Read more about Kathleen at her website. Her recent publication Plume has been selected for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and will be published in February 2012.

Enjoy one of her poems below which was featured on the Writer’s Almanac in 2010.

Gil’s Story

by Kathleen Flenniken

Many of our poets in the 2012 lineup are also teachers at universities and high schools, balancing the life of writing with the responsibilities of education.

Ellen Bass lives in Santa Cruz, CA, and is a faculty member at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in Forest Grove, OR. In the low-residency MFA model, students work independently with a mentor and gather for intensive residency periods twice a year. Bass usually mentors four or five students at a time through this program. In 2011, Pacific University’s program was ranked as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs in the country. Jessica Gigot, one of the Skagit River Poetry Project communication directors, had an opportunity to talk with her about her experiences as a teacher of poetry and her life as a poet.

JG: How long have you been a poetry teacher?

EB: I have taught poetry for a long time, over forty years. Most of my teaching has been in the community and I teach at retreats and conferences nationally and internationally. This is my first time teaching in a university program. In the past I’ve taught mostly alone and it’s really wonderful to be part of a team. I have been teaching for five years at PU.

JG: What do you think about the low-residency model? This seems to be a more common option for MFA programs.

EB: The low-residency model makes it possible for students who have established lives, jobs and family responsibilities, to be able to study poetry deeply. Also, developing poets can choose a school based on who they want to work with, rather than be limited to the schools in their area. Students come to Pacific U because there are poets there who they want to learn from. It’s like an apprenticeship.

Most of our students are serious about wanting to become the best poets they can possibly be. And all of our students become insightful and joyful readers of poetry.

JG: How do you connect with your students?

The residencies are a 10-day immersion, so in addition to workshops, craft talks, readings, and discussion, we also eat meals together and have time to talk informally. Then, over the semester, my students send me their work via email along with letters in which they talk about their process of writing, the poets they’ve been reading, ask questions, discuss issues of craft, and bring up anything else that’s important to them about writing. I send them back critiques  of their work and a long letter responding to their interests and concerns, making suggestions  and including notes on the craft that I hope will be useful to them. This is an on-going conversation about their work, their reading, and the life of a poet. It’s an intimate and in-depth relationship.

JG: Is it hard to teach poetry?

EB: (Laugh) That is a great question. It is challenging to teach poetry. That challenge is part of why it continues to be interesting. I like working one to one, teaching each person as an individual. Every student has different strengths and weaknesses, and as a teacher my job is to learn how to teach each person.

One of the challenges in teaching poetry is the same as it is in writing poetry—you learn many aspects of the craft, many skills, but the art is in when and how to apply them. Nothing applies all the time. For example, you learn something about how to create a metaphor, but then you can run wild with them and make a marvelous poem or you can clutter up a poem with them. If we could just learn something and do it all the time, it wouldn’t be so hard! But that’s what makes it infinitely challenging both to write and to teach.

Some students have strengths that are apparent from the beginning, but with others they go along on a plateau for a while and then make leaps into territory that I couldn’t have anticipated.

I am a very, very, very slow learner and I didn’t really show much promise early on.

JG: (Laugh) I find that hard to believe.

EB: The learning process for me was slow and arduous. I am particularly skilled in teaching, I think, because of this. Much of what I do was not instinctual, but a learned process, so I really can teach strategies of how to work the poem.

And part of my slow learning was because for many years I suffered from a lack of exposure to good teachers.

JG: Who was your favorite teacher?

EB: My most amazing mentor has been Dorianne Laux. I began working with her in the late nineties after a long time being away from writing poetry. I had been writing non-fiction and I longed to return to poetry, but I was at a stuck place and needed a teacher, the right teacher. People often say, I couldn’t have done it without so and so, and sometimes it’s just a way of expressing appreciation—they really could have done it. But in this case, it’s literally true. My poems started to change really fast after I started working with Dorianne.

The other teacher who was essential to me was Anne Sexton who I studied with when I was getting my MA in Creative Writing at Boston University in 1970 (in those days they didn’t yet call them MFA’s). Anne’s public persona was dramatic, flamboyant, but as a teacher she was very thoughtful and respectful of students and she loved teaching. Anne encouraged me to expand and write more and she plucked me out of the waters of acerbic criticism. Without her, I might have given up right then.

