Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Paul Farley

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The Power
– Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the-pier
palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want: the ornament
of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,
the weak grip of a crane in the arcades
you’ve built, ballrooms to come alive at night,
then a million-starling roost, an opulent
crumbling like cake icing …
Now, bring it down
in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,
that knows the spectral blues; that always starts
in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling
in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings
marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume
of black smoke high enough to stain the halls
of clouds. Now look around your tiny room
and tell me that you haven’t got the power.

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For more information on Paul Farley, please click here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=27
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Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

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What the Living Do
– Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we
spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through.

The open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and
I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we want more and more and
then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing
so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

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For more information on Marie Howe, please click here: http://www.mariehowe.com/
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Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Father’s Voice
– William Stafford

“No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark.”
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.


—
For more information on William Stafford, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-e-stafford
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6 Mile

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Some of the things it’s possible to do while walking the six-mile block you walk every day when you’re back in the land where you grew up:

Look north to the foothills of the Adirondacks and think, as you always do, how cool it is that a fifteen-minute drive behind the wheel of a car will bring you into the six million-acre Adirondack Park itself.

Lift your hand in greeting to each and every car that comes toward you, and watch as each and every driver lifts his hand back to you.

Observe all the Amish laundry hanging on Amish clotheslines. Decide, based on your observations over all six miles, that Amish men do not wear underwear and Amish women do not wear bras.

Notice that a few pairs of underwear are colors other than blue, black or white. Wonder if these colored undies are breaking a covert Amish rule. Decide that the answer is no, because otherwise they wouldn’t be hanging on the line for all to see.

Take a left on Crill Road and wait for the flock of wild turkeys to cross. Take your time, wild turkeys. Note a line of them in a distant field, walking single file with their heads bobbing up and down. Recall that your father told you they follow the manure spreader, picking out the corn that the cows didn’t absorb.

Think about all the wild turkeys you’ve seen lately: walking down the sidewalks in northeast Minneapolis, flocking on either side of the road the entire length of the Natchez Trace, and now here in upstate New York. Decide that wild turkeys are taking over the highways and byways of your fair nation, and wonder where it will all end.

Walk past this barn, which is the barn you grew up playing in, and think of all the hours you spent in it. Hayforts. Hay tunnels. Hay rooms underneath haystacks, in which you read by flashlight. Years of trying and not always succeeding to avoid the gaping holes in the floorboards. Think how great it is to be in your unsafe homeland, how great it is that those gaping holes are still there in the barn, along with the wide-open rectangles in the far wall. Decide that your nephew, the one who “fell” twenty feet to the ground out one of them and came up laughing, didn’t fall but leapt.

Count the number of Amish baked goods signs along the six miles and wish that it were Friday. Consider the spelling of “donut” as opposed to “doughnut.” Come down firmly on the side of “doughnut” but recognize wearily that you are out of step with the rest of the world when it comes to doughnuts.

Ask yourself: if this were Friday, which kind of Amish do(ugh)nut would you buy? There is no question: Cream Filled. The minute you decide on Cream Filled, immediately change your mind to Glazed. Decide that if this were Friday, you would buy four of each and take the whole box –wait, do the Amish use boxes?– home to your parents.

Wonder why, in recent years, you crave the wide-open west so much instead of these foothills and mountains you grew up in. Wonder if you’ll someday trade your one-room plumbingless shack on the slope in Vermont for a one-room plumbingless shack in Montana. Realize, as you walk the six miles of this block, that the wide-open west and the land where you grew up have much more in common than you ever thought.

Stop by and say hi to a friend. Wonder why the photo of his grave is so much bigger than your other photos.

Keep walking. Walk to the house where your friend and his wife lived. Walk across the grass and sit on the front steps of their house. Look out over the fields stretching south, the fields and the woods, and talk to him. Charlie, I’m sitting on your front steps. I’m looking out over the valley. Remember how you always told me it was God’s country?

