What Poetry Makes Happen

Writing is such a solitary act, most of the time, that’s it’s really worth celebrating when we find a writing community that is vibrant, thriving, and supportive of all its members. So this is celebration. Get out the cava!

First I want to celebrate our daughter Sarah Busse who, along with co-editor of Verse Wisconsin Wendy Vardaman,has been named one of the two Poets Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin.

Rich and I went up to Madison for some grandparent time and to attend the poetry reading in honor of these two poets laureate.
Along with the cava here's a sampling of poetry--


From Wendy--"Relying on Your Imagination to Discern the Question, a Prose Sonnet"

(at the Capitol, 2/25/11) Because what's the point if you're not enjoying your life. Because neither of us is getting any younger. Because it is an unseasonably pleasant February day in Wisconsin. Because it is an unpleasantly seasonable February day in Wisconsin. Because my children are with me. Because who needs all this stuff this house these plates this bed these chairs. Because it all comes down to backstory: who we & why we. Because there is free Ian's pizza from Finland and Arkansas at the top of the hill where we listen to Rabbi Biatch.

Because you can read the news on Avol's Bookstore windows and on Facebook and in poems and on people's faces. Because Tammy Baldwin, my congresswoman, and Beth Kiser, my children's grade school cello teacher stand on either side of me. Because "ROTC Kills." Because my husband writes Solidarity on his sign in seven languages while my teenagers get out their magic markers. Because poetry and plays came from one place, and theatrical gestures aren't stunts or tricks or mere or even just. Because 14 senators are just enough to make a sonnet, if you're careful, and I am letting go of perfect all the time and sometimes the performance is the poetry.

From Sarah--The Sound of People Learning to Make Music [excerpt]

...but the sound of people learning to make music
has never bothered me, maybe because
I grew up in a music filled house, and we
were always honking, squeaking , strumming
and pounding, trying our hands and breath in new
combinations, beginning again.

So it doesn't bother me now, when my son
pulls out his viola, or my daughter her ukulele,
the warm-ups and scales, rehearsal and process, tents
and manifestoes, are all just part
of the open-ended art of getting it wrong
in order to get it right. It's somewhere in this
not quite aimless, not quite tuneless wandering
we learn, if we ever will,
to shape a new music, new chords, that don't
reach for the usual resolutions. There is always
somebody, somewhere, practicing, learning--
not a rigid perfection, not the dictates of order,
but how to hear, and what to listen for.

Huzzah Kuzzah for a community that celebrates its poets by giving them a post and a platform to strengthen community and for a daughter who has always loved words and arranges them in intricate and beautiful ways.

Huzzah Kuzzah for a community that celebrates its poets and comes to hear them. The reading was held in a meeting room of the Goodman South Madison Branch Library. The room holds fifty people. It was full and past full to the rafters. Closer to seventy people came out on a Saturday afternoon to hear poetry. Some were poets themselves, some were friends and family, some were just curious, some one or two were hungry for the cupcakes. And all were welcome. There was no cost to admission.

Bruce Dethlefsen , Poet Laureate of Wisconsin gave a wonderful reading. Here's one of his poems--From Unexpected Shiny Things

at night
my mother bathed me in a white tub
scrubbed me with white soap
rubbed me in a white towel
hugged me and plugged me
into pajamas and the white sheets
an act so kind
so common
it barely even happened

Fabu, the third and most recent Poet Laureate of Madison, introduced the readers and read a bit from her own work. She did not read this one but I wish she had.

This Woman I Love
for Effie Florida Cunningham Partee
(Play Audio)

Down a winding dirt road
with rust colored rocks
and glistening beige pebbles
is where my Grandmother lived.

She woke up to clear blue skies
and billowing white clouds
My Grandmother went to sleep
when the shimmering sun was just down
and the still stars were floating outward.

Yet all the beauty
of Mississippi land
cannot nearly compare
with this woman I love.

Also on the program were Andrea Musher (Madison's second Poet Laureate) , and the members of the Hibiscus Collective, a group of Wisconsin women writers ”dedicated to ensuring that multicultural voices are heard in oral and written traditions” (from the program).

W.H. Auden wrote, "Poetry makes nothing happen." I've never quite agreed with that iron proclamation. Something happened last Saturday. People from all over Wisconsin, and two from Iowa, walked in out of the cold to listen and share poems about sorrow, humor, and the complications of living, to affirm as Rich once said, that "we do build worlds with words and heart touches heart through the tongue."

That's something.

