Night Vision: A Videopoem Triptych

Night Vision Videopoem Triptych by Swoon

 This summer, video-artist Swoon created a video based on my poem, "On Edward Hopper's Automat." He has now combined it with two other videopoems  to make a three-part video triptych called Night Vision. The poems by Nic Sebastian, Sherry O'Keefe and me blend into a haunting exploration of nocturnal life.

I'm intrigued by the way this new form tears down the boundaries between poems. The film adds layers of visual and auditory friction; the three narratives create a back and forth conversation about fear, distance, and loneliness. They seem to ricochet and echo as if in the dense fog a lighthouse keeper's dream life. Night Vision reminds me once more that artists work in partnership, even when we aren't immediately conscious of it.

Handmade Boats

Whale Sound published my chapbook, Handmade Boats in November 2010, and it is now available in a few new exciting formats. You can read more about it at Nic Sebastian's blog, Very Like a Whale.

To read to Handmade Boats:

listen to it online
download the ebook
or order a print copy

There is one other exciting bit of news: Swoon's film based on "On Edward Hopper's Automat" is going to be shown at the upcoming Word In Motion Festival in Latvia. 

An International Collaboration: Videopoem of "On Edward Hopper's Automat"

Swoon, a video artist in Belgium, recently created a cinematic interpretation of my poem, "On Edward Hopper's Automat." Swoon's videopoem was accepted into the Word in Motion International film festival in Riga, Latvia.


On Edward Hopper's Automat from Swoon on Vimeo.

The poem was first published in the chapbook, Handmade Boats (Whale Sound 2010).

Evoking the Columbia Plateau

Twice this summer I've stumbled into conversations I'd been unconsciously wanting to have for a long time. One conversation took place when I sat down to breakfast with an old friend. Instead of the light chat over coffee that I expected, I found myself in the middle of an utterly open, heartfelt exchange about fear, loss, and faith. The second time happened when I opened up Paul Lindholdt's new collection of essays, In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. As I began to read, I felt again like I was part of a necessary and revelatory narrative that was at once personal and public, regional and universal. 

A reader doesn't have to be anchored in the Northwest to be moved and impacted by this collection. These stories are about the relationship one can have with a region, but they aren't fixated on one small place; they range from Seattle's urban watersheds eastward to Idaho's Silver valley, and they study the complicated overlay of narratives on a land that is both loved and polluted.

Lindholdt has carefully studied the regional stories about the landscape, history, inhabitants, and big-industry deceit, and he has made them his own. In Earshot of Water explores what it means to be intimately connected with the water of the Pacific and Inland Northwest. Lindholdt recounts what it was like to grow up along Walker Creek, to kayak the Salmon River, and to come to terms with the sometimes ferocious wildness of Bellingham Bay.

Lindholdt's knack for story-telling is clearly evident as he tackles everything from hunting and rodeos to invasive weeds and hydroelectric dams. But don't be mistaken: these are not simply stories of pleasure and adventure. Paul Lindholdt is a serious wilderness advocate and naturalist and essays like "In the Shadow of the Government's Blind Eye" and "Subliming the System" lay out painful evidence for making environmental change and initiating better stewardship practices in the region and beyond. We glimpse his days working ankle deep in the toxic drainage ponds of Western Processing, we feel his pain as his father suffers from prostate cancer, and we float with him on the languorous bends of the Salmon River as he seeks respite from the grief of losing his firstborn son.   

In Earshot of Water is also, very simply, a good read. The style is lyrical and clean, and his description of the landscape is deft and sure. These essays build a satisfying narrative arc that show his skillfulness as a curious and observant naturalist, as well as his willingness to let himself be seen as well as heard. In Earshot of Water is a keen and empathetic study of the intimate connections between the wildlife and the people in Paul Lindholdt's community. Upon finishing it, I wanted to read it again.



Lindholdt, Paul. In Earshot of Water. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011.

A New Engangered Species: Our Teacher Communities

In the mad fracas over the federal budget, our legislators have sacrificed the National Writing Project, a nonprofit that supports 130,000 teachers and 1.4 million students each year in the United States.  As a result, university teaching centers across the country have been notified that they will receive drastically reduced funding that may disappear altogether. Sixty percent of the National Writing Project staff has been laid off.

I can accept all the compromises that my family has had to make because of the country's economic struggles these last few years. I can accept that my version of the American dream, like many other common Americans, has undergone drastic and humbling re-visioning. Practicality comes first: we pay the bills and skip the luxuries. We skimp and tighten the belt and stretch our little money a little bit further. I can be at peace with the austerity measures my family has made to survive, but I cannot accept the drastic measures that are dismantling the most vital parts of our educational structure. The National Writing Project has a simple but radical idea that has been wildly successful for 37 years:  if we create a space for teachers to share, they will come together and teach each other. When teachers are given the opportunity to collaborate, they learn new tools, they study new practices, and they become better teachers.
 
