bones of saints are venerated as holy relics that bless us. Bones as bearers of life. Benediction and medicine.
Bones accompany the poet/speaker/me throughout the book–as talisman and key. There is an underworld called The Boneyard to be navigated. And in every poem, there is an invisible skeleton holding it up that is not, entirely, of this world.
The earth is a realm of bone on bone, in all the ways that can be understood. It can hurt to be here, magnificent as the scenery might be. Throughout the struggles, bones remind us that something unseen supports us, lies hidden within the known world, bears new life within what is buried.
Cover art ‘Bardsey Boats” ink and gold leaf on found wood from Bardsey Island, 2017 by Jake Lever.
I encountered the boats on the cover of Far Country in Soul on Deck, a story in Image Magazine about their creator Jake Lever and his series of installations called “Soul Boats.” It was love at first sight. I tore the page with the fleet of Bardsey Boats out and pinned it over my desk. They became a beacon as I wrote and re-wrote this book.
As letters “written” in symbolic language, these boats seem to me not so much image as an invocation, a means of engagement, a mode of travel. For how else can one reach the distant lands promised in the title Far Country? Particularly given that they aren’t exactly places one can reach in ordinary ways.
My draw to the image was strengthened by Jake’s description of the process behind their creation, as described in the Image Magazine story:
Jake Lever’s artist statement in Image Magazine
I love this example of art making via deep engagement with place and its inherent mythologies, a process of seeing, exploring, collecting, shaping, marking, sharing. What beautiful instructions for artists working in any medium. It makes me wonder, how can my poems engage directly and tangibly with the place they arise from? What is it they might offer to others, or back to the land? What can they listen for in the silence? Where might they travel?
As you can see, I was deeply struck by Bardsey Boats, a response that doesn’t surprise their creator. In a recent email, Jake wrote to me,
“Simple pre-industrial boat forms seem to get “under the door” and seep into the soul like no other image. There is something primal around the vessel cradling/nurture/protecting at birth and yet offering safe passage across the threshold from life into death. All very mysterious, primal and wonderful – beyond intellect and more to do with intuition, ancestors and spirit life. They have given me so much and I am still learning from them.”
From Soul on Deck, Image Magazine. Another of Jake’s boats, on a much larger scale, with sage advice from CPE we might all carry us with us right now.
Boat as imagination, as consciousness, as body. These are the things that carry us across the deep waters of life. These boats helped me to recognize the ways in which this book is about loss, change, and grief on many levels–the transformations we face in our individual lives, the large scale ecological shifts taking place around us, and the collective atrocities and unraveling we are amidst.
Perhaps the boats are keys, or symbols that open the way. Adorning a book cover, they become the door that is literally opened. Given how much time the speaker in many of these poems spends looking for doors and keys, that is fortuitous indeed.
Pinned over my desk as I worked on the manuscript.
Visually, the Bardsey Boats appear to me as a poem—perhaps each is word in a gloriously spare poem, or a stanza made of thin couplets descending down the page. Or perhaps each one is an individual poem, and they are a sequence in which the image shape shifts and transforms.
Most of all, I love the reversal of this image—to imagine each of the poems in Far Country becoming a boat. A vessel, a fleet of vessels like these inked and gilded bits of driftwood.
Here I am, friends, like an underground river rising to the surface once again. The occasion is a celebration: my new poetry collection, Far Country, arrives into the world March 4th thanks to University of Nevada Press. Oh, happy day!
(Cover art Bardsey Boats, from the beautiful series of “Soul Boats” by Jake Lever. )
Please join me in person or virtually for the official book launch at Collected Works Bookstore Wednesday, March 12 at 6pm. The event will include a reading from Far Country followed by a conversation with the wonderful poet and friend to the earth, Anne Haven McDonnell. I am so excited to see where we go together…
Well, what can I tell you about this newborn book?
Five years in the making, these poems are my attempt to explore the unknowable–a landscape transformed by climate change, motherhood turned into crucible, and the unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium of deepening connection and love.
There are poems about herb lore, the imaginal realm, the flourishing earth. It’s filled with signs from the stars and the moon, and a new relationship to faith taking shape quietly in the background. There is a midwife, a daughter in trouble, and other wounded healers. There are deer. Springtime, for sure. There is drought and dry rivers, and moths. There is heartbreak and mercy. There are loads of keys.
“Far Country” refers to the world we have left behind, the future we are hurtling towards, and the foreign, disoriented present. It is the ground we stand upon when we have lost our bearings. It is a place of spiritual exile, longing, and return. To reach there, these poems traverse worlds both seen and unseen, fusing them into a rich tapestry of lyric exploration and wonder.
I invite you to travel to those lands and walk alongside me for a bit. Far Country is available from your favorite independent bookseller.
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Given the long lapses I’ve had writing here, I have come to see this space, once so wide ranging and free flowing, as an ephemeral river. Perhaps it flows under the surface during dry years, or gets diverted to other channels, or drops into other dimensions entirely, like the rio abajo rio that lies out of sight even as it waters our souls from the depths.
