This post is not solely about the resistance movement erupting in Turkey right now. This is also about how we are connected as humans and how the world seems so small through solidarity and friendship.

As I walked the streets in my Midwest neighborhood this past weekend, I passed the Turkish gift shop midtown. In that moment as I have so many times before, I thought of my dear Turkish friend in images and words, how we have shopped there together, hot tea in our hands, wading through art, scarves, jewelry, wind song from her native tongue.

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Sounding a Resistance
As I continued to pass the shop, doors open wide to the breeze, that memory quietly interrupted by a line of perched bodies along the brick façade. I did not know their cause for standing so patient and so still, but bowed my head in peace, nodded in support of their seemingly singular voice, buried between brightly colored signs, arms clutched together like chain link. Later that day I heard, read the disjointed narratives seeping from Turkey. A few days later, I heard from my friend…

dispatch.com

Today I write…
There is no time but the present to stand inside the green, lie down in sprinkling blades, beside stiff shadows covered in leaves, beside your neighbor hand in hand, beside the earth. Stand because fresh air changes shape when harnessed between hardened buildings and fume filled parking lots. Stand to cherish open natural spaces as divine moments beyond a busy day, a busy week, a busy world. Stand because like those blades of grass, those trees, voices do not sit, they only speak in peace and stand in resistance.

For more information about what’s going on:

Images, writings, video

Photos from the Resistance via IMGUR.com (images)
The First Week in Resistance in Istanbul (video)
BBC News (timeline and map included)
Washington Post (blog)
New Yorker (blog)
Open Democracy

Don’t mind the mess on my desk, what matters more is the thank you card I received in the mail the other day from a young lady, a high school freshman, after we spoke recently about her career interests, education, and post high school options. One might think that in a time of instant messaging a 14-year-old might send a casual email or nothing at all, rather than employ print, cursive, paper, and ink. But I can assure you, and with good old-fashioned penmanship, there are still people out there exploring their own thoughtful marks, writing in ink, slowing down, leaving a unique presence.

“Everyone you meet has some kind of purpose in your life,” I told her. “Sometimes you don’t know what that purpose is at that very moment, or who will end up a part of your life for longer than that moment.”

That day, as we explored career, education, future, we also talked a bit about how first impressions count, how sometimes all you have is that very first encounter. In our conversation we did not get into lasting impressions but she assured me just a few days later she knew how to make one: a simple thank you note on a folded white card, lined in silver, with detail, time, and sincerity pressed into page.

In life and writing, never underestimate a simple handwritten ‘thank you’.

I stumbled on a page in my journal, a reminder that the artist practice is a rigorous one, a deliberate one, filled with process, craft, and choices. Words do not simply fall on writers’ pages; writers seek out those words through reading, through conversations, in lived or imagined experiences.

The artist practice is one with purpose, one with planning, but also one of doing. Making is doing. We can sit around and stir our ideas in our heads or we can try them on, try them out, take risks, and see what happens. We can learn from other artists that are meandering through their own making, their own processes. We can share our ideas and collaborate freely, openly, engage in creative transparency where working, making, producing is a shared experience.

Fifteen years ago art met education in my mind, my work, my furiously swirling pen. I could no longer facilitate, walk into, away from workshops after school, in school and not wonder what happened after we stopped writing, talking, thinking creatively, critically, honestly, imaginatively. I was curious about the students I worked with, curious about their writing, about the teachers, about whether artists can make a difference in “Education”, creatively creep through the high pressured policy crevices, and work on the in between narratives bubbling inside of classrooms? I wondered as an artist, if I could be a part of the change, the shift, the sway of learning, in spaces that are filled with young minds.

I don’t consider myself a “teacher”, but rather an artist teaching. Do you know any teachers?  I often watch educators in their classrooms and marvel at their command of myriad knowledge and their beautiful dance with the material. I often work closely with teachers, who are talented, highly capable and absolutely thorough in the craft of engaging learning in the classroom. I suppose as an artist teaching, working with those teachers, sometimes I feel my role is to ask what else or to take creative risks classroom teachers can not always take (in plain sight). Let’s forget about the test for the moment. What are we now going to do with what students just learned? How can we take what we learned and do something interesting with it? How are we going to make it stick, apply it somewhere else, relate it to real life?