I was like most teachers: I started out in my early twenties on fire with the passion and faith that with enough effort, I could make a difference in the lives of my students. After a few years in the classroom, I was bone tired, creatively tapped, and suffering a crisis of faith about my chosen profession. How does a teacher find the resources, energy and endurance to be effective--truly effective--in the classroom, day after day, year after year? How can a busy teacher find the time to research, learn more effective pedagogical techniques, create innovative assignments and genuinely support her students without sacrificing personal relationships, well-being and health?

In 2007, I stepped away from the classroom and joined the National Writing Project staff. I thought I might learn how teachers can serve their students with excellence and survive with their passion and faith intact.  For almost three years, I supported the country's teachers by helping to create space for them to collaborate, question, research, and share. That old phrase from the classic film, Field of Dreams holds true with teachers: If you build it, they will come. If we carve out the time and space for teachers to improve their professional skills, they will come and work their damnedest to make things better for their students.

It doesn't matter if a teacher is in an elite university, a remote rural elementary school or in a rundown inner-city high school: the NWP network is robust and flexible enough to connect even the most isolated teachers with online technologies. And when they meet in person, it solidifies authentic, life-long professional relationships that can change the way they learn, teach and share for the rest of their career. With the National Writing Project model, we have a highly successful, functioning structure that improves teacher efficacy and classroom results.

Last month, when I was teaching poetry to recovering meth addicts, I walked around the room and  listened with awe as people shared their painful, hope-filled poems.  One by one, women raised their hands to ask a question, to give voice to their experience, and to affirm their recovery with powerful metaphors.  I am a better teacher because I've been working side-by-side with some of the most thoughtful teachers of my time. My quiet years working away from the classroom and behind the scenes at the National Writing Project helped me to recover my own faith in the good and necessary work that can happen in a classroom.

I stand by my teacher colleagues who are facing little financial support and astonishing national criticism as they continue to step into the classroom each day and educate our students. I stand by my NWP colleagues who have lost their jobs this week. And I support the few remaining staff who are fighting with everything to keep the NWP network in place for the sake of the teachers and students. If we turn the lights out in the National Writing Project offices and close the 200 college and university-housed NWP sites, we disconnect and ultimately disable teachers all across the United States.

Collage Poems

I recently read William S. Burroughs' essay, The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin. I wouldn't normally follow the advice of Burroughs, but one of the benefits of long writing retreats is that you get to goof around with experiments you normally wouldn't have time to try. This is how Burroughs explains the benefits of collage work: "You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors." His argument intrigued me, so I spent an evening cutting up a local Montana paper, and littering the studio with tiny words. I can't say the poem I made was worth keeping, and it looked like a poorly pasted ransom note by the time I was finished. But, I did learn something about local language. The newspaper was full of words I don't normally use in my daily lexicon. Words like: blowguns, mauling, outlawed, drake mallard, and near-fatal. The word safety popped up over and over again, and if you are talking about grizzlies, mauling, blowguns and snow-locked winters, it makes sense that safety would be a frequent concern. If we are bold enough to attempt to write about cultures or places where we aren't natives, how else do we learn the vocabulary but by playing with it?

Postcard from the Montana Artist's Refuge: Week Two

Before I came to the Refuge last week, my grandfather-in-law gave me David Hinton's anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry. It feels exactly right to be reading the work of Cold Mountain (Han Shan), Li Po, and T'ao Ch'ien here, in midwinter. The translations are magnificent, and the selections are so, so good. I particularly delighted in discovering T'ao Ch'ien, whom Hinton describes as:

"the first writer to make a fully achieved poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism that became the hallmark of Chinese poetry. So T'ao Ch'ien effectively stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting"

(110). In, "Idle 9/9 at Home," T'ao Ch'ien says:

My empty winejar shamed by a dusty cup,
this cold splendor of blossoms opens for itself

alone. I tighten my robe and sing to myself,
idle, overwhelmed by each memory. So many

joys to fill a short stay. I'll take my time
here. It is whole. How else could it be any less?

Today, in Basin, Montana, the thermometer is hovering at -3 degrees. A layer of ice frosts my windows. It is comforting to know the residents of this small community are going about their day, making pottery, painting, sewing quilts, rolling out dough. The woman in the front studio chops firewood to stoke her stove, and works on her sculpture. I chant mantra to summon the poems and relish the idle time to do so. There are so many poems to write.