On...

On Process

July 20, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

In April, I cut twelve poems from the poetry manuscript I planned to have finished by summer. Twelve out of sixty is a lot of poems. More than that, the poems were a thread in the book that no longer worked. Meaning, I took out a section of poems on a topic that (I once believed) helped tell the whole story.

In all honesty, I knew the poems weren’t working for a while, but I couldn’t let them go. Not because I needed the poems to be published. I wasn’t ready to dig up new poems on the subject that demanded further exploration.

By dig up, I mean: find and relive old emotions.

The manuscript went through many changes over the past ten years. I’ve been through many changes over the past ten years. Hell, the last four months.

Learning from process

To me, the writing process is like riding the ebb and flow of wave after wave. The rhythm connects all my writing: the past, present, and future. All stages of the work are connected. So when I cut something out, it never truly goes away. Leaving the twelve poems in the manuscript when I knew they didn’t belong was simply part of the revision process. Don’t get me wrong, it was tough to let them go. But it was also satisfying to make that decision and see the book grow into its final form.

I find similar satisfaction when I work in the yard. After I spent a weekend digging up those twelve poems, I went to my garage, pulled out the tiller, and dug up weeds to make a flower bed.

Often, I need physical work to mimic my mental work and the yard is a great outlet. It’s also a fun metaphor to the writing process. I plant seeds, transplant bushes, prune trees, water and mulch and weed flower beds. (Insert “words” where you see a plant reference.)

It’s July now. I wrote the twelve poems, talked with my editor, and reordered the poems in the collection. As of today, it is sent to the publisher. For the first time, these sixty poems are no longer in my possession. Soon, they belong to the world.

Now what?

It is incredibly hot outside so instead of pulling weeds I am painting my office. A present to myself for finishing the manuscript. The bookshelf is pulled away from the wall, a curtain is off its rod, the room almost three-quarters painted.

From the ebb of my completed manuscript, I am in this new present. There’s plenty to do while the book is in production. But I’m not quite ready to flow into the next phase of the writing process. For now, I paint walls. I’ll know when it’s time to move on.

On Listening

June 25, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

reflection tree in shallow river with sand and rocks

A writer has to be a good listener. Some might call us great eavesdroppers too. There’s a practice I learned from the Unitarian Universalists called ‘deep listening’. I sat in a small circle of people and when someone talked, everyone else listened and no one responded. Words floated in the room, living and breathing without input or advice or counterpoint.

It’s powerful to be deeply listened to.

It’s powerful to deeply listen to others.

I’ve been deeply listening since George Floyd’s death and want to share a few pieces that resonate with me. As I mentioned, I struggled to write this post. So many words came to mind but they didn’t know where to land. And that’s okay. I can’t always know what to say.

What I’m hearing and what it’s doing

I’m hearing Black voices in a way I never heard before, and I’m grappling with my own culpability and responsibility in systemic racism.

Personally, I’m disappointed that both my formal and social education never taught me to consider what it means to be White. While I worked to figure out my identity in my twenties, I had a lot to pull from: woman, mother, single mother, young single mother, poor, drunk driver, artist, hippy, optimist. But White was never a piece of it. That ignorance hurts. It’s shameful and it sucks to feel this way. But here I am. And it’s okay.

It’s okay because I’m in the second stage of learning (conscious incompetence) and I know that shame is an effective motivator. I’ve felt deep shame for my actions before and I changed for the better by not ignoring my shame or running away from it. I’m staying in this feeling until I work myself through it again. The best part is that this time, I’m not alone.

Where I’m listening and learning

“Running For Your Life“

A Community Poem For Ahmaud Arbery (6 minute listen)

A powerful poem woven from many voices. NPR Poet-in-residence Kwame Alexander creates one poem from the 1,000 poems that are submitted. If you read or listen to nothing else on this page, please listen to the collective voices in this six minute recording.

Van Jones on racial justice

Interview with Van Jones (5 minute listen)

News commentator and author Van Jones speaks about what the reaction to George Floyd’s death means to him.