JG: I love the poem “Relax.” Can you tell me  where this poem came from?

EB: Of course, I’m mainly talking to myself in the poem. I am not someone who is relaxed. I’m a little high-strung. So I talk to myself and try to cultivate the perspective of this poem. Although I don’t have a formal meditation practice, I try to maintain an informal practice in the moment. The principle of the Buddhist story in this poem is one I’ve been chewing on for a good forty years.

The poem also was inspired by a friend who was in a long depression. When you love someone you want to be patient and not complain that you’re getting tired of their depression, but of course you are getting tired of it. So the poem was an outlet for me. I needed to present my most patient self to her, but in the poem, I could just tell her to relax! That’s one of the best things about poems—they are there for you to say whatever you want!

JG: Is it hard to find a balance between the teaching and writing process?

EB: Yes. I am working on being more selective and devoting more time to writing.

JG: Your most recent book is The Human Line, published by Copper Canyon Press. Can you tell me how these poems came together? There seems to be a strong theme of science and our relationship as humans to our own biology?

EB: All of these poems were written in a five-year period between when my last book (Mules of Love, 2002) was published and when this book was published in 2007. At that time I had a lot of stability in my personal life and I think that gave me the ability to focus outward to the actual world, the science of the world. When I was a young person I thought science was boring. I took a long time to look outside myself at all. Now I’m always thinking about the fact that we are on this planet moving around in this incredibly mind-boggling space with all of these natural laws governing us. There isn’t anywhere that you can look that isn’t interesting scientifically.

My partner is an entomologist and I have some new poems coming up on insects. I don’t feel like I have a lot of control over my subject matter. When the muse gives me something, I just say yes. Chickens are also showing up recently in my poems.

JG: I hope we will get to hear some of these new poems at this year’s festival?

EB: I am looking forward to it.

You can learn more about Ellen Bass at her website: www.ellenbass.com

What gives Giovanni such wide appeal? One clue is her tell-it-like-it-is honesty.  She is famously quoted as saying: “If now isn’t a good time for the truth I don’t see when we’ll get to it.” And after she was treated for lung cancer – the disease that killed both her mother and her sister —  she denied easy platitudes that cancer had made her a better person: “(I)f it takes a near-death experience for you to appreciate your life, you’re wasting somebody’s time.”

Here is Giovanni talking about poetry, and its audience, in a 2010 interview with PBS Art Beat host Jeffrey Brown.

Poetry to me has always been like opera. You know, we’re not like rock ‘n’ roll; we’re like opera. There’s going to be a smaller group who is going to love what we do.…

I think that we as poets have to be very careful with how we treat ourselves, because if we’re not careful with ourselves we will start to inappropriately compare ourselves. And we’ll say, Golly, poetry doesn’t sell the way that trashy novels sell. And it doesn’t. And poetry doesn’t get made into movies. Nobody’s going to say, ‘Oh, Nikki, I really love ‘Ego Tripping,’ I’m going to make a movie out of that.’ That’s not going to happen.

Poetry is complete. And I think that we have to recognize, well maybe we’ve done good work and maybe we’ve reached at this particular point a maximum audience. Our problem is not to worry about that so much as to make sure that we are reaching the people who want to be reached.

Kidnap Poem

Ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i’d kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter

You to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see

Play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i’d kid
nap you

–Nikki Giovanni

Eileen Myles

I’m a Sherwin Bitsui fan because his poems have a calm murmuring forward motion that I deeply trust and a surrealism that feels older than French and may be engaging both poet and reader in scarier transitions than the deliberate disordering of the senses not that I am dumping on Arthur Rimbaud. But Sherwin Bitsui writes “in” Native American in as unambivalent a way as I write in Boston-ese or something else. And since he is also reading a whole tradition of European and South American literature or maybe Spanish or maybe it’s language poetry I simply love that there are many kinds of disordering animating and rerouting factors erupting and surging and patterning his poem from line to line. He codes this richness coolly. His poem “Asterisk” opens with these head-scratching lines:

Fourteen ninety something,

      something happened

which heralds an ensuing world of distrust, observation and possibility. But he dispenses with the puzzled affect right away:  “and no one can pick it out of the lineup…” darkening his almost Jewish comedian’s coy meander onto the stage. Yet the indeterminate ‘something’ seems permanently hired to investigate the whole world  — it prowls the poem:

something lurking in the mineshaft—

…

and motor oil seeps through the broken white line of the teacher’s loom.