I watch young people think and pretend not to listen. But after years of teaching, I know better. Students are listening, waiting for the moment to shine brightly. However, their opportunities for that moment seem to dim with each year in school. How is that possible? We all have our theories. And of course education policy keeps changing in response to those theories. As an artist working in and out of classrooms, I see that glimmer in the faces of students, teachers, and I’m fascinated by it. However, I am practical and understand that I’m not in that classroom every day.

There is so much more to the story, and I am curious; interested in teaching and learning, interested specifically in writing in the classroom and beyond the classroom. I am interested in shifting learning spaces, creative practice and honoring the creative space in learning, from critical to creative, practical to imaginative. I am interested in teachers, students, artists, and what we all can do together.

There is no blueprint,
just love and geometry,
as we build, engineer,
wonder solve, spread all over
the furniture, the living room.
There is love and silence clicked
and cluttered in those colored
plastic blocks, those endless
renditions, that time well spent.

“The important feature that design brings is this bridge between the science and the arts. And I don’t think many people understand the power of design to put these two things together.”—Bill Moggridge

Words do not simply lie themselves crooked or straight, curved and crossed on a blank page. A writer crafts each word intentional, as if dressing in front of that page, like a figure in a mirror, pulling at stitch, turning lines, and layering images, sound, and rhythm.

In a recent discussion with a group of other writers, we talked about “finding the choir”, those who are like-minded in wanting to write and celebrate creative process, reading, and writing. Anne Rice said, “There may be writing groups where people meet but it’s occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.” And while that quote rings true in the discipline of writing and necessity to create that somewhat solitary space for getting those words on the page, writing also seems very much a public or social act in that before the writing happens or after the writing has happened, there is reading, observation, experience, and even a joining of those practices, crafting with others who are also writing. There is that persistent image of the lone writer at the tabletop or desk, under a glowing light beaming against the wall. That image is a familiar one, and is sketched across myriad walls as the shadows of writers doing all types of writing, everywhere.

With wisdom and a poignant tongue, Zadie Smith, spoke truth when she said, “All that matters is what you leave on the page.” And that a writer should, “Protect the time and space in which you write.” This is what many “writers” know is true. However, there are wide curious creative spaces between the actual act of writing, pen to page, fingertip to screen or key, and the inspiration, motivation, or sheer will to write. Inspiration and motivation will not get words on the page, but it is a part of the process. And just as much as writing is a process to be cured, it also seems a process to shared. That resolve a writer has when they are lone at their workspace facing their ideas, hopes, fears, or deadlines can be strengthened by the echoed harmonies of other such writers finding their way with their own words in their own respective critical and creative spaces. There is value in connecting with other writers.

Important is having a “choir”, a network of other writers in which to learn, be inspired, challenged, and supported. Writing is a lone matter, but a writer need not stand alone. We live in a time where building a creative network is within reach via social media, our communities, and in our professional realms.  That network or “choir” is the system a writer can call on, participate in when the writing is happening and even when at times it is not. A writer finding their way to their words is a process. And during that process, it is completely normal to feel unsure, less sturdy, exhausted, and lonely. But in this modern time when those who are writing or have to write, are within virtual reach we can literally and figuratively reach out (during our own respective process) for a bit of creative communion.

Where do you find creative communion? Where do you find your choir?

There might be magic in children’s books as they have a way to settle down wiggly awkward boy bodies, commanding stares and stillness. Even the busiest little people find time to take in words, images, and meaning. I love how without prompting my eight year old will read to his three year old brother. There is literacy between them, huddled on the bed together, leaning over a book, my eight year old acting out the character voices with such fervor. For a few minutes there are no arguments, no rolling around on the floor, no jumping on the bed. There is only two brothers, finding their way word by word, sentence by sentence, together.

This found poem is from the colorful spines on the bookshelf in my sons’ room. Children’s books are a wonder, and covered and filled with poetry.

Tiny
reflections
color
my steps.

Sunday rose burns, blurs my vision, these thorns
crooked in my eye. The baby’s eyes wet
with rapid blinks and bruised petals along
his cheeks. Salt pastes the narrow groove beside
his eye, like mine, they sting, tighten, dry. We
are the same with our swollen nodes and sore
throats, our slippery symptoms and clean hands.
Blood vessels, like swollen roads in the white
of our eyes, the pulse, the tightening, tears.
At home we are contagious together,
waiting for the time to pass. Tomorrow,
when we are apart, we will wish for time
without fevers, without stinging pink eyes.

