National Poetry Month 2023, Week Four: Hannah Linden’s “My daughter says the ghosts were busy last night”

I first read Hannah Linden’s poetry in 2014, when we were both part of Jo Bell’s “52” group of writers–a number of us committing to write a poem each week for the entire year. We shared our work-in-progress in response to the prompts Jo supplied us with each week in a private Facebook group. Hannah’s writing stood out from the group and I was delighted when she announced last year that her first pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, was coming out in the Fall. (A pamphlet is what the Brits call a small selection of poems; what we in the States might call a chapbook.) 

Hannah is from a working class background, as she puts it, born in a “cotton mill town slum” in northern England. Poetry “didn’t seem like something one of us could write or think of as ‘ours,’” she said in an interview. Later, she “started writing poems on paper bags,” while working the register at a supermarket. Her co-workers “told people to come to their till instead because ‘can’t you see the poet is writing!’” 

Some early encouragement from a teacher led her to enter some poems into a prize competition, which she won. She went to university–the first in her family to do so–but “felt in awe of all writers, out of my depth and that I was kidding myself to think I could be ‘one of them’.” She gave up writing poetry until she was in her early thirties, having moved from the North to Devon, where she took some poetry classes, but got discouraged by a teacher there, and didn’t read or write poetry for fourteen years while raising her children. A random meeting with Mike Sims of the Poetry Society led to her sharing poems with him and he encouraged her to write more. Then she joined Simon Williams’ Poem-a-Day forum and “52.”

In the interview, Hannah explained that in these poems she “was interested in the way ‘mother’ is both a role and a relationship.” The Beautiful Open Sky opens with a series of poems exploring the damage inflicted by a narcissistic mother. The voice in the poems shifts from the mother “saying what she thinks her children may be feeling and then she lets them start to speak for themselves whilst navigating the role of a single parent.” Finally, “as her children mature, the mother starts to relate to them more as independent people and, in the last poem, the adult daughter herself is speaking in the poem’s title as the mother comes to terms with letting go.”

As Hannah says in the interview, “the ‘beautiful open sky’ is a way of trying to see the world when a series of situations are weighing you down, oppressing or terrifying you.”

My daughter says the ghosts were busy last night

I’m getting old. I don’t hear the creaks 

even on the nights she wakes me, unable

to settle into the cooling house. It could be

owls, I say. They call across the valley, hunt

and flirt with each other. Maybe,  she says,

I hear more than one species these days.

Insects in the loft, perhaps. But I know she’s

thinking of the people who lived here before—

those we never met or the one we try to forget.

And of the loneliness of the nights

when she should be somewhere else.

It’s too safe for her here now, and today

she’s going out into the world again.

Soon I’ll be the one listening

to the roof expanding, contracting.

–Hannah Linden, from The Beautiful Open Sky

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In case you missed it: I am excited to host a Writing Retreat there from 13-18 October 2023! Join me for 5 days of writing and immersion in the nature, food, and culture of the Azores. We’ll explore the island, focus with deep attention, expand our horizons, and tap into the stories within. Details and registration at https://www.scottedwardanderson.com/azores-retreat 

My Year in Writing: 2019

Scott Edward Anderson reading from Dwelling: An ecopoem at Sacramento Poetry Center, March 2019. (photo by Lara Gularte)

Now is the time of year when I take stock of my writing over the past twelve months.

Here is “My Year in Writing: 2019”:

–FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances published by Homebound Publications in September 2019; book launch party on 10 November in Brooklyn; included on Book Authority’s Best New Family Books list

–DWELLING: an ecotour, including readings in Berkeley, Diamond Springs, and Sacramento, CA, Philadelphia and New Hope, PA, NYC, and at the ASLE Biennial Conference at UC Davis, where I also moderated a panel called “Poetry Can Save the Earth”

-Essay, “Whitman & the Sea,” published in Schuylkill Valley Journal in print and online

-Poem, “Cândido Rondon Remembering Teddy Roosevelt,” published in The Esthetic Apostle

-Revisions to and progress on my #WIP, a research-driven memoir I’m calling THE OTHERS IN ME: A Journey to Discover Ancestry, Identity, and Lost Heritage

-Started a long poem, “Azorean Suite,” a section of which will appear in the upcoming edition of Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal, in my original English and in a Portuguese translation by Azorean poet, José Francisco Costa

-Essay, “My Pessoa,” to appear in Pessoa Plural next June

-Wrote introduction to David Swartz’s English translation of Nuno Júdice’s novella, THE RELIGIOUS MANTLE, which will be published in 2020 by New Meridian Arts

…all in all, not a bad writing year!

