My Latest News and Offerings

BRINK OF SPRING

Can you feel it?
Spring's awakening, inhaling deep,
stretching her arms, getting the kinks out.
She breathes heat into the morning sun
so a line of snowflakes atop the maple's branches
shimmers into liquid
then drips down, tapping pockmarks
into the rounded snowdrifts slumped against the fence.

Hello there!

It’s feeling very much like we’re about to transform from winter to spring here. There’s warmth in the sun. The remaining snow (we had about two feet on the ground until yesterday’s rain) is more crystal than powder. And the birds are back!

Are you noticing any hints of seasonal change in your backyard? You might have to look closely. I think all transformation begins this way: subtle hints that gradually gain momentum to the point where something turns over, or steps forward, or begins.

Personally, I’m still fully ensconced in winter’s energy: still spending most of my days indoors, partly because of all the writing I’m doing, partly because I got into that habit while rehabbing a broken bone in my foot (don’t worry – it’s much better!)

How about you? Are you eager for spring’s energizing warmth and colour? Or still luxuriating within winter’s blanket?

Spring is always so energizing for me! It’s my favourite season and this year it has me thinking about transformations.

What new facets might emerge when you step forward into the new season?

Lee Ann

It might surprise you to know what exercises poets use to hone their craft. Just like other types of artists – musicians, dancers, singers, painters – serious poets work hard practicing the fundamentals of their art. So when they sit down to create, they have the technical skills to make clear, strong, evocative poems.

So what are the poetic equivalents of say, practicing pentatonic scales on piano or guitar, a singer’s breathing exercises, a ballerina’s workouts at the barre?

A poet’s apparatus is not a musical instrument or a physical body; it’s language. So a poet needs consistent, close study of language, and that means reading a lot of poetry, finding a beacon to reach towards. Two of my beacons are Lorna Crozier and Kim Addonizio, poets whose work is easy to read yet complex at the same time.

More than study, it helps to have a fascination with language. After all, there’s not a lot of room in a poem to develop an idea, tell a story, evoke an emotional reaction. Each word must be carefully selected, must be precise. A poet’s reference material is not sheet music but a thesaurus.

In addition, a serious poet does exercises to explore and perfect the elements of style and structure. Here’s an example of an exercise I recently completed, from poet Dorianne Laux’s workbook, Finger Exercises for Poets. The focus here is on syllables and lines, and the challenge is to:

• write a simple eight-line poem in couplets (two-line stanzas)
• use one-and two-syllable words
• use one three- or four-syllable word
• work with the idea of twos.

(If you think this sounds like TOO FUN TO BE LEGAL, you may be a poet!) Here’s what I came up with:

Twin maple trees in winter
stand close as this popsicle

just pulled apart.
My daughter's eyes

round and keen
await like the tree branches

keenly await spring sun.
Soon: two types of sticky sugar treats.

This little poem illustrates another aspect of good technique, best explained by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, who said that the fact that something happened is the worst reason to put it in a poem. A poet, he said, must be a maker instead of an utterer. In other words, a poet may use something that happened as a springboard into a poem, but rarely is it justifiable to keep something in a poem just because it happened. When a poet makes something out of that actual event… well, that’s a better poem. And sometimes it’s completely made up, as this one is, and as those of you who know me will have suspected, the first clue being I do not have a daughter!

Now you know! Poets work like any other artist to master the fundamentals of their art: through practice and study they develop the technical skills that allow them to give readers a sense of enjoyment and maybe even expansion. That is the goal of any art, yes? As I wrote in a recent poem,

… you write all this down hoping just one reader

finds themselves saying, “huh”

which is universal-speak for when a human pauses and realizes something new.

Lee Ann

Hello there! Long time no chat – how have you been?

I wanted to check in this morning, after the first of Ottawa’s “impactful” snowfall days, because I’ve been thinking about the winter season and noticing some things.

Like light. Have you ever noticed how the quality of winter light is softer somehow, than summer or autumn light? It seems, especially on an overcast day, to be somewhat diffused, as through it beams through some sort of fine gauze. Also, there’s a stillness to winter that I think is unique to this season. Have you noticed this?

It is, of course, the season of hibernation. Of pulling back, of pulling in, of rest. At least it is in Nature, and I’ve been thinking that I want some of that for myself this season. Less doing, more open space. Less multi-tasking, more one-thing-at-a-time. I’ve come up with one or maybe two Winter Projects: activities that are suited to this season of replenishing. One thing I plan to do is write a new poem every week. Here’s one:

WINTER MORNING

The world is always 
calling us back, offering itself to our attention, and yes
to our affection if
we open enough to receive the call.
Take this morning —
one like so many to come as we
trudge into winter when
morning after morning means waking 
to frozen darkness
when clearly the better option is to
drift back down into sleep
a much more acceptable form of dark.
But here I am,
shivering by the window overlooking
the rayless back yard 
where in the early morning’s pale light
a lone black raven 
pokes through powder snow at a few
leaf remnants left behind by autumn 
and nearby
a solitary ebony squirrel 
stands still as if frozen, tail twitching for reasons obscure, 
and clinging to the perch on the feeder 
a chickadee 
scans for predators with nervous, jerky head motions.
When I notice the chickadee’s black cap emerging in the shadowy light
I imagine it’s a toque hand-knit by a
grandmother chickadee during winter preparations 
and the little chickadee thanking her politely but secretly wishing 
it was a bit more fashionable like the woodpeckers wear. 
And then the squirrel jumps, scampering towards the shed and
kicking up clouds of white crystal snow,
its plume of a tail like a fine lady’s makeup brush, and she’s calling him
to her dressing room with a cry like the raven’s, who has just 
screamed a loud protest and now 
wings his way up, up, making another cloud of sparkly crystals
and in the moment he emerges 
like a phoenix, 
I realize
I have been warmed.

What have you been planning to do with your wintertime? I hope your winter season is one where you notice things that replenish you!

Lee Ann

What Else is New?

My series, “Fascinating Women You’ve Never Heard Of” continues! For you last-minute shoppers, how about introducing someone on your list to a new historical novel featuring a real and fascinating woman? I recently interviewed two authors of such books and I recommend both. Check with your local independent bookstore for:

What They Said About Luisa, by Erika Rummel. In 1575, Luisa Abrego, a freed slave from Seville, was tried in Mexico for bigamy by officers of the Spanish Inquisition. Aside from the trial record, no other documentation of her exists. Intrigued by that scrap of information, Renaissance historian and author Erika Rummel resurrects Luisa in her latest novel. My interview with Rummel is here.

A Pair of Wings, by Carole Hopson. Bessie Coleman was the first American to earn a civilian aviation certificate from the French Federation Aeronautique Internacionale (FAI). This was something she had to do because, being African American and female in the 1920s, nobody in the United States would train her to fly. My interview with Hopson is here.

It’s June and life is in full bloom! Take your morning coffee outside and have a look for yourself, in your own yard or next door. I’ve always said June is the best month in the garden, because nothing has gone wrong yet. No bug infestations, no drought, no wash-out rains. Plants are bursting with new leaves and colours of every hue, expanding daily, it seems, to fill in all the rough spots. Here are some samples from my own back yard:

Of course, June makes it easy to find beauty. It’s everywhere – but what if it’s not?

I recently found myself in a setting and a situation that was anything but beautiful. And as I looked around, I thought: here I am, the one who says she’s on a mission to find beauty in everyday life, and to put more beauty into the world, but not every day is a day in June. So I set myself a challenge: to find and write about something beautiful in that not-so-beautiful experience.

I can tell you it took a few days to sift through the details and to finally see something good, something I could call beautiful. But I did find it:

SIGNS OF HEALING IN THE EMERGENCY WAITING ROOM

The white-haired woman hobbles in
leaning heavily on her husband’s arm.
She drops into the chair in Triage
where a nurse points to a poster of cartoon faces
to help her describe her pain on a scale of 1 to 10.
She stares for a moment at her left foot
her face scrunched into Level 8 pain,
limps to a waiting room chair and waits to be called.

Opposite her, under a sign explaining that 
abusive language will not be tolerated
sits a boy about 8, 
a gauze bandage encircling his head,
green stains on the knees of his baseball uniform 
red stain on the gauze.
While mom hovers, standing because of a chair shortage,
dad explains in precise, descriptive language 
how medical staples differ from the ones the boy knows from school.
The boy is briefly distracted. 
The white-haired woman learns something new.

Next to the boy, below a large photo of a pretty nurse 
holding a banner that reports 35% of nurses experience abuse in the workplace,
a 30-something man sits in a wheelchair with his right leg outstretched
icepack balanced on his ankle. 
He is joined by a pretty 30-something woman who hands him a large coffee.
Their eyes lock for a moment, crinkle at the corners in matching smiles.
She adjusts the icepack. 
The white-haired woman leans gratefully against her husband. 

Across the room, the sliding glass doors 
whoosh open to a tall woman cradling her right elbow, fist clenched against her waist. 
A large sign pasted on the doors warns in bold black typeface, 
do not open these doors between 11:30p.m. and 6a.m. 
to anyone except our staff or patients.
A rumpled man in a worn shirt and blue medical mask stands 
to give the tall woman his seat. 
She unclenches her fist, presses her palm to her heart. 
The white-haired woman stops shivering.

You may already be the type of person who gives up your seat, adjusts the icepack, gives a smile when that’s all you have to give. I apparently need to challenge myself in that regard. So I’ve set a goal to remind myself the next time I’m a situation that’s far from a day in June, I’m going to be the one who adds some beauty!

Lee Ann

What Else is New?

Do you ever wonder:

1. What’s really going on in the life of a plant? Check out my article, “Under the Microscope: The Wonder and Mystery of Plants” on Page 5 of the March issue of “Trowel Talk,” the newsletter of the Master Gardeners of Ottawa Carleton.
2. What’s happening under the surface of the soil where your garden grows? “Soil: It’s Not Dirt!” in the June issue of Trowel Talk reveals all!