The Work of Susan Rich, Janée Baugher, Peggy Shumaker and Ellaraine Lockie

I think of poetry as my “home page.” It is where I land when I want to deepen my appreciation, my observation, my understanding and my memory of the worlds I inhabit. Reading and writing poetry, I click over to the world within this world, a place I go to realize the self I so easily ignore when I am pumping gas, working out on a treadmill, or rushing to finish my to-do list. The place I click over to for an immersion in poetry is not a virtual world. It is the world as I recognize it through my senses, my intuition and heart.

I am in good company traveling in that world; the numbers of travelers there are ever expanding and the poets’ culture is ever moving into the mainstream. Thousands have heard of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and the poems he reads over the air. Hundreds of teachers know about Billie Collins and the work he has done with the website Poetry 180 to bring poems to students just for the pleasure of hearing them.

Over the weeks of National Poetry Month, I’d like to introduce you to the work of poets I have been reading this year by telling you what I admire in their work and what I retrieve from their poems. I hope you will visit their websites, sample their poems, become familiar with their books, and use the links they supply to interviews they’ve done and craft articles they have written. Most of all, I hope you will allow their work to inspire your own.

This week, I am writing about poets Susan Rich, Janée Baugher, Peggy Shumaker, and Ellaraine Lockie.

Susan Rich
Susan’s newest volume of poetry, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, opens with the poem “Different Places to Pray.” In it, she describes experiencing the world as a poet:

This is the way a life unfolds: decoding messages from profiteroles,
the weight of mature plums in late autumn. She’d prefer a compass

rose, a star chart, text support messages delivered from the net

The poetic sensibility is a gift that can feel like a burden — as poets, we must use our subjectivity to build understanding. There are no engineered and manufactured tools we can employ to find what we are after. Those who might hold our hand can only be of support once we have found enough to share with trusted listeners. We must recognize the paths our words are building to get us somewhere we didn’t even know we were looking for. When Susan writes about tulips in “Tulip Sutra,” she describes the poet’s process metaphorically as she pays homage to a flower she loves:

 Bless each blossom that opens and opens

traveling behind itself

Often, Susan begins her poetic journey by reflecting on visual art. She explains this in “Entering the Picture: The Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins,” an article she wrote for the Oregon Quarterly, where you will also find a slide show of the photographs she was viewing:

I remember that afternoon ten years ago quite clearly. The month is November, it is a Wednesday as I make my way through the darkening hallways of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. There is less than an hour to go until closing when I am assaulted, hit over the head, by art. A framed image of a young girl at a simple table holds me in its place. I can’t look away. As in the sight of a new, mysterious lover, I find myself transfixed.

Instinctively, I scribble down a few lines and close my notebook. I go on with my life. But the photograph calls me back. There’s an inexplicable detail in the courage of the child’s spoon against the window’s broad horizon that I need to experience again. Four years after my initial visit, I return to the museum in search of that same piece. With the assistance and agile detective work of the gift shop cashier, I find that I’ve fallen for the photograph “Hunger Is the Best Cook” by Oregon photographer Myra Albert Wiggins.

She continues:

Somehow I have to confess: I became that child — and at the same time was unexpectedly transported to my own lonely childhood. Through the photograph I was able to transcend time and space; to move in history back to 1898, to a little girl, feet dangling, face intent on her task.

It strikes me that this movement both outside the self and at the same time further into one’s personal history is exactly what poetry accomplishes. And what I’ve now learned, visual art can also do. There’s a fancy word for writing about visual art: ekphrasis. It derives from the Greek and literally means to “speak out.” Yes, I believe pictures do speak although it’s a trick to hear what they truly want to tell us.

Susan works that trick out, leaving her readers with graceful poems and the evocation of what it means to find, recognize and affirm the feelings that shape us. In her poem “Disappearing Trick,” Susan’s question shows us how her listening in the presence of Wiggins’ elaborately staged photographs connects her to the impulse for making art:

Myra, is subject ever more than a handshake

Of chaos and stillness?

Susan concludes: “Out of the silt of a lifetime — /out of disappointment and out of fashion/ — your own invisibility — ” and we are reminded that her poems, like Wiggins’ photographs, are choreographed from the objects and environment of the artist’s life to express and find universal moments. The poet recedes, as the photographer does, and the art takes center stage.