Contagion is a human spell very few of us can avoid altogether. At some point we all are vulnerable to falling ill. In this poem I was curious about a mother and child, a passing of illness, of love, of time. I thought about how I’ve been sick with my own children, cuddled in bed, both of us warm inside of each others’ fever and grasp. I love writing about those vulnerable moments, portraying life even when it’s messy.

Though this poem is not about a “lovely” subject, my sense is that poetry isn’t only about what is lovely. Our lives are complicated with emotion and events so why should those truths not exist in our poems? I appreciate how poetry seems to have an ability to carve beauty in the ordinary, even the awful. It seems more about capturing a snapshot, finding, noticing acute bright notes and darkened wounds, writing those experiences in candid verse with vivid detail and rhythm. This poem, an attempt at blank verse, aimed to capture this moment between parent and child, the time between illness and health, between pallid and pink.

How do you creatively write about the ordinary?

My three year old on the muddy orange sunset, “That’s a lava sky.”

Robert Frost once speculated on the relationship between poetry and thought, conjecturing that all thinking was grounded in metaphor. Many people never took him seriously. Now, thanks to the work of many theorists in a number of diverse fields, from linguistics to philosophy to cognitive science, we can say with some certainty that he was right. Sentences build themselves around analogies; thought creates visual pictures in our brains; metaphors shape our ways of seeing the world. All of this appears to be done mostly unconsciously, as we filter messages, both verbal and visual, from our environment and shape those signs and clues into world-responses. -Terry Hermsen, writer, educator, author of Poetry of Place: Helping Students Write Their Worlds

 

image via morguefile

Blending, shifting, and mixing. I’m no DJ, just a writer reading, re-reading, and revising. Here is a recap, remix of posts from this week. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

Click on images to read posts.

Mix + Match Palette

Collide

Wonder and Scribe

Inspiration

On Love…

To Know Poetry

Quatrain

Quatrain

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

-Tony Hoagland, excerpt of A Color of the Sky

A terrific literary resource, The Poetry Dictionary, by John Drury

Quatrain: A four-line stanza

“For a long time, I couldn’t understand how people could write in quatrains and still look themselves in the mirror. And now, for some reason, they just feel calm and right.”—Samuel Amadon

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” -Emily Dickinson

While writing under the dim light in early morning or late at night, let us look for poems at the tips of our stinging fingers worn of typing, working, beating against our cheeks warm and slippery, worrying over something, someone, over words.

Let us search for the shapes of poems in the piles of unopened mail. Listen for letter sounds, low decibels, rhythm sway and shift. Let us be vulnerable with our tongue, our subjects, our soft bending of the day. Let us pay attention to the letter crumbs and dust piled in the corner beneath bills, Sunday’s paper, or the dozen books we build as word castle in the corner.

Let us sit with those words full in our belts, cool in our pockets. Let us listen look wipe the backs of our fingers along line breaks, push those words along metered plank, watch them rise and fall as tempered waves. Let us wonder—write down every sparkle in sight.

found image: morguefile

Click on links below to check out this past week’s posts slightly revised and remixed.

I should begin with a poem

Spring and Sunrise

Ok let’s write: First Drafts

Mix + Match Palette

Speak Slow: A Found Poem

Opus

[...] in her Bic-blue bikini swimming the last of her morning laps, Afro bejeweled with droplets, rising dripping from the water like Aphrodite from waves…

—excerpt from Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi

First drafts are lovely, loose, and reckless. Allow them that disjointed scrambled mess. They are not meant to be perfect, they are only beginnings.

I know, I know I haven’t given a writing prompt in a while but this phrase I just wrote is quickly turning into one so let’s see what happens. Take just one word from the above phrase (bonus for two or three), and place it somewhere in your poem. I say poem only because it’s National Poetry Month and I’m all about poetry this month. But if you’re not in the mood for a poem by all means write prose. But whatever you decide to write after reading this post, be sure to take a word with you (lovely, loose, reckless, scrambled, perfect, or beginning) and see if you can make it stick. As always, you’re invited to drop me a line (in the comments) and share what you wrote.

Here’s your out: If you’re not up to writing at this very moment, at least re-read the above phrase and remember first drafts are a mess.