“A letter to all struggling to understand“

Op-ed by Jason Mott

New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott offers some advice. His words have stayed with me: “These are difficult, exhausting, frightening times. I know. But don’t let that fear numb you. Don’t let it make you resentful or, worse yet, deaf and silent. We’ve all built this country. We’ve bled for it. We’ve died for it. We’re a family. Right now, a part of your family is screaming out for help. Don’t turn away from that.”

This moment cries out for us to confront race in America

Op-ed by Condoleeza Rice

Condoleeza Rice, former secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 under George W. Bush, recounts growing up in Jim Crow Alabama.

“Oh My Brother”

Poem by Jaki Shelton Green (7 minute listen)

North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green reads from her first album, The River Speaks of Thirst.

“Black Matters”

Poem by Keith S. Wilson

A poem from Keith S. Wilson’s debut book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love. About the book from Poetry Daily: “Whether describing a lover, a scientific concept, or an act of racial violence, these ‘fieldnotes’ are simultaneously fantastic and grounded, celestial and corporeal.”

Thoughts on George Floyd and the social contract

Monologue by Trevor Noah (18 minute listen)

Born to a white mother and black father in South Africa under apartheid, Trevor Noah has a unique perspective on a lot of things, but especially the social construct of race. I also recommend his book, Born a Crime, which is an eye-opening and hilarious page turner. If you prefer audio books, he narrates the book and I bet it’s great.

Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence

Interview with Resmaa Menakem (51 minute listen)

Resmaa Menakem is a therapist and trauma specialist who explores how people hold trauma in their bodies. On Being is the one podcast I listen to on a regular basis. I like Krista Tippett’s interview style and the mission of On Being is similar to my own as a writer: “On Being, as it has evolved, takes up the great questions of meaning in 21st-century lives and at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?”

Going forward

This is me barely scratching the surface on the subject of race in the United States. I don’t expect to be a scholar but I will be better educated. I also want to be a better citizen in my community. And people in my community are telling me to look through a different lens, so I’m listening.

Over twenty years ago, someone recommended I try rose-colored glasses in order to see things from a new perspective. I wore those different lenses and I’m better for it. I also learned back in my twenties that I wasn’t going to arrive at being a good and happy person; simply dust off my hands and call it done. Being the person I want to be is a lifetime commitment. There’s always work to do. Every morning provides me a new opportunity.

I have started reading from this list of recommended books. Here’s another list and another for parents. My local family members started a book club and we meet for the first time this coming Monday. If you have any suggestions on what you are reading or what you are listening to, please share in the comments.

Be safe. Be well. Keep informed.

On Focus

May 22, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

We’re in the 9th week of pandemic homeschool. When it comes to my six-year-old boys, focus is a daily struggle. And I get it. They don’t understand that Monday thru Friday the living room transforms into a classroom. When they see the couch, they do what they normally do: jump, climb, and wrestle. That I sit before a white board means nothing to them.

From the start, I incorporated a ‘word of the day’ into our curriculum. I let the kids pick words (hedgehog, astronomy, water), but mostly I choose words that are relevant to our immediate social emotional learning. On our first day, the word was ‘hygiene’. We’ve done ‘taunt’ and ‘annoy’. Last Friday, after a particularly hard week for me, our word was ‘resilient’. Sometime during week #5, I chose ‘focus’.

Focus*

(noun) – the center of interest or activity; an act of concentrating interest or activity on something.

(verb) – become able to see clearly; pay particular attention.

Spanish – foco, centro

Word origin – Latin (mid 17th century) as a term in geometry and physics: literally ‘domestic hearth’.

Domestic hearth?

Where the Heart Is

The hearth is ripe with symbolism, for good reason. For centuries, the hearth provided warmth in winter, light in the darkness, and cooked food. These attributes were a form of protection–from cold, illness, starvation, and predatory animals.

Hearth is the ‘heart of the house’ where we keep the ‘home fires burning’.

After the recent stay-at-home orders, I imagine people see their homes differently than they did in February. Some took the opportunity to complete honey-do lists, while others worried about making mortgage or rent payments. Some people spent two months by themselves, while those in full households would pay good money for a moment alone.

That’s a broad sweep across what people are experiencing. (It’s all the bandwidth I have at the moment.) And it doesn’t touch on the fact that for some people, home is the most unsafe place to be.

Our relationship with house and home is as varied as we are as individuals. But what most people have in common right now, is finding ways to keep Covid-19 from getting inside.