Stories about food

One of my favorite pieces of writing, one that I have gone back to time and again over the years, is a cookbook published by the H.P. Hood Dairy in the 1940s. My copy is so old and tattered it begins on page ten.

What I love about this cookbook are the stories that are told by contributors and accompany each recipe. For example Mrs. James B. Sherman of Arlington, Massachusetts writes of the buckwheat griddle cakes:

"It would be worth getting up in a room so cold water froze in the glass to once again run downstairs to a breakfast of genuine old-fashioned buckwheat griddle cakes, with maple syrup, made from batter that had been rising while we slept. My Aunt. who is entering her 80th year, says she had them for breakfast 'on the farm' as far back as she can remember."

"...so cold water froze in the glass..." I would like to have known Mrs. Sherman and heard more of her stories. We all have stories about food experiences. Food ties us to family ("my aunt who is entering her 80th year"), food ties us to culture.

In my family in rural Maine we had a large garden and summertime was pickle-making time. I grew up with the sweet, vinegary, spicy smells of fresh-made pickles. And when our children were young and we went back to Maine they were part of pickle-making too. Food experiences become stories, or poems.

Our daughter Sarah (www.sarah.busse.com; www.versewisconsin.com), now a poet and pickle maker has said I can share her poem of pickle making.

Billy Mills's Bread and Butter Pickles

Plunge glass jars into clean hot water and soap.

(Wash the world, wash the weary feet of the traveler.)

Then scrub the cukes in cold and towel dry.

Slice onions thin. For accent pick a pepper,

Green or red. Salt it all down with ice.

The brine is vinegar and sugar in equal part,

Mustard and celery seeds, whole studs of clove,

Turmeric for color. Bring to a boil,

But only just.. Turn off the stove. This

Is the secret to keeping them crisp.

A small detail, but crisp is the trick, the unseen

Flick in the wrist, that makes them really good.

Where might love lead, if we were light on our feet?

If we were quick? That’s not our way.

Welcome the traveler, and don’t skip the turmeric.

We all have food stories--stories of special holiday dishes, stories of Friday night traditions, or of special Grandma or Grandpa recipes, stories of fishing, or mushrooming, or growing huge pumpkins.

Food stories are often the beginnings of longer works. And food stories are fun for kids, grownups, readers and writers. Once a month I want to feature food stories--some from picture books, some from cookbooks, some from other authors, some from you, I hope.

Let's eat. Let's write.

Saving and keeping

Last weekend we made a road trip to Decorah to walk the grounds and look at the gardens at Seed Savers Exchange. Seed Savers Exchange is devoted to saving the seeds of heirloom vegetables. According to their website, "Their collection started when Diane Ott Whealy's terminally-ill grandfather gave them the seeds of two garden plants, Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory and German Pink Tomato, that his parents brought from Bavaria when they immigrated to St. Lucas, Iowa in the 1870s."

The Whealys decided to develop a repository of seeds that individuals had saved for generations. Most seed companies had narrowed their offerings to only a few varieties and the couple was worried that crop diversity would soon be lost. Seed Savers has thousands of varieties of vegetable seeds now and has also expanded from that original mission to establish a herd of White Park cattle, some poultry, and an orchard of heritage apple trees.

As we walked the grounds and looked at the once endangered White Park Cattle and the beans and squash, tomatoes, corn, and other vegetables and flowers grown from seeds carefully tended, saved in envelopes and jars, I began to think about saving, keeping intact.

Of course "saving" reminded me of George Schaller's, Rick Ridgeway's and others' efforts to save the chiru. We have an urge to wholeness, to keep our world whole, to go against the current of loss and destruction that seems so frequent a part of modern life.

In the middle of the woods at Seed Savers I began to dream up some discussion questions for kids. Questions about losing things. What have they lost? What have I lost that I regret losing? A book of poems that my daughter Sarah wrote and made and gave to me. (She only made three and I lost one. I feel its loss often); one of a pair of hand knit mittens made by a friend no longer living, an old six quart kettle that my mother used to pick raspberries.

And I thought I would like to try doing some writing with students about losing and saving. Could we write something about those lost things? What they stand for? Why we remember that we lost them? Can we think of anything we have saved from being lost or tossed? An old toy? A cherished piece of furniture?

Sometimes what is lost gets found. And those are the happy occasions. Things are looking up for the chiru. A recent note from George Schaller tells me "chiru are now on the increase." But sometimes lost is lost--like passenger pigeons. Perhaps that's why saving feels so good.