As I wrote last week:

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 from an immersion in poetry is not a virtual world. It is the world as I recognize it through my senses, my intuition and heart.

This week, I am writing about poets Marc J. Sheehan, Jefferson Carter, Lana Hechtman Ayers and Marilyn Stablein. Be sure to use the links I provide to visit their websites, sample their poems and other writing. Of course, allow their work to inspire your own.

Marc J. Sheehan

It was with a smile that I began Marc’s collection Vengeful Hymns, and it was with a smile that I finished reading it. I felt as Jim Daniels did when he wrote for the book’s back cover that the poems “would break your heart if they weren’t so warm and funny, wistful and accepting.” I understood why the book had won the Richard Snyder Prize and was also runner-up for the Society of Midland Authors book of the year award in poetry. I agreed with Elton Glaser, who was the final judge for the competition:

Having read so many poems that sound anonymous and interchangeable, I was thrilled to hear the refreshingly distinctive voice of Marc J. Sheehan in Vengeful Hymns. With his hard-pressed wit, and a tone that moves from rueful to lacerating to just plain funny, Sheehan creates a likably woebegone character who can say this kind of thing: “And then, despite my best efforts, it was spring.” Loss and failure may gnaw at the speaker’s vitals, but they leave his nimble mind intact. Like a deadpan midwestern Wordsworth, he notes: “So this, too, will be memory–disaster / recollected in tranquility.” When a poet this canny and grounded and wry comes out of the heartland, there’s good reason for us all to rejoice.

That tone is established at the start with the opening poem, “The Back Roads,” in which the poet suggests the need for a “midlife crisis-mobile” for cornering turns in a landscape of disappointments. Driving past churches that could be purchased for a hymn and yard sales where you could buy what you need to be someone else (“unreflective mirrors,/bladeless razors”), the speaker arrives at the idea that:

You’re you, though, and the road straightens out,

so you speed past the battered stands of fresh
vegetables, the orchard of blueberries
whose fruit you’re offered only if U-Pick.

Like happiness, you think, as it shrinks away.

On a detour outside Walhall, MI, Marc meditates on how the river looks emptier with a washed-out bridge than when it has no bridge at all. As in the previous poem, once he decides to move along according the detour enforced, he moves from feeling disappointments stacking up and middle age possibilities diminishing to going “where I was told / to go — although not all the way to hell…/praying only for the sun/to burn my lost self here a while longer.”

In “At the Vernal Equinox near the 45th Parallel”, Marc speaks to a crow happy to have what seems like an unusually large amount of carnage to feed on after the yearly thaw: “I tell him we’re here, in this moment balanced/between dark and light, equator and pole.”

Reporting on a youthful drug experience, Marc allows us again to see the large emotional-developmental picture in the specific setting he is writing from: “Did I want to know the secret or not? The sun/asked me through my illusory skin. / I walked down the gravel road to get away / from myself and found myself wandering.”

Each time I finished reading a poem in Vengeful Hymns, I was eager for the next, for the poet to show me that, though I glimpse a self that is hurt and tired and fearful of getting somewhere, of ever meeting expectations, I can rely on a shift in consciousness to accept something brighter. In “The Crown Chakra,” he sets up the trouble:

In response, I donned a blaze-orange toque,
which smelled of mothballs from the cedar chest
the ex left behind, and tried to make my Heart
Chakra open since it was already broken.
But despite being pummeled, it remained
a selfish piñata, keeping its treasures…”

And he offers the healing:

And then, despite my best efforts, it was spring.
so I swept up the butts, tossed out my pouch
of Drum tobacco, tapered off my crying
Jags to once a fortnight , and looked hard into
the mirror, hoping to find a bright aura…
…put away my cap and darkest thoughts
and went bareheaded into April…

Marc has the ability to meditate on ordinary objects and allow psychological insights to sneak up on him and on his readers. In one of his several prose poems, “The Recipe Box,” he considers the cards inside and how they’ve become stained with batter, sauces and wine, how they stuff the box that will no longer close, how though he can afford to eat out and always thought he’d like to do that more, he craves the dishes he and his former wife made for one another. “Each menu produced a miraculous amount of leftovers, which you can’t stop but keep eating.”

Marc successfully captures sadness about the past, the way it creeps into our days through what we see in our landscapes and the everyday actions we take, but always he finds his way (and mine) back to the feeling that despite our unfulfilled yearnings, we are happy to be alive. Here are lines from “Heraclitus, Chagall, et al“:

And this day is this day, a river,
a habitation, a dream built of sunlight and heartbreak, curiously
irreproducible despite having all the ingredients
save for a door that lets you back
in once you swim
though it (and just try
to disprove this) inexplicably
into blue air.