We might think our needs are different from those in the 17th century, but are they?

The domestic hearth was so important to survival, that the word for it–focus–developed into ‘pay particular attention’.

I use ‘focus’ when I teach my children. And it’s not just about the bouncing (I allow a fair amount of bouncing). I’m cultivating their capacity to concentrate, to hone in on one thing, to take a deep breath and pause (and in turn, allow space for others to focus). In my experience, the ability to center oneself aids in mental and emotional survival. I want my kids to grow into resilient adults. I want them to know how to tend the domestic hearth within themselves.

More people will be affected mentally and emotionally by Covid-19 than become physically ill. How do we not just survive the pandemic, but how do we set ourselves up to thrive?

If there is one thing that focus can teach us, it’s that paying particular attention to what provides us warmth, safety, and nourishment will help get us through. The domestic hearth is a symbol of what sustains us through hardship. And while we’re feeling anxious about the unknowns surrounding Covid-19, the hearth reminds us to sit, and be still.

*Google Dictionary which pulls from Oxford.

Feeling a need to express some emotions during this time? Check out my post on writing lyric poetry.

On Lyric Poetry

April 23, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

My school-aged children attended their last day at school on March 13, 2020. The following week I transitioned my house and work-life to include homeschool. On Sunday morning I woke up early, before everyone else in the house, and cried. A good, deep cry as I sat at my new “teacher’s desk.” Then I wrote the above poem and felt a wash of relief, so I decided to write a daily poem during North Carolina’s stay-at-home orders. I post them at Coronavirus Daily and on Facebook.

As long as I’ve been writing, I’ve written lyric poetry. In fifth grade, I wrote a poem that prompted the principal to call my parents.

In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr says, “How to respond to the strangeness and unpredictability of our own emotional being? One important answer is the lyric, the ‘I’ poem dramatizing inner and outer experience.”

The poem in fifth grade was fiction, but I used the dramatized “I” in order to relate to the content of the poem, which was about sexual abuse. It was 1985, missing kids were on milk cartons and “stranger danger” had been debunked. While writing the poem for a class assignment, I didn’t know I was trying to reconcile that people I trusted might harm me. I used “I” in the poem to get inside my feelings about the new information that changed my view of the world. My teacher thought it was a confession, which prompted the call from the principal.

What is lyric poetry?

Lyric Poetry* – (From Greek for “lyre,” an ancient stringed instrument.) Originally, poetry was meant to be sung, accompanied by music from the lyre or lute.

Lyric poetry now refers to a category of poetry (distinct from narrative poetry and dramatic poetry). A lyric poem is:

short in form
concentrated in its expression
subjective in its observations
personal in subject matter
song-like in quality

The relief that came over me when I wrote that first coronavirus-inspired poem is a strong thread of what has sustained me through the past five weeks. My family and I are extremely fortunate so far. We’re healthy. We still have income. We have food and shelter. The added stress in my life is, at this point, minimal in comparison to so many others. But the stress is there–the pandemic touches us all. And just like in fifth grade, writing lyric poetry helps reconcile my emotions.

Orr tells us that “Human culture ‘invented’ or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.”

The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a larger-than-usual collective existential crisis. As a society, we’re redefining what is “essential” in our daily lives. We’re questioning value and purpose. When this is all just a story we tell the next generations, what will we say changed within us? What strengthened? Why?

Write a lyric poem!

It’s difficult to feel hope and suffering–two opposing emotions–at the same time. It’s even tougher to sustain feeling them indefinitely. Yet that is what the pandemic is prompting us to do: be hopeful that we will overcome and be mindful and sympathetic to the suffering.

What do we do with our new emotions? It’s not like any problems we had in our lives before the pandemic disappeared. How do we cope?

In an interview, Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast says, “Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens…Happiness is not steady, but joy can be steady, and that’s what we really want. We want the happiness that lasts.”

For me, writing and sharing a daily poem is a joy through the pandemic that doesn’t depend on what happens. Whether it’s a tough day homeschooling kids, hedging our finances against the possibility of losing income, hearing stories of those suffering because of the pandemic, or the blanket uncertainty in our collective recovery, I have a joy I can depend on. It’s not exactly the deep joy that Br. Steindhl-Rast talks about. I think it’s my way to sustain steady happiness. Writing daily poems built a tangible thread through uncertain times. I transformed my inner experience into something I could see and share.