2018: My Year in Writing Review

Scott Edward Anderson reading at Cornelia Street Cafe, October 2018. Photo by Den Petrizzo.

This is the time of year when I look back on my writing life over the past twelve months. I’m grateful for all my readers, editors, and listeners in 2018.

As the Walter Lowenfels’s quote at the top of my blog says, “One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement.” I don’t take any of one of you miracles for granted. Thank you!

January — My craft essay, “Poetry as Practice,” published in Cleaver Magazine. Shanti Arts accepts DWELLING: an ecopoem for release later in year!

February/March — Finish the only poem I complete this year, “Phase Change,” with the help of Alfred Corn, currently on submission. (If you don’t know Alfred’s work, you really should check out his books by following the link above.)

April — My essay on Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” accepted by Schuylkill Valley Journal, published in Spring 2018 issue and online later in the year.

May/June — Write my essay/memoir FALLING UP and submit it to Homebound Publications for their Little Bound Books series. They want it! Will be published in Fall 2019.

July/August — Disquiet Azores residency. Continue research and writing for BELONGING, my “enhanced memoir” of identity, roots, and rediscovering my Azorean-Portuguese heritage.

September — Release of DWELLING: an ecopoem from Shanti Arts.

October — Several readings in support of DWELLING. Present my craft talk, “Making Poems Better: The Process of Revision,” at Boston Book Festival. Appear on “In the Balance” podcast with Susan Lambert.

November — Page proof edits for FALLING UP. Schedule appearances/readings for 2019 in New York, California, and at ASLE 2019. Continue work on BELONGING.

December — Excerpt from “Some Questions of Dwelling,” the prose section of DWELLING: an ecopoem, appears in Still Point Arts Quarterly.

It’s been a good year — thanks everyone for being my miracles!

 

“Poetry As Practice,” A Craft Essay

Cleaver Magazine published my craft essay, “Poetry As Practice,” earlier this year:

POETRY AS PRACTICE
How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction
A Craft Essay
by Scott Edward Anderson

In this lyrical essay on the writing life, Scott Edward Anderson shows how poetry can be more than a formal approach to writing, more than an activity of technique, but a way to approach the world, which is good for both the poet and the poem.—Grant Clauser, Editor

Walking in Wissahickon Park after dropping my twins at their school in Philadelphia, I find muddy trails from the night’s heavy rains and temporary streams running along my path. The fuchsia flowers of a redbud tree shine brilliantly against the green of early leafing shrubs. A few chipmunks scurry among leaves on the forest floor. Birdsong is all around me: I note some of the birds—if they are bright enough and close enough to the trail or I recognize their song—the red flash of a cardinal lights on a branch nearby; a robin lands on the trail ahead, scraping his yellow beak against a rock.

Observation like this helps feed my database of images, fragments of music, and overheard speech, which prepares my poetry-brain for the work of choosing words, putting them in a certain order, and forming phrases into lines, stanzas, and eventually entire poems.

Remembering a line I’m working on, I worry it like a dog with a bone, gnawing on the words, their syntax, imagery, sound or feel in my mouth and mind. Playing with the line, I’ll follow it until it leads somewhere or dumps me in a ditch, when I’ll file it away for another day. I’m paying attention to where the poem wants to go. READ MORE

Behind a Name, Into a Poem — a Q&A with Scott Edward Anderson by Hamline Lit Link

The Hamline University English Department recently conducted an in-depth Q&A with me about two of my poems, “Naming” and “Villanesca.”

Here is a link to their blog, Hamline Lit Link, where it was posted: Read more

 

My poem “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden”

W.H. Auden

“September 1, 1939” is one of the most famous poems by W. H. Auden. He wrote the poem after learning the news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland at the start of World War II, published it a month later in The New Republic magazine, and reprinted it in his collection, Another Time, the following year.

Despite – or perhaps because of — rushing it into print, Auden appeared to dislike the poem almost as soon as it was published. As little as five years later, reprinting the poem in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), he cut the stanza with its most famous line, “We must love one another or die.”

“Between you and me, I loathe that poem,” he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, and resolved to keep it out of future collections of his work during his lifetime. He relented in 1955, allowing Oscar Williams to include it in his New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, but only with the proviso that the last line be edited to “We must love one another and die.”

Why did he hate this line – and the poem — so much? He claimed in a preface to the 1965 edition of his Collected Poems, “Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.”