We live each day once, but in writing our poems, we find again what we lived on the inside, how free we are to breath the blue sky of life no matter our situations. Marc Sheehan describes the dilapidated and illuminates how easily we could fall from the ledge we balance on into pools of total despair were we not inherently wanting to live and appreciate the beauty that comes our way.

Jefferson Carter
In quite a different voice, that of a curmudgeonly, married leftist and professor of writing, Jefferson Carter, in his collection My Kind of Animal, shows us what we all pretend not to know, or at least don’t say. Although he’s made a kind of peace with the world and his duties in it, he reserves his poems, which sometimes use raw language, as a place to say what he sees, what he wants to assuage.

In “Why I Drink at Poetry Readings,” Jefferson amuses us:

…Consider the universe
of smells, the last poem asks us,
consider the mutt in the bookstore
sniffing the drowsy readers’ legs,
his tail slapping to beat the band.
Why that cliché? That particular
dumb cliché? Ask the sangria…
Me? I’m loose
as a mesh coin purse, pacific
as the slowest suicide & I
smile, clapping to beat the band.

Calling Jefferson “Hero of the Humiliated, Mensch of the Unmentionable,” the poet William Pitt Root, continues, “No longer can we shun the rumor that he is indeed the long-awaited love child of Rimbaud, Jim Morrison, and Sarah Silverman, such is this poet’s irreverence.”

And so I chuckled as I read this blurb on the back of the attractive volume and as I read the poems, thinking of the ways in which I sometimes don’t reveal what I am really thinking, or, perhaps, worse, talk myself out of believing my feelings are based in the truth as I don’t want to surrender the image I somehow believe I must uphold.

In “Don’t Get Me Started,” Jefferson leaps from remembering his yoga class the night before to asking his wife to think about the soul being the color of duct tape or transparent plastic sheeting. She’s “tired of my negative bullshit,” “leaves the table, her toast/untouched” and from another room calls, “if you were happier, you’d be happier.”

Jefferson knows the persona he greats us with, knows the ways in which we will shake our heads at his crazy ideas, like measuring “anogenital” distance. But he draws us into his antics and the way they release the poet inside of us all. In “Washing Machine,” the poet is resting the side of his head on the lid of the washing machine, seemingly a very Jefferson Carter thing to do, as in poem that follows, “Measuring,” he tells his audience that when no one is home, he leans his forehead against the bare wall his wife wants to cover with oak shelves to pretend he is floating over the washes of his Arizona desert hometown. At the washing machine he receives and phrase, “moon trash.” He will “hear it for days.” And now I will too.

And I will smile thinking about the ways in which I could physically stay connected to what will dislodge poetry I could record. I could take my shoes and socks off and walk barefoot in the wet grass of the garden even though it is only 45 degrees outside. When I hear the hot air blowing out from the electric heaters at the bottom of walls in the rooms of my house, I could hold my hands in front of them to receive messages from the gods that have withheld spring so far this year. I could put my head to hot water tank whispering a thanks for how it will be my life line with a water supply should the expected maybe in my lifetime seduction earthquake happen along our fault. I am energized by the thought of exploring who I am and what I feel and think by describing my world’s vibrations and surfaces, by letting those textures and motions call words up in me.

We all know the shell of a curmudgeon is built to protect his extreme sensitivities and we all love the moment that shell cracks and the tender spirit we know wants to fool us into thinking it is tough takes center stage. In “Helen,” he reports that in yoga class he is practicing:

ujaiyi breath, pretending I’m fogging
a mirror, imagining my blurred reflection,
which is almost nothing & preparing
to bow & say the divine in me
bows to the divine in you.

Lana Hechtman Ayers

A voice can be a personality, but it can also be that of a character we recognize from myth, literature or fairy tales. Lana’s collection What Big Teeth: Red Riding Hood’s Real Life, (she has recently published a sequel, A New Red), contains poems in which Red Riding Hood offers hard won insights about women’s lives and from moments of anguish and pleasure in leaving the path she was raised to believe was the right and only one. In the book’s first poem, “Prologue: The First Story,” the persona of Red Riding Hood beseeches us to:

Beware appearances.
Once you have sown fire,
every story is about burning down.

But before this, the first story is about the dark.
Hark — the Wolf inhabits the dark.

When you close your eyes, he is there,
a river of teeth and claws.
He will tear you apart if you do not stop him.

Do not stop him.
How else to transform?

Lana’s Red Riding Hood confesses she “pined for skylines/of brick and glass,/conversation deeper than the grocery list.” She admits trouble is what she got and that she has no regrets, because, as she sees it, “you can’t find yourself/without first getting lost.” Two poems into the book and I know I am going to devour the poems ahead for their story and wisdom.

After losing her virginity to Hunter, who is far from a prince but a good catch in the small town Red is from, she marries him though she already realizes this lumberjack will not have a chance against a “cultured Wolf/who knows how to talk and paint and tango.” Sadly, she reflects in “Red Riding Hood at the Altar with Hunter, “I said I do/when I didn’t, / I didn’t.”