Tips to write a lyric poem.

I opened the window and laughter blew in

Start with “I” –the subjective and personal experience.
Do something in the poem. A simple act you do often. “I opened the window.”
Think of something that relates to the act you wrote down. It could be another action or an idea, a whimsical thought, or an emotion. “I opened the window and the breeze brushed my cheek.” “I opened the window and my eyes softened.” “I opened the window, tears down my cheeks.”
Keep going, making associations between physical actions, ideas, emotions, or thoughts.
Try not to think too much, let the first action inspire the next action or idea, and so on.
Having trouble? You know the game where you say a word and another person has to say the first thing that pops into their head? It’s like that. If you can’t think of anything, go back to the physical act that you know. “I opened the window and walked to the kitchen. I sliced a strawberry and thought of summers with my grandmother…”
Have fun. Stay safe. Find joy.

*Myers, Jack, Don C. Wukasch, eds. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003.

On Poetry

March 24, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

Poet Ralph Angel once said to a student: “I’m not interested in the story of my life. I’m interested in the fact of my life. The fact of my reality…any poet worth her salt…deals with their shit directly.”

In an interview with poet Gregory Orr, Krista Tippett said, “To talk about poetry is to talk about life.” Orr responded, “I hope so.”

In 2012, a friend and fellow alum of Vermont College of Fine Arts started Bite My Manifesto, a website designed to inspire. Here’s the beginning of my writing manifesto: “I started writing to grasp the chaos which is human nature. I kept writing to identify myself within said chaos.”

I’m interested in the fact of my life.
I started writing to grasp the chaos which is human nature.
To talk about poetry is to talk about life.

Pull up a chair and let us talk about life. Let’s deal with our own shit. As poet Lucille Clifton wrote, let’s celebrate:

that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Poetry as Order

Why does talking about poetry mean talking about life?

The poet’s work is to put words to that which can’t be seen; to express that which leaves us, otherwise, speechless. To some, it might seem counter-intuitive that writing poems is an act of order–don’t poets spend a bunch of time frolicking? Yes. (At least I do.) But there’s also an unromantic side to poetry.

When I write, I take what is going on inside my body–questions, ideas, memories, emotions–and place it onto something tangible.

Once all the “stuff” is out of my head, I look at the written words and begin to shape them. I decide how I want readers to enter the poem; how much tension or rhythm or surprise; how long I want them to linger on a line or how quickly I want them to run down the page; where to pause and pause just a breath longer; lead them all the way to the exit–not an end, but a threshold they walk through, that may just lead them back to the beginning.

What started as a jumble of words, becomes a cohesive piece of communication. It’s as if I can see my interior landscape before me.

But that is the talk of poem-making.

Order is also for the reading of poems. We reach for poems in times of need–to express our love or to give company to our loneliness. Poems help us order our interior landscape, not by providing direction but by reminding us we are not alone, and we have the strength to persevere.

To talk about a poem is to talk about the stirring and aching of the heart, the joy in a drop of rain, and the struggles of identity. Poems ask us to see ourselves in the words and also to accept that those words will outlive us.

In other words: You are poetry.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. Maybe one day we will sit around the table together and talk about the stuff of life via poetry. Until then, here’s a few resources to get you started.

Poetry Unbound at The On Being Project – “Immerse yourself in a single poem, guided by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Short and unhurried; contemplative and energizing. Anchor your week by listening to the everyday poetry of your life, with new episodes on Monday and Friday during the season.” (Approximately 7 minutes.) For more poems and writing, visit their Poetry & Writing section.

Academy of American Poets: Sign up to receive a poem a day in your email. Learn more about Poem in Your Pocket Day. There’s teaching materials, a database of poems, and poems for kids.

On Home

February 23, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

In his book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski says, “Before the idea of the home as the seat of family life could enter the human consciousness, it required the experience of both privacy and intimacy, neither of which had been possible in the medieval hall.”