In a Penguin anthology the previous year, the poem and four others were included along with a caveat: “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

What was it about the poem and, in particular, this line that Auden didn’t like? Was he embarrassed by its earnestness and sentiment, as some have suggested? Did he feel it was sappy and self-indulgent, as others would have it? Or was it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written,” as he put it?

And yet, the last line endures and the poem remains one of Auden’s most famous, surviving even today as one of the most eloquent pleas for empathy and peace in the face of totalitarianism. The poem even resurfaced as a touchstone for people in the wake of 9/11, as I have written elsewhere.

I wrote “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden” on 3 September 2014 as part of Jo Bell’s “52” experiment, and it was recently published in The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry.

Here is my poem, “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden”:

 

“We must love one another or die,”

The poet instructs, though doesn’t believe it.

“We must love one another and die.”

 

Revised to inclusive and on another try,

Then repudiated the poem, banning it.

He who must love another or die.

 

“Ours is not to reason why,”

Another poet said with the soul of wit.

Ours is to love one another. We die.

 

Changing a word makes meaning fly

To the far reaches of our minds and sit.

Must we, really, love one another or die?

 

Can we exist without knowing why–

Knowledge straining at the bit–

Until we can only love each other and die?

 

When we live without love, we die.

At least, those of us who desire it.

We must love one another or die.

We must love one another and die.

 

–Scott Edward Anderson

 

National Poetry Month 2016, Week Five: My poem “Villanesca”

For the fifth and final week of National Poetry Month this year, I’m featuring one of my own poem, “Villanesca.”

This poem was published last summer in Cimarron Review, thanks to poet Alfred Corn, who chose the poem in his role as a contributing editor.

Alfred also provided some critical guidance to help me finish this poem, which I’d been working on for several years. The poem sprang from a conversation overheard between my friend and colleague, Jan Almquist, and his daughter on the train to DC a decade ago.

We were traveling down to pitch the design of The Nature Conservancy’s Annual Report when Jan got a call from his then teenage daughter about leaving her score for Enrique Granados’s “Spanish Dances,” at home and asking him to bring it to her. That was all I needed to prompt the poem, although it obviously went in a different direction.

Sometime later, after boarding a plane, I found a program of Granados on the audio channel featuring the fabulous interpretations of De Larrocha. Obviously, I had to get that into the poem somehow and it helped build another layer.

As mentioned in last week’s post, I shared this poem with poet A.V. Christie a few months before her death. I was very touched by her response to the poem. She wrote, “I love the tone of this poem & the subtle/textured types of communication it’s built up out of…I experience it…it’s so active & in motion…”

Here is my poem, “Villanesca,”

 

Before the cabin door shuts, I check messages.
You forgot your score for “Spanish Dances” on the piano,
left open at the “Villanesca,” a piece with pastoral repetitions
you found hard to reproduce. Your rough interpretation
reminds me of your voice and its effect (or its affect).

Headphones on, I listen to Alicia de Larrocha
performing Granados. The program host has a soothing lisp,
enunciating every syl – la – ble, like a reporter on NPR.
Quoting from a review, she says De Larrocha’s playing speaks
to “a glorious inevitability achieved through immense discipline.”

“Can you bring the score to my rehearsal?” you ask
via voice mail, forgetting my flight this afternoon.
Unlike De Larrocha you always forget the score,
ignore signals, struggle to find the right notes, refuse
to face the music of our own inglorious inevitability.

I press delete, choosing not to repeat past mistakes;
at least, for the duration of my flight.

–Scott Edward Anderson

 

On Becoming the Subject: When Someone Writes About Your Work

The poet (in bandanna) and pals, Wind River Range, Wyoming, Summer 2001. Photo by Joshua Sheldon.

“I never read my reviews,” the novelist Pat Conroy once said. “Not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn’t applaud, it bothers her. I’m the same way. I’d be devastated to read that someone didn’t like my work.”

Back in 2001, a young woman named Veronika Linhartova Morley, then a student at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, contacted me by email. She wanted to write about my poetry for a class assignment on contemporary American poets.

She told me she’d read a poem of mine called “Carpentry” in the Boston Review and had found a number of other poems on line. I was flattered. Only, I never wrote a poem with that title and I’ve not yet published in the Boston Review. I looked up the poem, which was written by a Scott Anderson (see the link above) and thought, I could have written it, but I didn’t.

I hated to disappoint Ms. Morley, but broke the news to her by reply email. She was embarrassed; however, it turned out that all the other poems she’d found were indeed mine, and she still wanted to write about my work. We had a nice correspondence and she wrote a delightful little essay about my poetry and the influence of Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Hall on my work.

