Today's installment of Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee, in which I read good poems by other people while we all wake up over coffee. Enjoy!
On December 28th at 3 PM (PT), I'll be joining my writer friends Melissa Stephenson and Emily Withnall to discuss how our writing and reading went in this pandemic year. Of course, it's a virtual event, and of course, you're cordially invited.
Invitation here: https://fb.watch/2Eufb78-Nl/
Event link here: https://www.facebook.com/events/419627052512977
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Every Sunday I read good poems by other people while we all drink coffee. Thanks for joining!
Poems read:
(The microphone, while "working," did not cut the monitor hum. So. We'll just carry on and try again next Sunday.)
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| Trouble on my mind by Dana, used under CC license |
Mercury is just out of retrograde, it’s the morning after a yet-undeclared election where deaths from climate change, inequity, and Covid are all at stake, and I’m cutting up the last two chanterelles from a disturbingly dry mushroom season.
After the mushrooms, I’ll cut up two garden potatoes, one purple, one pink, and the rest of my cubanelle peppers and fry a couple eggs. I dried and stuffed the other hundred some peppers, and all that remains is a handful of fresh banana peppers and poblanos. As my breakfast is sautéing, I’ll bake one of the sixty some winter squash on racks in the back room; the temperature there is 55 degrees so the squash will last through the winter. I’ve named this variety “That Crazy Plant”; it comes from the seeds of a mystery squash that took over my garden the summer of 2019. It looks like a cross between a pumpkin and a turban squash and has a remarkably sweet bright orange flesh. I’ve moved the potatoes and carrots from the garage to the backroom, a room otherwise delegated to the dog and the squash, after a surprise snowstorm where temperatures dropped from the 60 to 12 degrees and some six inches of snow fell. I’ve spent the last few nights talking on the phone with friends while cutting the tops off hundreds of carrots. Over the next month, I’ll juice them, dry them, grill them, sauté them, ferment them, share them with friends and the foodbank, and eat them raw.
People say they have to find things to do during Covid, but I find I cannot get through all I need to do, though I often wonder about what I’m doing and why. I wonder about the notion of work, of a job. I don’t need a winter of food stored in freezers and dried in cabinets. And yet, answering this calling to grow food, to feed people, to understand what it means to grow most of what you eat, feels necessary. I feel compelled to do it, and it helps keep me steady—planting seeds, popping dried beans from their pods, saving carrot blossoms and sunflower heads.
Still, my job has always been to write, and it has always come first. I don’t have children: I dream and I write. I struggle with the simple tasks of daily living—paying bills, making doctor appointments, cleaning my house, calling for repairs, even opening mail. I was the child who couldn’t regularly brush her hair or teeth or clean out her locker or show up anywhere on time because she was dreaming and writing and writing and dreaming. I have never been suited for much else, and it has saved me throughout my life. Made me whole. Made my soul feel steady. Writing is that great creative force, that beautiful arc across the night sky, dusty and eons deep. It is the most important thing I have to offer. I have a duty first to vision. A sort of seeing that is transmutable and necessary to me and to the world.
Let’s be honest: I haven’t written enough since Covid sent us into isolation, despite the very clear invitation—that is, long periods of time alone at home. A dream, really, an ideal field, like a spring garden covered with the compost of fall leaves. Every day I wake up forgiving myself for not writing enough. I try to be good to myself. But it hurts not to write.
The apricot smell of the chanterelles steadies the panic that tries to rise up in me. What I know about this day as Mercury moves out of retrograde is how deep the change this country has to make, how deep the change I have to make. My job in this moment, on this day, is to transform. I don’t know how long it will take, or even what it looks like, but it must happen. And only a lifetime—fifty-three years—of dreaming and writing and writing and dreaming could have prepared me for this most necessary job. I have to trust my own role in the movement from seed to fruit to fallow earth.
Later today, I will clean with a dry cloth several of the winter squash in my backroom. The dog bed is still covered with carrot tops and unfinished carrots the dog got into a few nights ago—purple and orange and yellow and scarlet carrots, crooked and straight, enormous and tiny. The squash are weighty in my hands, and they glow as I wipe the cloth over their imperfections.
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Pandemic Meditations is a weekly series in which creative people share responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Find more meditations at http://www.erinpringle.com/p/pandemic-meditations-series.html
In the bleak midwinter, 1.6 million people have died across the world, and counting.
In the bleak midwinter, more than 297,000 people have died from coronavirus in the U.S., and counting.
On December 9, 2020, more people died in a single day in the U.S. due to coronavirus than the number of deaths on 9/11.
If ever there was a bleak midwinter, this is it.
I hope you and your families are safe, although I know as I write this that I have many friends who have been sick, who have long-term illness, and who have lost loved ones. I thought of you and your families as I made this arrangement of this song.
Please wear your masks and get the vaccine as soon as you can. I want to give you hugs, and I am getting bored of conducting a choir of Liz x 6. I’m aching to sing with other people.
But mostly, I want you all to be alive when we come out of this!
Please, do what you can so that you and I and our remaining loved ones make it out of this bleak midwinter, alive.
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| Liz Rognes photo by Rajah Bose |
I read good poems by other people while we all drink coffee.
Enjoy!
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| Lily |
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| Lily |
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| Lily |
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| Lily |
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| Lily |
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| Somewhere in California photo by Azaria Podplesky |
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| Somewhere in California photo by Azaria Podplesky |
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| Somewhere in Oregon photo by Azaria Podplesky |
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| Somewhere in Oregon photo by Azaria Podplesky |
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| Azaria Podplesky |
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| Azariai Podplesky |
Tea
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| Mandy Chapman Orozco |
Poets read:
Wendell Berry, from his book A Small Porch; Kim Addonizio from her book Tell Me; Polly Buckingham from The River People; Adrienne Rich from The Dream of a Common Language; Marge Piercy from The Moon is Always Female; James D'Agostino from Slur Oeuvre
The only word I have been able to find for the Pandemic before us has been "tragic." Whether in regards to how sections of leadership has handled it, or how divisive and separate things have become, I have seen tragedy all around me since March.
I am tired.
Through this Pandemic though, I have witnessed beauty. I have seen artists persevere as they have continued to create regardless of what the world experiences around them--somehow feeling compelled to continue to speak on the climate of their culture, just like the long history of artists before them.
I have found myself becoming a filmmaker. A wild transition from theatre artist. After being an adjunct at Spokane Falls Community College, which had me directing a freshly adapted play into a film through Zoom, I found myself clawing to learn more about this newfound craft.
As a lover of tragedy, I could not help but be inspired to tell a bit of tragedy when asked for my Pandemic Meditation.
In chapter 6 of Aristotle's Poetics he states:
"So tragedy is an imitation not of people, but of action, life, and happiness or unhappiness, while happiness and unhappiness have their being in activity, and come to completion not in a quality but in some sort of action …Therefore it is deeds and the story that are the end at which tragedy aims, and in all things the end is what matters most …So the source that governs tragedy in the way that the soul governs life is the story."
Remnants was born on the heels of these contemplations.
I invite you into Holden's world.
This film encompassed collaboration from so many incredible artists, and we worked for months to put this together. I am forever grateful for the chance to create and a platform to do so with. I hope you enjoy the piece, as it is my first independent film.
Ask yourself, after months of isolation, how do you manage to meet outside expectations if your inner life is turmoil?
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And now, for this week's featured presentation, Remnants, directed and acted by Dahveed Bullis:
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| Dahveed Bullis |