In the poem “Red Riding Hood Diaries about Sex with Husband Hunter” Red Riding Hood offers lines of truth gleaned from her experience:

When you marry an oak,
The body agrees to
Lady slippers in shadows.

Lana’s question is about how the self will be claimed after a child rearing that emphasized what was supposed to be enough for a woman — a husband to feed and clean up after.

When Red Riding Hood meets Wolf, a docent at the Museum of Art, she is ready to lick him clean until he howls and she howls herself awake and can write, “I bay into a new day.” Sin and self-knowledge can be synonyms, she tells us. “Blind obedience is/the destroyer only of the obedient.”

And so we traverse the universe Lana’s Red Riding Hood lives in and creates, remembering that poetry is the art form that changes one’s life, that puts one in a world not retreated from, a world anyone is stronger for having tasted. No wonder so many are afraid of poetry, advise that it makes no sense. Whoever allows the messages of poets into their being, sees their view and earned wisdom makes nothing but sense and then makes much of what is learned by rote roles nonsense.

“Red Riding Hood on Seduction” contains these lines:

the patience it takes

to go at another’s awkward pace,
the lust to listen to another’s talk
the way fire listens to the wood.

Oh, and my desire to be heard,
who knew (not me) its impacted depths?

Red Riding Hood paints and works in clay alongside Wolf. Scary and “wrong” though adultery may have been, Red Riding Hood discovers in “Red Riding Hood Kisses, Tells All” that “it primed me for becoming what I previously was not–/an independent woman of independent thoughts.”

We are not to feel that the Wolf is Lucifer in disguise, Lana’s Red Riding Hood declares in “Epilogue: Red Riding Hood for Real”:

The Wolf can howl
all he likes.

It’s only a request.
The rest

is a woman
making up her own mind.

Often as writers, we find ourselves writing in the third person (he or she) or in the second person (you), when our life experience seems hard to own, hard to tell. Taking that impulse a step further and exploring the situation through the persona of a known figure with whom one resonates is valuable in writing. That persona has a setting and a personality to leverage, a role she might settle for or change.

Marilyn Stablein
Perhaps poetry is always about grieving losses, of lives unlived, of lives undone and redone, of desires and loves unfulfilled. After writing 10 books of prose, Marilyn Stablein has published her first collection of poems, Splitting Hard Ground. In the poems, she traverses diverse landscapes she’s lived in and left behind in countries around the world, but the landscape she introduces that breaks my heart is the landscape of grieving for her son.

In “Lion’s Tooth ,” Marilyn deciphers grief as she gardens:

I know why the dandelion
is called lion’s tooth,
dent-de-lion. When you try
to pull one up roots cling
to earth like clenched teeth:
gritty and stubborn —
admirable qualities (except in a weed).

She meditates further on the dandelion: she has to dig deep but when she pulls the stem of the plant breaks off and will only grow back stronger. In the spring, the green leaves are way too bitter. In fall, she can blow the seeds for a wish — the wish to have her son back and hold him tight against her like “some tenacious weed/unwilling to let go.”

In “Heirloom,” the poem from which the book’s title comes, the poet receives a seed catalog in winter that makes her dream of summer, of the eight years that catalog has followed her through different climate zones, her son’s name on the label:

He ordered seeds the summer
before the accident. I’ll plant
a garden for you, Mom.
in the back yard.

The poet continues:

Without him winter languishes,
vines bereft of berries.

The garden fallow,
adobe earth parched to brick.
If I make a resolution
for the budding year
it should be to order seeds.

With luck they’ll get in the ground.
Even if I can’t harvest what I sow
hard work has its own rewards.
Who doesn’t love a seedling
splitting hard ground?

It is not possible to walk away unmoved from Marilyn’s poems, from the ground she offers us, ground that holds the long tap root of grief and hosts the small shoots of life that break the surface. Marilyn so gently weaves the pain of losing a child with the honoring of how important it is to hold that life dear; she wears her sorrow and her love as one garment. From “What Rises”:

Like milk boiling over the rim
Of a pan on the stove, or the ginger
Tea frothing up the sides of the pot,
Something wells, sweeps up from a place
I can’t see, jars the meridians of my spine.

Tears of being, mysterious exclamations:
For the sun, for this day, this life.
This is how love lives.
This is how I pray.

Writing poetry and reading poetry, we pay attention to ourselves in the deepest way, and to the world, with all of its pain and possibility. When we allow ourselves to speak through poetry, our own or others, we come alive, no matter that the world is full of disappointment, full of numbing interactions, full of dysfunction and wrong turns, full of loss. In poetry, we become clear to ourselves about our hopes, about our desires, about our love.