Keep walking. Walk down the road to where your friend’s brother lives. See him coming out of the barn. Start to run so that you can catch up to him before he goes into the house. See him stop walking when he sees you coming. Listen as the first thing he says is, “I like your sneakers, Alison,” with his head down. Listen to yourself say, “I’m so sorry,” as you both start to cry. Sit on the porch with him and his wife for a long time, talking.

Stay up late with your father, sitting across the kitchen table, talking. Get up early and go to the diner with him next morning. Ride shotgun in his car as he drives you down the dirt road to the ten acres they’re having surveyed, because you can’t stand the thought of not having a piece of this land once the Amish have bought their place and they leave it. Stand with your father by the edge of the ten acres and point to a knoll that would be a pretty place to put up a plumbingless one-room shack.

When you leave next morning, have a hard time leaving.

Poem of the Week, by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Lady Look-Alike Lazarized
– Jennifer Michael Hecht

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.


—
For more information on Jennifer Michael Hecht, please click here: http://www.jennifermichaelhecht.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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The Best Moment of the Night
– Tony Hoagland

You had a moment with the dog,
down near the base of the butcher-block table
just as the party was getting started.

Just as the guests were bringing in
their potluck salads and vegetarian lasagna,
setting them down on the buffet,

you had an unforeseeable exchange of warmth
with this scruffy, bug-eyed creature
who let you scratch his ears.

He lives down there, among the high heels
and the cowboy boots, below the human roar
rising to its boil up above. Like his, your evening

is just beginning –but you
are lonelier than him. You think
that if you disappeared tonight,

you would not be missed for years;
yet here, the licking of the hands and face;
and here, the baring of the vulnerable belly.

You are still panting, and alive, and seeking love;
yet no one who knows you
knows, somehow,

about your wet, black nose,
or that you can wag your tail.


—
For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.tonyhoagland.com/
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Poem of the Week, by Anna Journey

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Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood
– Anna Journey

The hummingbird’s nervous embroidery
through beach fog by our back

patio’s potato vine
reminds me of my mother’s southern

drawl from the kitchen: She’s flying,
flying like bird! I’ve heard that

as a child I involuntarily flapped my hands
at my side during moments

of intense concentration. I’d flutter
over a drawing, a doll, a blond hamster

in a shoebox maze. There are ways
to keep from breaking

apart. My guardians. My avian
blood. I believed

birds bubbled inside me—my own
diagnosis—though the doctors called it

something else: a harmless
twitch. A body’s

crossed wires. The lost
birds of my childhood

nerves have never
returned. But when you held

my elbow as we walked the four
blocks to the boardwalk,

we saw the brief
dazzle of a black-

chinned hummingbird—the first
I’d ever seen. It sheened

and tried to sip
from my sizzled wrists’

vanilla perfume. I knew
a single one

from the magic
flock had finally found me.

—
For more about Anna Journey, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Journey
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Plan B

Posted on by alisonmcghee

An acquaintance asks you if you have any words of wisdom to contribute for a talk she’s giving on the topic of “Building a Writing Life.”

You start to tap out a bunch of little bromides along the lines of a) make a practice of writing regularly, b) look at writing as a process rather than a series of finished projects, c) develop a good critical eye for your own work.

How dull. If you were an aspiring writer you would be at best unmoved and at most insulted by the boringness of these words of wisdom. You hit delete and abandon ship and go for a long walk with your dog.

But the frustration with your own words remains. Annie Dillard, in an essay that you’ve memorized because you love it so much (except for that one paragraph you hate and choose to ignore), says, “What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

You are enraging yourself –not too strong a word– by the triviality of your advice. This seems ridiculous; it’s only a simple talk to aspiring writers on building a writing life, for God’s sake. But the anger remains.

Now you’re thinking about a workshop you taught last fall, in which the writers were talking about this very thing. How to become a writer. How to make a life as an artist, whatever that art form –painting, writing, music, acting– might be. The difficulty of making a living, even a small living, as an artist.

