I have only posted once on this website since I got it, which is pitiful. I am hoping now that I’ve completed (finally, mostly, hopefully) my new poetry manuscript, I’ll be able to engage more with the world. It seems to be a process, for me, of shutting out the world followed by opening up and taking everything in. Not a very balanced way of living, but this is how I write.

I’ve just connected with Pandora’s collective, and am going to be participating in their Summer Dream Literary Arts Festival in Stanley Park. Sounds like they have been doing great work for years while I’ve been changing diapers and singing along to Baby Beluga. Now that two out of three kids are old enough to enjoy a bit of storytelling themselves, I’m hoping we can enjoy a bit of what Vancouver has to offer as a family.

In truth, even when I could, I didn’t attend a lot of events. I do love hearing work out loud, especially when its work I love and it is performed well. I also enjoy hearing authors talk about their work, but I love even more the private act of reading, preferably alone with a glass of wine (or, more likely these days, a bowl of leftover salad—bliss!) The pleasure of the text is, for me, generally best enjoyed in solitude.

Spring is everywhere in this contrary city of ours—cherry blossoms, but no snow for the Olympics! I have been thinking about beginnings as the red flowering current push forth their blossoms. What makes the beginning of a poem hook the reader?

Consider this line by Lorna Crozier:
Who wants to hear about
two old farts getting it on
in the back seat of a Buick,
                        –Lorna Crozier, My Last Erotic Poem

and this unforgettable one by Marie Howe:

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement.
–Marie Howe, Practicing.

Consider Gerald Manley Hopkins’ great struggle against darkness and despair:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee

and Louise Gluck’s opening from the depths:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
        –The Wild Iris

And Wayde Compton’s call and response poem that brings us all in:

caller         got a treasure map and a silver pick.
all        how you gonna know where to dig?
        –Jump Rope Rhyme of the 49er Daughters

and two poets we lost recently, whose voices cannot be replaced (and so, with the beginning, the promise of spring, also comes the ending, the silence).

And shall I tell him that the thought of him
turns me to water
                –P.K. Page, Water and Marble

My white mare on the Punjabi plains, the stamp of her hooves
                –Kuldip Gill, Ghazal V

Send me your favorite beginnings, and I’ll post them. I won’t promise when, because then I’ll break no promises. Let’s say I’ll post them before spring shifts into summer…

Snowdrops and daffodils!

Rachel

Rachel

I’d like to invite everyone to the next Cross Border reading featuring writers Peter Pereira, Brenda Miller, Shannon Stewart, and Nancy Mauro.  To find out more information about the readers, click here.