What is poetry? And why has it been around so long? … When you really feel it, a new part of you happens, or an old part is renewed, with surprise and delight at being what it is….You will come to understand the world as it interacts with words, as it can be re-created by words, by rhythms and by images. You’ll understand that this condition is one charged with vital possibilities. You will pick up meaning more quickly – and you will create meaning, too, for yourself and others.—James Dickey

We quarrel in beautiful couplets, sit
beside each other touching our fears
against our tongues. There was a time,
not long ago, we reasoned in a hush,
held our breaths for days, impassioned
collision, let the silence fall
from our mouths as careless flicker.

To find our stride, our turning over,
we learned to listen without wither,
every crevice, every breath, every kind
kind word between us, an opus.

photo credit: morguefile

a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.—Adrienne Rich

As a writer, my eyes and ears, my heart are thoroughly wrapped up in the spell of words and what they can do to still our times, capture our most sensitive raw condition, our lives. I am drawn to beautiful lines of thoughtfulness, to rhythm, to texture dark in the letter imprint across glossy pages, glowing screens, and feather light squares of pulp. I am caught up in the chain of lyric, dangling like a necklace underneath the blinking cursor or dripping from our lips as we read silently to ourselves.

I find that poetry is seemingly all around us, in marketing, in headlines, in tweets. When I come across writing phrased poetically I think of beautiful moments of sense and verse, a snapshot clicking loud in the flash of hand to line and the flicker of fingers feverously across computer keys. There was a time when poetry felt more important to our history, when it recorded war and peace, injustice, courage, figures, moments of clarity. Today, I am looking for poetry everywhere, in everything.

Nowadays I write to capture the world as it spreads its well and wounds. I think I will always chase poetry at heart. Its distinct character shows up in my prose, in my speak, and in my attempt at lyrical lines. I am thankful to know a poem or two, poets, writers, who like me, are writing with their senses, their blind pages lit by metaphors, meter, imagery and all the details crawling in between.

April is National Poetry Month

My three-year-old is steadily sharpening his food palette and it made a mom proud when he asked for “baby carrots” for breakfast the other day. I thought to myself, “Is this a trick?” But instead of second guessing his request, I simply grabbed a carrot. He responded by kindly asking for three more. Inside I was thoroughly overjoyed, but on the outside, I played it cool by simply nodding and acting as if this was a completely normal everyday request.

I then went on to acknowledge how supportive I was of his healthy food choice. But before I could finish the praise, he asked for celery; then followed with a request for cranberries. Certainly this wasn’t my three-year-old in the kitchen early that morning asking me for vegetables and fruits. Surely, this was some kind of anomaly, or weird out-of-body experience (for both him and I). Granted, we do eat healthy as a family and I’ve worked hard to teach and encourage my boys to develop healthy eating habits. But who knew my three-year-old would show this much initiative at such a young age on such a random day. It was a rare display of sophistication that I welcomed with elation and simultaneous awe.

With shapes of pale green, bright orange, and maroon, my three-year-old had single-handedly made me so proud in that moment as he filled his open hands with a rainbow of vitamins and nutrients. But it didn’t stop there. “Look at my feast!” he exclaimed. “I see it,” I said, “Tasty.” “Yes, it’s tasty mom,” he said. And as he took bite after bite of his fruit and vegetables, he began to sculpt his feast, playing with his food as appetizer, munching on pretend castles, slides, sailboats, and coins. He not only made terrific healthy food choices that morning, he had fun, as he played his way through eating each crunchy, chewy bite.

Whose suggested kids not play with their food? I suppose I don’t see the big deal as long as they are curious and eating. It was in that play that he explored texture, shape, and taste. It was in that play that he took his time eating, making different pairings along with different pretend scenarios. It was cute, but it was also him building his taste palette, making good food choices on his own. Besides, I’ll take a little play with a lot of healthy eating any day.

Happy Friday, I hope my three-year-old inspires you to eat a bit healthier today and everyday. I’m going to go grab a few carrots right now.

When I’m teaching, I remind students, remind myself, words are just words, jagged lines, dark etchings, curls and turns, if we don’t have context or meaning. Most texts whether it is visual, word-based, or sound, is communicating something: a message, a narrative. As our ears take in sound, or our eyes move across images, written text, a symbol, or even moving text on our devices, we should slow down ask ourselves, are we reading for meaning, or just rolling our eyes over text?

photo credit: morguefile