Janée Baugher
Janée is another poet interested in ekphrasis (visit the website for Boulevard to download a pdf of her article “Art to Art: Ekphrastic Poetry”). She asks concerning this poetic form, “Is a poet’s engagement with the visual arts tantamount to poaching? Or, could the art of ekphrasis have something to do with the annihilation of framed constraints?”

Reading the poems in her book, Coordinates of Yes, answers this inquiry for me. As reader, I am moved by the poet’s words into a place where awe not only fills the space between viewer and painting, but arrives in that space with aha moments and other gifts of knowing. Janée’s publisher at ahadada books describes her poems as holding a dualism of place and transience and as using a literal eye that is undifferentiated from the imaginative eye. The two threads in her ekphrastic work force me to slow down, to examine the truths that germinate when we look outward and move through.

In her poem “La Cathedral de Rouen Le Portail, Temps Gris,” after the painting by Claude Monet, Janée writes:

                                             …How grey
those days of lonely painting. Fumes
of light, air of muse. What did he learn

about the precarious sun, the unshaping
of place? Such lightness of light —
that absence of light — solidifying his work.

And at the verse’s end, the poet herself enters into the negative capability (the capacity it has for holding one thing and its opposite) of the art she beholds:

What lay within this church? A reverie

known only to the blind? Did he ever enter
those portals — the ones I now see opening?

In “The Portrait of Mona Lisa,” after the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Janée captures the sorrow and mourning she sees coming from the canvas, first from the landscape described as “haunted austere abutment/and a snaking dirt road leading/away” and ultimately to the moment a camera flash from the crowd triggers a mechanical partition to lower from the ceiling:

over you. For one half hour:
you, relieved,
there behind that impenetrable screen.
And we
are spared your weeping.

For Janée, paintings stop time and in created stillness, something of the human spirit leaps from the canvas and in return something of the viewer leaps toward those in the painting. In “Les Raboteurs de Parquet,” after the painting by Gustave Caillebotte, Janée writes:

    Near the hearth, a bottle of red wine, full
but for one glass-worth. It sits unsipped
beside the bottle. The middle worker,
(wearing his wedding band) considers the wine.
The indivisible union between one man, one woman;
the tools by which we live, the coils we leave behind.

Travel is a physical event and it is a metaphysical event — Janée travels through rumination to understanding when she stands still before paintings and she travels at railway speeds throughout Europe going to see those paintings. Both kinds of travel lead her and her readers here in “Draining West”:

How odd the art of retrospection.
on trains, relished in mobility,
the ability to pass it all. Or to stop,
those days laid out for the living —

Peggy Shumaker
Peggy Shumaker is another traveler poet. Although in most of the poems in her book Gnawed Bones, the natural world she observes in Alaska, Hawaii and Arizona are a canvas, she includes several poems in her book inspired by visual art. In “Sea Change” she writes after viewing Da-Ka-Xeen Mehner’s Sculpture Weapon of Oil. She thinks of solar wind, of ice walkers noticing how seal packs are thinning, how we do in our observations of the demise of the planet as we know it, feel oil as daggers through our ribs. Peggy writes, “We have some serious vanishing to do;” we feel how much she cherishes the land, the water, the lives of animals. In “Upset Woman” written after a drawing by Florence Napaaq Malewotkuk, Peggy asserts that the most recent dead “still walk around/to see how we think,/what we say, how we feel.” Her poems do that same thing — reading them I feel them reading me, holding up my thoughts and my feelings for my own recollection. In “Deliverance” written after Chagall, Peggy contemplates a woman clinging to a giant rooster:

One roll of his red eye

and his unrepentant woman
mounts up, clings to wattle
and tendon, leans her ear to his beak

She loses herself, her doubts, in the moment of hearing its heart as a “faint tick of faith.” What can the poet do in an age when the animals and nature she loves are thinning out, disappearing? When the years move along and age brings the poet face to face with mortality? Are the poems not a way of holding onto the wattle of life as she has known it and deriving some relief, though faith may be faint?

Whether Peggy is describing a buck used to stretching a leg over his shoulder to scratch inside his ear better than a poet uses poetry to scratch an unreachable itch or recounts what must have happened on the ground where a koa tree was downed to make a table (“mongoose darted nest to nest” and “feral pigs yanked out/tender fiddleheads, new shoots”), I look through her eyes and see through my own in the same moment — I think about the busy opportunism in the natural world, realize that I hadn’t thought about the holes in nature left by harvesting the wood my furniture is made of.

