“…my soul needs this; I want the one rapture of an inspiration.”
from “To RB”
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hello Reader!
Welcome to my monthly newsletter accessed via Substack subscription (free) or my personal website blog. Isn’t it wonderful that we have all these fresh digital avenues to direct our words to your email inbox or computer screen immediately? It is. It really is. But do you remember when newsletters came to your physical mailbox, having been placed there by the mail deliverer’s physical hand after being sorted in a physical mail facility—a post office—that received mail transported by an engine powered semi-truck? I do! (Yes, I’m old enough to remember).
Ah, the newsletter. That once-a-month or once-a-year meticulously printed document that updated readers on the happenings of an organization or family or group of friends. Maybe some of you still get these updates during the holidays or from an organization that continues to share their news in this now quaint method. If you do get them, they are likely few since we now have email and other media outlets via which to update family, friends, clients, and fans. Paper is seldom wasted these days on our communications; however, perhaps, words are. I often wonder we say more too often and to less avail these days. I don’t know.
But I do know that I miss getting handwritten and typed communications on paper, some of these communications adorned with drawings and included with photographs. In high school, I had an overseas pen pal through a program at my school and her letters were the best mail. It took at least a month to hear from her after I sent my letter, but the anticipation simply increased the joy of finally receiving her thoughts, updates, and ideas on paper. When I was young and married to my first husband, my mother would send me cards and letters in the mail. I saved most of them. When I was young, I moved a few times with my family and each time I gave the friends I left behind my address. Not my cell phone number or my email … my home address scribbled onto a piece of notebook paper poorly torn from the school notebooks. For at least six months, maybe a year or more, letters were exchanged between us until our energy to keep the relationship alive wore out as new friends replaced the loss of an old friend in our respective locations.
I’m not really one to wax nostalgic. There’s little truth to the phrase ‘the good ole days.’ The past holds much goodness, but also much harm, sorrow, and terrible, terrible prejudices, injustices, and ideas. It’s exemplary to move on from those things and draft better futures even when we miss bygone charms like landlines, black and white box TVs (yes, I miss those), and letters in the mailbox. As a poet who explores and documents painful histories as well as social and cultural injustices concerning gender, sexuality, disability, and environment, I know all too well how easy it is to romanticize the past and our experiences in that past thereby alleviating feelings of shame, complicity, and grief. It’s natural to not want to investigate the darkness and see only darkness. We pray for light. We need the light. We hope for a glimmer of redemptive thriving in our dark pasts—personally, institutionally, nationally, globally—so our whole damn existence isn’t a depressing sham.
Well, dear reader, me too. In fact, I look for it also in the sometime sordid pasts of the world of poetry. I look among the sleeping, the sleeping poets. That’s right—not dead poets but sleeping poets. These poet’s physical bodies have been reclaimed by the earth and their spirits, whatever they are made of, linger in a somewhere we cannot be certain of; but their words, their poetry, hasn’t vanished or stopped breathing. It pulses with life. Those poets are still here with us in poetry, so how can we count them among the unliving?
Also, I have questions for these sleeping poets, wonderings about their material relationship with the earth and the page, a tangible piece of parchment or page scribbled with words by pencil or pen. I want to have a conversation with these poets. So, (hypothetically) I will. I want to tell them about my work and receive answers to my questions about their work. First, I want to converse with Gerard Manly Hopkins, one of my favorite sleeping poets. Here goes…
Dear Gerard,
Hi. How’s the earth? How’s your cozy habitation there? Is it like the womb you speak of in “To RB” holding you close with all your bright inspiration? In this poem, you compare the inception of a poem with the moment a man makes love to a woman and call inspiration “The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong / Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame.” As a woman, it’s hard to avoid the maleness of this inspiration or miss the way you compare yourself to the childless woman with an empty womb. In this sonnet, you speak as a poet who wants to be impregnated, ready to burst with “The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.”
Honestly, Gerard, I’ve never felt this way. I’ve never longed for inspiration. I’ve never had writer’s block. I’ve never needed a longing. But I know that this is a unique problem because many writers do. My question for you has more to do with why you envision inspiration as male. I have my hypothesis and could analyze the hell out of this, but what do you say? What if you didn’t need this inspiration to overtake you and could, instead, allow it to gurgle up from within yourself, a hidden spring? I am truly curious how many poets envision inspiration as something coming over them and how many experience it as a welling up from within. I’m experience the latter. (My reader, how about you?)
“RB” comes at the end of your short life which would mark the end of your occupation as a poet. And what a rich occupation it was! You wrote so many poems. Bravo! Thus, my second question. Why a lament at the end of your life? Why a longing for more poetry as if your existence had been devoid of poetic toil and gestation? As if you had not given birth to a plethora of artistic achievements. You are rich in poetry, Gerard! Looking back on your past, I see more than a glimmer of goodness amid any shame, harm, or grief you may have known.
Gerard, I will answer this question for you. I believe the process of creating is its own sustenance, its own hope … and I bet you needed some more of it at the moment you wrote this poem, like a letter, to RB. Thank you for writing that letter as poetry. Your need is my need too. I’m glad I’m not alone.