…

something, / can’t loop this needle into it.

I love that “this.” Is it the writing line, this needle, as it’s held in the fingers of the narrator, is the narrator’s camera pointed at something unmistakable in the hand of someone else that we know and who are we? Sherwin’s intimacy disorders everything a tad and allows us to lightly graze over a universe of discrete harsh things, and strangely beautiful:  “asterisk water towers invisible, / while fragrant rocks in the snout remain/unnoticed in the bedroom, /because the bridegroom wanted in, /Pioneers wanted in, /and the ends of our feet yellowed to uranium at the edge of fear.” There’s such cascading toxicity in his poem. Whole stories can be imagined from Sherwin Bitsui’s quick moves. His poetry is almost bad in its dedication to risk. The ends of our feet are not our toes necessarily. Language is doubling throughout his poem, assigning guilt and gently letting complicitude lap the hungry consciousness of the reader. Am I the bridegroom reading this, wanting desperately to know more than the partial and shifting landscape the poet semi-allows. Sherwin Bitsui occupies consciousness in a drifting and sound way. Environmental crimes, personal ones and the collective damage of that something which happened in history recently or long ago leave each of us and everyone in a new world in which we must manage to speak with each other as best we can while not handing over the keys of our desires and demands too readily. His complexity and ease is exactly this. His “asterisk” beckons and will not give it up. His punctuation on the horizon makes me watch. What am I to do.

Asterisk
By Sherwin Bitsui

Fourteen ninety-something,
something happened
And no one can pick it out of the line-up,
Its rising action photographed
When the sign said: do not look
irises planted inside here.

But look—
Something lurking in the mineshaft—
A message, ice in his cup,
third leg uprooted but still walking.
It peers over his shoulder at the dirt road dug into the mesa’s skirt,
where Saguaro blossoms bloom nightfall at the tip of its dark snout,
And motor-oil seeps through the broken white line of the teacher’s loom.

Something,
Can’t loop this needle into it,
Occurs and writes over their lips with thread,
Barnacles on their swings;
fleas hyphened between their noses;
eels asphyxiating in the fruit salad.

Remember, every wrist of theirs acclimates to bruises.

Kindling from their plum-colored family tree flank the gloves’ aura
and asterisk water towers invisible,
While fragrant rocks in the snout remain
Unnoticed in the bedroom,
Because the bridegroom wanted in
Pioneers wanted in
And the ends of our feet yellowed to uranium at the edge of fear.

There are lots happening with poetry at the center. Tomorrow, Village Books in Bellingham is hosting a free poetry reading from 7-8:30 with five poets. Should be a an inspiring evening. There is a fund raiser for the Festival after the reading, but I’m told that it’s sold out. YAHOO!

More later.

Village Books in Bellingham is hosting a free “Voices of Place” reading on January 16th with a $25 poet reception fund-raiser afterward. Six area poets will read from their works.

MoNA is partnering with the Project and hosting a Poetry and Valentine Making Party for Adults on February 13th with food and wine. Poets Samuel Green and Lorraine Ferra with guide us through the word-smithing while a visual artist will be on hand to help us make that perfect valentine. Also in February, Cgynus Gallery and Maple Hall in La Conner will be the place to be on February 20th for a Benefit Concert and Art Sale.

MoNA once again will be the site for our Spring MoNA Poetry Series in March. We are still working on the details but it will be a grand evening of poetry and music.
And of course, throughout all these months, we have our poets collaborating with students and teachers in our area schools for week-long residencies. Poetry is alive and well! Happy New Year!