Peggy writes about what resurrects on the earth after fires, about clouds that hold water the earth may not be able to take in, about coral reefs with “thousands of mouths held open to the night.” She uses phrases that engage and sweep the reader into the nature she views: “waves’ liquid moonshadow,” “in me a place/that healed like a cactus shoe — hard, fragile, secret,” “Our steps disturbed/tiny winged creatures who risked/their lives to fly ankle high.” She uses sentence structures that connect her and the nature she treasures to the people in her life and to the sadnesses encountered with them: “we’d already scattered, dust kicked up by Dad’s tires, leaving leaving leaving leaving leaving,” “Slot canyons twisted/inside her,/worn down/by what ran through,” “Now no one sees the ocean/though it lives in every tear.”

And after we journey with the poet through nature, through family ties broken and rewoven, we turn in the last section of her book to her nearly dying. In “A Brief Aside,” Peggy describes a connection with her husband that exits below consciousness. Here she is reaching toward him:

I don’t recall
reaching up
and deftly, with my left hand,
plucking out
what brought the blurry
world into focus.

We learn what strength feels like in “Narrow Roads To/From the Interior:

Above, patient
as erosion, as torture,
the IV drop by drop
reveals what we’re really made of.

We receive an understanding of the poet’s place and how embodying poetry allows her to live there. From “Kus-Sun-Ar”:

My hurt body can’t rest yet,
It was so close to the other world.

Poetry bring us to the other world, more gently though than life threatening events. And when we have been in the realm of the poets, we are not at rest. Much is demanded of us. At the end of “Kus-Sun-Ar,” the poet writes:

I feel the shaman,
placing his healing
Into my emptiness.

The skillful poet, like a shaman, makes sure we will stand on the ground again, not disoriented, but seeing the world more clearly.

Ellaraine Lockie
In “Hometown Blues,” printed in the shirt pocket poem series by poetswest.com, this transplanted Montana girl writes that she lives with “Seashells, not sagebrush/California wineries/not Montana bars/Fruits, stems and vines/not roots.” Ellaraine has a knack for using the particulars of the places she inhabits to make lists that move us and make us realize what we are missing in our lives.

In “Marked for Deletion” from her chapbook Love in the Time of Electrons, she lists landscapes as she listens to a voice mail and draws an analogy between love and the country that separates her from her lover:

A motor that begins when his breeze
blows through the windmill between my ears
Pumps power across the country…

Healing a burned forest from love gone wrong
Feeding fields too spent to grow flowers
Lighting caves long without electricity
Over and over again

In “Asks for Oysters,” about the poet’s brother who is dying, Ellaraine’s lists are of food, especially the ones with nuts that were his favorite food:

In us, an abyss we try to fill with roast pork
canned peas, mashed potatoes and gravy
Still empty we start on the pecan pie
peanut brittle, candied cashews
hazelnut fritters and walnut bread
My brother watching
full of love and morphine

And, Ellaraine, who has traveled extensively like the other poets I’ve been reading this year, incorporates her lists in a poem about travelling in a time of terrorism. In “The Best Revenge” from Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, Ellaraine first phrases her feelings about traveling in London in a way that hits home to all who feel the weight of recent world-wide tragedies: “I have buried the exploded British bodies/under Katrina’s casualties.” She goes on to list the events of her arrival in London: walking with three suitcases too heavy to lift onto a bus (part of the public transport system that had been bombed earlier), “awarding myself a walking ovation/for having flown the day after 9/11,” and at the sight of memorial to a girl killed in the blast, imaging the death and destruction that happened to some on the public transit system. Finally, she stands in front of Russell Square’s tube window, summoning the courage to buy a ticket and reminds us that “retaliation can be as peaceful/as purchasing a public transit ticket.”

With every image, Ellaraine brings me with her, whether that is to the home where her brother is dying, to her message machine where she hears the voice of the man she desires, or the streets of London upon her arrival there.

And so I leave my account of the poetry of four poets I admire engaged in the way poetry draws me close to others and to my own history, strengthens my desire to right the world and reminds me of our common yearnings, our sorrow and our survival.