Susan Rich taught for the Writing It Real in Port Townsend’s summer writing conference last June. At the conference, she read from the poems that were soon to be published by White Pine Press in the volume entitled Cures Include Travel as well as those in her previous, The Cartographer’s Tongue. She introduced attendees to the varied ways in which she connects her concerns for human rights around the world to her work as a poet, community builder and writing teacher.

She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia, and a human rights trainer in Gaza. She has lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later moved to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her international awards include invitations from the USIS to work in Zimbabwe as a writer-in-residence, a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, and a Ruben Rose Award from Israel.

Selections from her new volume appear on KUOW’s The Beat and Poetry Daily. Selections from The Cartographer’s Tongue can be found in interviews with Jack Straw Productions and Electica.

This week, I am pleased to discuss Cures Include Travel, with its rich use of poetry’s lyric values to evoke the humanity and devastation Susan witnesses at home and while living, teaching and traveling among war-torn nations and those housing refugees. The book’s three sections are aptly titled “Guide Book,” “Talking Geography,” and “Crossing Borders.” When we travel, we seek information, then we visit areas new to us, and then as we move from the one newly known area to another unknown area, we apply an ever-honed sense of observation and willingness to negotiate the slopes and valleys of new experience and learning. This is not only the way we make outer journeys but also the way we make inner journeys. While Susan’s poems take her readers on the traveler’s outer journey through countries in Eastern Europe and Africa, through images and metaphor, she takes them on a seeker’s inner pilgrimage; the poems embody Susan’s intimate thoughts about a world she loves, a world in which she is intent on creating connection despite loss and destructive forces.

Susan uses the craft of lyric poetry well in sensitively rendering her self-reflection and the stories of those who have touched her. She teaches us that when we see the world with a traveler’s observant eyes, we also see beauty in our own lives, even in the midst of sadness.

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“Not a Prayer” is the title of the poem that opens the book. In it, the poet watches late afternoon light on window frames, a vestibule table, an oak chair, and a lavender bowl, realizing the light is turning them to “honey, butter, mustard seed.” She is, as she says, “living still, for the first time all day” and letting the “sunlight speak.”

 In this light, the poet is reminded about the recurring quality of transformation, as dusk “enraptures” the day. After receiving the reminder, the poet’s attention shifts to “the half-averted gaze, the glass / of morphine placed by her bedside.” We learn suddenly in the poem’s last two lines that this is “not a prayer” for the survival of the other, who is terminally ill, not a prayer for an unrealistic outcome. However, we can’t help but see it as a vehicle for the poet to document the moment before loss, before transformation to a new state for both the terminally ill loved one and the speaker. It is a prayer about preparing for experiencing a coming loss, for handling the ways the speaker will change because of it. In valuing close observation of the moment, the poet moves beyond thinking about how there is not a prayer to composing one for all of us who write in still moments, that we may find more of life’s wisdom.

With such strong grounding, it is impossible for me not to want to continue on the journey laid out in the collection. I turned to “Flight Path,” about embarking on a journey by plane. The poem is in answer to an underlying question many ask travelers–“Are you lonely?” As Susan considers loneliness and how seekers and travelers must cope with it, she shares the image of her life drifting “to the side like litter” and then writes about what comes in its place, the restoration of her ability to be:

Listen, what if we could leave here–

with more than velocity, more
than a thump, then a moan, could we

grasp the silver glint of sandpipers
as they angle from water to air,

their bodies arced in unison
hesitant, illumed, bare–

It is this kind of opportunity that many of us, especially artists, long for. We want to be in life, not watching it tick by on the hands of a clock. Sometimes, we reach a state of flow, the sensation of being outside of time, and we savor it, all the more because it is transitory. Travel, like writing, heightens this kind of insight and sometimes frees us to arrive at the place of just being, a place without cause, without effect that welcomes us, even if we are wounded, a place we know we will return from all to soon with the inevitable resumption of our temporal lives, so often dissociated from the peace we have experienced at the heart of existence. As Susan writes in her poem “Iska’s Story”:

Someone in white lifts you up
alters your direction

so that now
you climb out of the rubble
out into the street. You are
blood-covered, shrapnel wedged in

like stickpins in your shoulder
but you’re fine
and then there’s no one there to thank.

No one wearing white
No angels here.

This poem ultimately raises these questions: How do we cope as we search for what can release us? How do we cope with the truth that such deliverance is at best temporary? One answer is to combine traveling, which forces us into peculiar situations, new sights, brief alliances, beginnings and endings with memories of situations, images and alliances in our non-traveling lives. Using such association, we learn more about ourselves, our yearnings, our wounds and our triumphs. In the poem “In Search of Alternative Endings,” the poet begins:

Endings come subtle as shadows that interlace, then dissolve
on an ice-covered pond. The first I remember a hand on my breast–

at the small of my back, the uncovering of a secret life.
The knowledge that pain is always increasing.

