I’m a big fan of poet MaryOliver (1935-2019). Her passion for the natural world intertwined with intense human emotion both inspire and challenge our assumptions.
Credit: Orion Magazine
“Wild Geese” (2004) is one of her most popular and often quoted poems. When I reread it recently, I thought it particularly suited for our times.
American culture is rife with public scrutiny, shame, ridicule, and censorship. Daily messages of outrage tell us that we don’t measure up. We are condemned for our beliefs and even whom we love.
“Wild Geese” is a reminder that you are enough. You don’t need to live someone else’s definition of what is “good”.
You can move past your mistakes. Each day begins anew. No matter your err of yesterday, the sun still rises and sets.
You need not be weighed down by guilt or shame. You can fly wild and free.
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
April 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of National Poetry month.
The honorary month was first created by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with Jonathan Galassi, President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1996.
Poetry has been my pandemic companion. Comfort, connection, and inspiration.
With spring comes hope. Let’s celebrate!
Join me in spirit at the Academy’s first virtual gala celebration, Poetry & The Creative Mind. Enjoy an evening championing the power of poetry in our culture and lives.
Date: Thurs., April 29th, 7:30 pm. Event chair, Meryl Streep.
Registration free. Donations appreciated. Proceeds go toward poetry education programs and materials for classroom teachers. Register here.
David Whyte’s, “What To Remember When Waking“ is one of my favorites and seems just right for today.
*. *. *
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
Thank you fellow artists, writers, bloggers, educators, dancers, poets, philosophers, musicians, homeschoolers, trauma survivors, family and friends, near and far for your virtual hugs, kind words, and listening ears.
Thank you for finding creative ways of connection during this Corona pandemic. Thank you for sharing your art and spreading light and hope to others.
I’m still in survival mode, trying to get my bearings. Absorbing unwelcome changes. Surrendering to uncertainty.
In times of crisis, the great poets and writers can offer us solace and momentum.
I leave you the words of W.B. Yeats, from The Celtic Twilight(1893), a lyrical tribute to Irish folklore.
Please let me know how you are doing.
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world…
One of the pleasures of mentoring young writers is watching them grow into their words. I’m excited to bring you this interview with my former star student, 18-year-old Maayan Ziv-Kreger.
Maayan grew up in the Boston area. She is an emerging poet, singer, and visual artist. She is currently enrolled in a post-high school leadership program in Jerusalem, Israel.
* * *
Our initial work together focused on short stories. When did you become interested in writing poetry?
I fell in love with poetry writing after seeing a video of Neil Hilborn preforming a spoken poem, OCD. The way he used words to portray images and describe feelings inspired me. I thought to myself, I want to do that!
I should also mention that taking your writing workshop in middle school, and later working with you privately, had a great influenced on me, too.
Thank you, Ma’ayan. What writers/poets do you enjoy?
So many! Besides Neil Hilborn, I love Mary Oliver’s delicate and very real poems.
Yang Wan- Li — a Chinese Sung Dynasty poet who describes nature scenes and what I interpret to be simple stories of the human experience.
William Carlos Williams has given me a lot of inspiration and love for short poems.
Caroline Rothstein — a fiery and sensitive writer who has helped me through many writing blips.
I really loved your poem, “Story Quilt”. I think many of my readers can relate to the experience of loving someone with dementia.
Thank you. It was inspired by my grandmother who recently passed away at age 92.
Story Quilt
In the Fort Bragg sunspot
my grandmother plays with her dolls.
She can no longer stitch together the fraying fabric of her sentences,
so I take them from her withering mouth gingerly
& with as little pity
as my ignorance can muster.
“Before Dementia” titled pamphlets are passed out at dinner.
Quilts of her heroic accomplishments
make me question if the form chewing messily in front of me
is made of the same fabric.
Guilt cannot erase my thoughts
of how she seems woven of excuses.
I beg my imagination to comply
but the room’s redwood shelves
betray me, staying empty
with only dusty shadows
our old paper-mache sagging against the white wall
she painted herself.
Only, she can’t remember making art
so I end up in the studio alone,
my needle catching, stitching
my grandmother’s story,
but I pull hard, mouth set,
and break the thread.
My Grandpa–Nana’s husband.
Give us a picture of your creative process.
I begin writing from a spark. Something larger than me inspires, saying, “Ah! Here’s something with meaning.” I strive to write poems with a teaching. But first, I have to learn the lesson myself. It’s not always easy to speak truth.
I write stream of consciousness in free form verse. My first draft is written thoughts slightly whittled down. I then revise for clarity and delete words that don’t add to them poem. My goal being that each word is there for a reason. After getting feedback of whether what I’m saying makes sense, I look over and refine my word choice.
Questioning my work each draft is crucial. And reading aloud to get a feeling of the rhythm. Though I write free verse, I want my poems to flow. A poetry mentor of mine, David Lee, once told me anytime I get stuck writing I should just read.
You independently schooled for a few years. Describe how this worked. What role did teachers or school play in the development of your writing?
First, with your tutoring during middle school, I developed my reading and writing ability. This led to a love of creative writing.
For high school, I was homeschooled. I took some classes at Sharon Public High School under homeschool status. This allowed me the freedom to create my own curriculum.
I could also choose what, where, and how I wanted to learn. I took English and Writing courses at the Harvard Extension School and other institutions. Through dual enrollment I earned 1.5 years of college credits. Taking courses at Harvard Extension gave me a great opportunity to practice academic and advanced creative writing in a formal setting with expert professors. Having access to this demanding education inspired and pushed me to strive high.
I also spent 4 weeks at a Brandeis University pre-college summer program for the arts. The writing workshop helped transform my poems into more mature and clearly written expressions. I’m very grateful for my instructor, Caroline Rothstein for sitting with each of us on our personal writing journey.
I’m very grateful for to you, Evelyn, for your help and the gift of becoming the writer.
It was a pleasure to work with you! You are also involved with music and visual art. Tell us about this and the ways it connects to your poetry.
In addition to writing, I draw, paint, and take photographs. I also play with other mediums such as clay and printing. I see my visual art as visual poems and poems as read and spoken paintings. They contain symbolism in both–speaking a different language, but made for the same reason and from the same source.
Please share another poem and its inspiration.
I wanted to speak to all those deciding what to do with their life, and to those who have already made choices. I wanted to remind them it’s never too late to make a change and be happy. As life goes on and you try to get serious, sometime you forget what’s important. You start building your life around falsehoods and fears — not having enough money or fame or living in a place that doesn’t make you happy. This poem is to remind us of an innocent joy we always hold inside ourselves.
Dreams
If you go
past the cars screeching,
where sunscreen is
slathered and postcards are
purchased for too much,
you can find your childhood dream
waiting for you,
sparkling over the still water.
Don’t loose focus
as They act like fortune tellers distorting your path.
Look past the shops,
not to the sand with
the seagulls preaching of failure,
but to the water you once wished to swim.
Don’t you see the children diving?
Do you see what you give up?
What inspires you?
Nature — all its beauty–the way can birds fly, how their body is held up by legs like toothpicks. The flow of water, the smell of a bonfire. When I’m in nature, my heart opens and words emerge. Nature includes things I observe in people, too — the way a city moves, the fabric of relationships.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve received so far?
Keep writing. When you have nothing to say, that’s when you most have something in your heart! And when no words come, go into nature and practice patience.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I see myself living in Israel, praising life, and bringing light into the world.
Traveling in Ein Avdat National Park in Sdeh Boker (Negev Desert)
Thank you, Ma’ayan. I wish you the best in your studies and creative endeavors.
EVELYN KRIEGER 