You listened to them talking. Everything they said was true. There was nothing to disagree with. The conversation shifted to Plan B, the backup plan for when things don’t go the way you want them to.

“Screw Plan B!” one of them said. “It seems to me that if you have a Plan B you’re going to end up following Plan B and be guaranteed failure. Why not go for Plan A and at least know you tried?”

You looked at this writer. He is a person of strong opinions and enormous talent, and behind that talent is a ferocious determination. He was laughing, as he often is, but you knew he was dead serious.

“I never had a Plan B,” you heard yourself say, and you realized only then that it was true.

This was a weird thing for you to say, because you don’t much like to talk in class, or anywhere for that matter, about your own writing.

But you felt as if little puzzle pieces were all falling into place. Was it possible that you hadn’t realized until that moment that you were a Plan A-only type of person?

Yes. It was possible. You knew that from early on you wanted only to write a book, a beautiful book, but the fact that this was and remains your only goal felt like new information.

In that same moment, sitting there in class listening to your students, you realized that life is easier if you only have a Plan A. It makes prioritizing easy. Whatever you want to be, to do, whether it’s write a beautiful book or paint an astonishing painting, means that the book or the painting will always be the highest priority.

First comes the Plan A, then comes everything else. Whatever job you take to support the plan will be secondary to the plan. If you have children you’ll figure out how to keep writing when you have them. Maybe you’ll get up at 4, maybe you’ll stay up until 4. Somehow you’ll figure it out.

Even if you’re not a good writer –and you yourself weren’t– that won’t stop you. You’ll keep at it until you slowly get better. Because what other choice do you have? There’s nothing to fall back on, if you have no Plan B.

“Easy for you to say,” someone once said to you, after you told her you were pretty sure you would be writing even if you never published anything, “because you have published things.”

That kind of remark makes you go instantly quiet. It seems so rude to respond to it, to repeat that no, you’re pretty sure you’d be writing anyway. And the further truth, which is that you never think about the things you’ve published, also seems rude.

But it’s the truth. Anything published is behind you, and you only look ahead. All you want is to write that beautiful book, and it’s still out there. You haven’t done it yet. That book is waiting for you.

This –the fact that you have not yet accomplished your goal– also makes life easier. You don’t have to look around and think, Now what? You don’t have to try to come up with a new plan because the first plan is still operational. It’s a dream that’s still being realized.

It’s a dream that might never be realized. This, too, is something that hadn’t occurred to you. You’ve been like a shark, always swimming forward.

All this time you thought there was an end goal, didn’t you? That beautiful book out there, shimmering in the distance, waiting for you to write it. But what if the beautiful book is a mirage?

It comes to you now, finally, that the beautiful book is a mirage.

That this doesn’t bother you must mean something, but you’ll have to think on it for a while.

Another Picture Book Writing Workshop, Saturday, April 7

Posted on by alisonmcghee

PICTURE BOOK WRITING WORKSHOP

Greetings, writers!

Any of you picture book writers out there still feeling isolated? I’m offering another one-day picture book manuscript workshop on Saturday, April 7.

We’ll talk about the fascinating/fiendish (take your pick) specific challenges of writing these fabulous little books, including the essential elements of picture book writing: characters, story arc, language, beginnings and endings, voice and tension.

If you wish, you can bring in copies of a manuscript of your own (no more than 400 words) and we’ll read it aloud and discuss it. Or, just come and absorb whatever’s useful to you and your current or future work. Workshop is limited to a maximum of eleven.

Date: Saturday, April 7, 12:30-4:30 p.m.
Place: my house in Uptown Minneapolis.
Cost: $50 (payable by check or Paypal), including hand-outs and some kind of tasty homemade treat. Please email me at alison_mcghee@hotmail.com if you have questions or would like to sign up, and please feel free to forward this notice to any interested friends.