Is there a form for how to tell this right?

The poem goes on to include indelible images of life amidst carnage:

and on an abandoned grocery cart, surrounded by chipped glass
and rags, is an intact, nearly frozen, banana chiffon pie.
The occasion of its creation so far from where we’ve arrived. Hearts crack open,
an infant lost, but an appetite remains for kites and stars…

The “appetite for kites and stars” embodies the idea that we can not write poetry about death without evoking life and longing; if we are persistent in allowing our words to lead us to confront enormous sadness, as Susan has, we find heights and the “all-at-once” that bring peace and connection; if we do not fully feel painful losses, we cannot experience ourselves as threads in mystery’s tapestry. Once we have had that perception, we yearn to evoke what we find near the center of things. Whether it comes from someone else’s story that affects us or from trying to understand our lives and continue, we are soothed for a moment and resume searching, the beautiful and frustrating state of those who want to experience life deeply.

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We have much to learn from Susan’s poems. Writing in response to her work can help each of us lift our own voices from beneath sorrow’s heavy burdens. Here is an exercise to help you write, as Susan does, based on some of the stanzas and strategies in “Iska’s Story.” In this poem, the poet is at an artists’ retreat and meets Iska, a dancer and refugee from the carnage in her homeland of Somalia. The poet captures her own mood as she is away from home, concentrating on writing and getting to know Iska. She also provides lines and stanzas where Iska speaks of her past filled with violence. As the images that evoke the poet’s mood are juxtaposed against the stories Iska tells, the reader begins to view life through a different lens to receive a truth: As long as things are not right in parts of the world, as long as the violent side of human nature destroys lives and lands on personal and enormous scales, our own selves are also deeply affected.

Responding to the poet’s interest, Susan writes that Iska says, “You can never really write what happened anyway; it’s like a hole that fills constantly with water.” In her notes at the book’s end, Susan attributes this line to Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent, in his book War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning.

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Here’s how you can use Susan’s technique to write a poem about a disturbing life history. First, you must decide whose story you are going to tell. Do you know someone who has left a home country to escape oppression? Do you know someone who is suffering from a debilitating illness? Caring for someone who is ill? Do you have a child who believes the worst has just happened? Do you remember a younger self who suffered? Any of these people can be the person for whom you write their story.

When you have selected the person whose story you will tell, find an article, interview, book, play or poem by someone who is currently or has lived through tragedy–holocaust, natural disaster, or war. Or, think of something a relative, colleague, teacher or newscaster has said that pertains to difficult times. Write down this quote or line of dialog, making sure it is one you can imagine the person you are writing about saying.

The writing you do to tell the person’s story will be in parts. You will alternate your words with words you attribute to the person you’ve chosen. In this way, you will tell the person’s story and evoke your inner connection to it. You will not ask the other person questions in your “parts” of the writing. Instead, you will write from your state of being and your life now, finding images that evoke them. For instance, in her poem “Iska’s Story,” Susan writes what she sees where she is:

VI.

Across from my cabin, the worn

weathered box
of an old man’s mobile home;

he’s planted rows of plaid armchairs.

Next, she writes some of what Iska has told her in a short narrative:

VII.

One guy was just going, throwing grenades
constantly at that hour. So whenever
anybody had to do chores

they had to do them before 5:00 P.M.
and then just go inside the house and pray to God.
Wait and see when you were going to be hit.

Part VII of “Iska’s Story” casts a spell over Susan’s images from Part VI: Odd as the static armchairs are, they become symbols of a life of safety compared to the life Iska describes. Or maybe not, we might begin think. They are empty. What dangers might the people who would sit there be facing? What exile might they have entered? The selection of what the poet sees juxtaposed against Iska’s experience changes everything.

As you write “parts” for you and for the person you have selected and keep the back and forth going with your specific images and their short specific narrative excerpts, find an appropriate place to put the quote you have selected into the mouth of the person whose story you are telling. That will work as a comment that pulls together the perception of the poet and the experience of the person whose story is being told.

Title your work using Susan’s model, “Iska’s Story.” Next, attribute the borrowed phrase to its originator with an epigraph something like, “After Chris Hedges in War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning.”

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Fragmentary writing, whether it leads to a poem or a lyric essay, will allow you to reveal what you might otherwise not be able to articulate. As Emily Dickinson wrote, we must come at things slant. Reading Susan Rich’s poetry and traveling with her through inner and outer geography to finally arrive home, we experience the strength of a skilled poet; we learn to trust that the craft of the lyric poem provides strength.