The first time I encountered the concept of privacy was after my parents’ divorce. Mom moved, with my sister and me, from our three-bedroom house into a two-bedroom duplex. My sister and I shared a small bedroom that neither of us spent much time in except to sleep. As a seven-year-old, I was excited to have sleepovers with my big sister. At the age of eleven, she did not feel the same way.

We moved again, into a two-bedroom townhouse, and Mom gave my sister and me the master bedroom. With more space to move around, my sister hung sheets to divide the room in two, demanding her privacy. I couldn’t understand why she was so insistent on separating herself from me.

Then one day, she moved her stuff into our garage, leaving me in the large master bedroom with mirrored closet doors. Now nine years old, I would listen to Madonna’s first album and dance in front of the mirrors singing at the top of my lungs, “You just keep on pushing my love, over the borderline.” When I danced, I made sure to touch every piece of open floor space. I reveled in my privacy.

The Stuff of Home

What keeps me glued to the subject of home is it’s relation to the awakening of our interior selves. Rybzynski says this:

“Words such as ‘self-confidence,’ ‘self-esteem,’ ‘melancholy,’ and ‘sentimental’ appeared in English or French in their modern senses only two or three hundred years ago. Their use marked the emergence of something new in the human consciousness: the appearance of the internal world of the individual, of the self, and of the family. The significance of the evolution of domestic comfort can only be appreciated in this context. It is more than a simple search for physical well-being; it begins in the appreciation of the house as a setting for an emerging interior life.”

The word “home” in western culture comes from the Old Norse word heima, meaning “at home.” In its inception, the word encompassed the house and the household: dwelling, refuge, ownership, affection, the overall feeling of the place.

When I think of building self-esteem or self-confidence, the words used to define the meaning of heima make sense to me.

I am my own shelter; when I turn inward, there is a refuge.
As a source of affection, I am kind to myself, and therefore, self-reliant in times when I feel lonely.
I am confident when I feel ownership over my body, emotions, and thoughts.
In high school, I asked Mom for a scale. Her answer: “It’s not how much you weigh but how you feel about yourself.” She taught me to trust my overall feeling of the place. The place was me.

When I work to feel at home within myself, I simultaneously work on how I feel in a room, in a house, with other people, and in society. To build a home within me is to build a home within the world. I take refuge, affection, dwelling, and an overall feeling wherever I go. As my body changes with age, illness, or injury, it’s like moving into a new house; I learn the quirks of the structure; I make changes to represent the old me in a new space.

Privacy

My sister and I never had to share a room after the townhouse. I soon lost the large bedroom when we moved again, and never regained one of that size. But it taught me the power of space, solitude, and how to make my surroundings reflect my interior self. Not that I understood that intellectually at the time. But I carried the ideas with me thereafter; that room shaped a piece of my identity.

Intimacy

Intimacy, well that’s something that took longer to understand. Privacy is a physical construct. Walls of a house create a boundary between public and private. We go home and shut the door. If you share a room with your sibling, you hang a sheet.

But intimacy? The close familiarity of another person. As I reflect on childhood, that’s not so easy to pin down. Togetherness, affinity, confidentiality; how fickle those words feel in my adolescent memories. I had closeness with friends and, yes, felt attachment to my family. But when I look for a moment that awakened my awareness of intimacy, I think of my first comfortable silence.

I was a sophomore in high school. My neighbor’s bedroom was in the attic of his house and it had a skylight. He was two years older and whenever I went to hang out, his room was full of other friends. But one weeknight I went over and it was just the two of us. We talked, and then lay on the floor looking at the stars through the skylight, in silence. We weren’t touching; I only knew he was there by his presence. I felt my mind stop, like it does in meditation.

It’s easy for a teenager to feel pressure in high school; stress stems from so many different places. In the privacy of my neighbor’s room, all exterior influences were shut out. Inside the intimate moment that we created, I felt no coercion from him and no pressure from myself. I was at ease; present.

Moving my body across every inch of carpet in a childhood bedroom taught me the importance of having my own space and solitude; the comfortable silence taught me power in the space between two people.

I mentioned last month that it was ten years ago when I came to the idea that home is the space between two people. And it makes more sense today. A comfortable silence might be one of the more intimate exchanges between people; it’s an experience of refuge in both self and other.

Is there any better place to dwell?

On Process