But now, to honor the arrival of this new book, I have in mind a brief season of posting a companion guide to the poems. Things like the practice of poetry as numinous art, what it means to write “ecologically,” the crucial role of imagination in these times, and other landmarks I used to navigate into and out of Far Country. Oh, and I can’t wait to tell you more about those beautiful boats on the cover.
I hope you’ll join me. Subscribe for best coverage! We’ll see what the river picks up in its meandering, and what it has to carry up from the silence underground.
Glorious, long armed light reaches through the windows.
The cottonwoods and willows along our dusty river are slowly giving way to gold and yellow.
New sorrows and joys come with each turning. Ripening, sweetness, decay. Struggle! Surrender! Despair! Gratitude!
Oh, yes, truly I’m forty now.
Lately, uncertain what to do with myself, and also guided by an older self (a younger self? A past self?) that was once more certain, I’ve been cutting scraps into strips and piecing them together.
Yes, there is the gist of a pattern, of form. But to create in a medium that is free of language and even image is a particular joy. Something beyond the mind, beyond knowing.
Though these could be infinitely useful, they don’t have any particular purpose.
And they are so fast! I can make one while the rice cooks, the teenager procrastinates, the right word comes to finish a poem, or start a poem.
In other news, this weekend I’ll be part of a living quilt (I get so carried away with these metaphors, sorry), ie a literary festival.
On Sunday at 3:30 mountain time, I’ll read alongside the poet Michelle Otero as part of the Fort Collins Book Festival. If I got to organize a book festival, it would have a lot in common with this one. There is a sturdy thread of land, healing, and, the power of language, running through the schedule.
After my reading I plan to hop over to The Ecology of Herbal Medicine with Dara Saville. This new book is a must have for New Mexicans wanting a deeper relationship with our home place, but also filled with wisdom and relevance for plant lovers everywhere.
As I write about the festival, I find myself wanting to tell you about the other events, authors, and readings, and I see that it is another patchwork making things a bit more connected in the world. Which strikes me as very beautiful.
Stay warm, friends. Stitch yourself to someone, to something.
Ps, here’s the book that woke my crafty hands and yearnings back up:
Last time I spread poems out for a birds eye view, I started translating the words/language into images/glyphs. It’s all there: keys, snakes, stars, boats, dunes, daughters, fire– the usual cacophony.
If I use these glyphs to create a map, and the poems are placed/arranged according to its cartography, where would it lead? Could it possibly navigate inner and outer worlds, not to mention multiple dimensions and times, simultaneously? If anything can do this, don’t you think it would be poetry?
Wish me luck as I draft my way through this wilderness.
As far as companions along the way, listening to Louise’ Erdrich’s Advice to Myself has been my guiding star each morning at the start of a writing day.
” My life as a writer is its own ecosystem. When the elements of the ecosystem are healthy and thriving, creation is occurring….When this ecosystem is pulsing with aliveness, the flowering and fruiting of creativity happens—it simply cannot not happen—and stories of all kinds seem to fall, heavy and ripe, into my hand.”
How do you nurture your writing/living/working ecosystem? What are you mapping? What fruit is falling into your hands? What tracks are you following? Where do they lead?
February has brought to these parts/pages a lively awakening of language and new poetry. My hens are laying again, and the spinning wheels of winter writing practice are gaining traction and rolling. Or maybe it’s just that the kids are back at in-person school?
Whatever it is, I’ve noticed that this happens year after year– a winter of labored writing practice that, like childbirth (my births, anyways) doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for a long time. Until all of a sudden a door opens and a new creation bursts forth. I feel like I say this every spring. Well, it’s still true.
I spend so many hours, days, weeks, months waiting to see what might emerge from the quiet room. It has been a year like no other, and for most of it I felt as if I had nothing to say, and if I did, as if I couldn’t write it. But apparently, I could write something: a 30 page farewell letter to my kids in case I died as a nurse on the frontlines of the pandemic (one of my favorite and most failed projects because really there are no words for that), poems about the dry river and death (as usual), my daughter’s coming of age (same story, new season), and a series in which I explore a complicated and unexpected twist in my quest for a spiritual home. Oh, and a chapbook called Notes on the Recovery of Self From Childhood, which features a thief, animal guides, a sleep walking girl, dream interviews, and a book that does not need to be written because it is already written. See, there’s never a scarcity of material if you make everything your material!
When some of these poems came along, they surprised me in the same way I am surprised when I see my friends’ adolescent children after a long period apart. Who are these marvelous creatures I never imagined possible? And what are they talking about?
Well, we can find out tonight (Tuesday, Feb 16th), when I share a reading’s worth of them LIVE on you know where (see below). I will be joining poets Ken Hada and Donald Levering for a reading at 6pm mountain time. I’d love to see you.
Kyce Bello 