Take care dear heart,
A Not-Yet-Sleeping Poet
And because I’m still awake in this world and writing, inspiration (not male) fills me with words, and I keep creating new poems. It’s a wonderful (pre)occupation, especially in dark times. But I won’t show you any new poems today. Instead, here’s a video of me reading what now feels like an old poem, published in the Cider Review Press in 2021. “The Knowledge Of” will be featured in my next forthcoming book tether & lung, to be published by Texas Review Press in March 2025.
Hurray for fancy medias like YouTube through which we can share our words despite the reduction of handwritten letters in the mailbox! The past glimmers. The future has new light.
The last couple of years have been a literary whirlwind for me, not to mention the many life changes I have experienced including remarriage, becoming a grandmother, and moving to a new state. So much has changed, mostly for the better. And this is true for my writing as well. Over a decade of focused attention, I have written through past life experiences while engaging dialogues on trauma, feminism, religion, and ecology, and now, much to my delight, I am watching those poems and poetry books find good publishing homes.
tether & lung, a book chronicling the fifteen years I was married to a man who struggled with his sexual identity and came out as gay after divorce will be published by TEXAS REVIEW PRESS this coming spring, 2025. I’ve written eight books about my first marriage and I’m not sure there won’t be more. Those books contain violence, transgression, betrayal, and grief. Three of them have already been published but this, my fourth, tether & lung, stands out as my favorite among them because it best sets the scene and landscape of my home and heart those fifteen years. None of my other books capture the constant anticipation I felt during my marriage, as if our storyline were suddenly going to wax romantic and take a desirable turn. Images in tether & lung instantly transport me to our family farm and my first discoveries concerning my husband’s sexuality.
Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love an Index, in which she writes grief after losing her partner, influenced the poems in this book. The context is very different, but reading Love, an Index was like holding up a mirror to my own soul. There’s a breathiness and subtle agony in her book that felt familiar, and that I wanted in my book as well. I believe I have accomplished this. Women, like Lindenberg and myself, write these heart-rending narratives—these poems—all the time with unflinching emotional honesty. We tend not to turn away from the ugly parts of anything, even love. Despite divorce, sexual tension, and heartbreak, the poems I brought into tether & lung are sensual and tender because those feelings were part of the story too—facets among many facets.
Discovering your spouse has never desired you is a tragedy all its own, but there are other, more universal tragedies concerning women's bodies as objects commodified and humiliated by the male gaze, a gaze that sometimes leads to acts of violence. Like too many other women, I have been sexually violated by a man in my history, a violation that has been amplified by the grasping of other men. For every woman, sexual assault leaves a psychic wound. In Floralia, a new book of poems that will be published by UNSOLICITED PRESS in the fall of 2025, I imagine this psychic wound through various speakers, though it doesn't take much imagination; I've been there. I know all too well that, while the physical body may heal quickly or even fail to show signs of intrusion, the mind and emotions do not. Neurology is altered. Guilt and fear are carried in cells retaining data concerning the moment or moments of invasive harm.
As Floralia demonstrates, victims are often put on display and scrutinized by society, thereby leaving them to grapple with their emotional experiences and stressors alone. Many turn to relationships and substances that will numb pain but do not offer sincere regard for their wellbeing. Written in three sections, the poems and radio play in Floralia confront the insidious influence of sexual abuse on a victim’s psyche and the public voyuering of assault narratives, a social habit that leaves a victim feeling more isolated and alone. Providing a window into a victim’s interiority, this book documents the cyclical and intimate nature of sexual assault as I, the author, write through the process of surviving trauma and all the real ways in which it manifests. Floralia asks us to sit with turbulence and ponder our role as acquaintance, family member, lover, or friend to someone who has been assaulted via an unsettling and cinematic narrative of broken trust.
The best part about publishing Floralia with UNSOLICITED PRESS next year? The press is celebrating women writers by publishing only women writers in 2025. Some of the proceeds from books will benefit women leaving domestic violence situations as well as indigenous women. I could not be more thrilled to be a part of this experience. Floralia will be published in two fun cover designs. I sincerely hope you will pick one!
And, finally, at long last, my most exciting literary news to date: my book Wolves in Shells was chosen by Tomás Q. Morín as the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry with UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS. I am honored and amazed. I am grateful. Writing is hard work. Writing to understand oneself while building an audience is very hard work. I'm probably better at the former than the latter.
Wolves in Shells embraces honest questions and vulnerability while telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner. Reflecting on her familial heritage, this survivor grapples with the way she, the women of her history, and her daughter have been conditioned to accommodate the demands of male ego and predation. The poems in this book are reflective, clear-eyed, and incisive, featuring O-Six, a wolf born into the rewilding territory of Yellowstone National Park in the 90s, as a metaphor for women who must cope with violence and survive on their own. Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones” the narratives in this aptly-named text consider the way that survival is a balance of protectiveness, risk, trust, and escape.
For me, this book exists as my own ‘hero’s journey.' It is a monomyth in that the speaker of these poems is forced to survive against the odds as she searches for a place to establish a stable socio-economic situation. But this book also holds stories of other women aggressed and caught in physical and emotional migratory patterns that do not have a clear destination. Dedicated to my daughter, I could not be more pleased concerning the timeliness of this book's acceptance and publication. We are entering a new election year and women, all women, are on the ballot. Our survival and opportunity is at stake. In 2020 I didn't get to cast my vote. Below is a poem from Wolves in Shells, first published in About Place Journal, sharing that experience. I am looking forward to casting my vote in November. Dear reader, please join me in voting for our nation's better future.