Her essay begins with a lengthy quote from a lecture I gave at the University of Alaska some years before:

“The contemporary poet of my choice, Scott Edward Anderson, once wrote in his essay ‘Making Poems Better: The Process of Revision’: ‘…writing poems is a lot like cooking. We bring everything we know about cooking and about what foods go well together to preparing a meal, just as we bring all we’ve learned or read or practiced to writing a poem. Sometimes, it’s just luck that we get the right combination of ingredients, but much of the time a fine meal is made from good ingredients being put together by a well-practiced chef.'”

She went on to make some good observations about my work and points about what I learned from both Bishop and Hall. She also identified a spiritual note in my work and my conflicting feelings about “the way we treat our world.”

In all, it’s a pretty accurate picture of my work, its process and two of my biggest influences. And the last line of her essay would make any poet proud. She writes that through her assignment and correspondence with me, she “not only learned about the process of writing poetry, but also learned to appreciate poetry even more.”

I don’t know how the essay was graded. I still have a copy. Veronika came to this country from Czechoslovakia in the late 1990s, as she told me, to get the kind of education unavailable in her own country. Some time ago, she gave me permission to reprint the essay, which you can read in full here.

 

National Poetry Month 2015, Week Three: My Poem “Peace On Mt. Zion”

View of Mt. Zion from the Moses Montefiore Windmill. Photograph by the author.

Last month, Samantha and I went to Israel. It was my first time in the country and my first visit to the Holy Land.

I was struck by the conundrum that is Israel. On the one hand, there is the history of the land and the history on the land.

Three of the world’s major religions were built from the earth there and sprouted and diverged as any people do, resulting in conflict and misunderstanding.

On the other hand, there is evidence of these religious factions co-existing much like that bumper sticker popular a few years ago featuring the message “Co-Exist” and a pantheon of religious symbols, as if to ask, can’t we all just “get along”?

In Old Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, for instance, ancient mosques and churches and synagogues sit cheek by jowl along the sea approach. And the market in Jerusalem is filled with Muslim and Jewish merchants distinguished perhaps only by their working hours and some specific merchandise.

Concurrent with this trip, Samantha asked me to write a poem to serve as the peace prayer at her daughter, Erica’s Bat Mitzvah, which happens to be this weekend. I was honored that not only Samantha, but my stepdaughter, too, wanted me to participate in her special day.

I’d been thinking about the subject on my first days in Israel, much of which was spent on my own as Samantha was in a conference.

But it wasn’t until our last day, in Jerusalem, when a tour guide we’d hired read a poem of Yehuda Amichai’s called “An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mt. Zion,” as we stood on a hill under the Moses Montefiore windmill overlooking Mt. Zion, that a poem started to come to me.

(Amichai is significant, too, because I gave Erica’s brother Max a book of Amichai’s poetry for his Bar Mitzvah a few years ago.)

Here is my poem “Peace On Mt. Zion,” which I dedicate to Erica and will read at her ceremony:

 

PEACE ON MT. ZION

(for Erica, on her Bat Mitzvah)

  

Peace is such an abstract word,

made concrete by the story

of an Arab shepherd and a Jewish father

told by a guide overlooking

Sultan’s Pool, outside the old city

of Jerusalem, from Amichai’s poem

about searching for a goat

and a child on Mt. Zion.

Their “temporary failure”

strikes me first, a lasting impression

lingering over the ramparts of the old city

–cradle and shelter of all origins.

  

So much begins searching

for a goat and a child on a mountain—

new religions, sacrifices, whole

cloths to cover the void,

until the child is found and the goat,

hiding together among the bushes.

The father and the shepherd

cry together and laugh,

and for a moment, all is quiet,

except for their voices,

which you can still hear

echoing over centuries of stone.

  

–Scott Edward Anderson

“52” or What It’s Like to Write a Poem Every Week for a Year

I did it. I wrote a poem every week for an entire year.

(At least, at the time of this posting, I’m working on the penultimate poem of the year and, with one more week to go, I think it’s safe to say I’ll complete it.)

Why? Why the heck did I take on something like this? Why would anyone take on such a task?

Last year I spent the month of April writing a poem a day. That was 30 poems, most of which were quick reflections on what was happening in my life, the world around me or in my mind.

This was different. 52 poems. One per week. And at someone else’s bidding.

That someone else was poet Jo Bell. A year ago, Jo offered a challenge to some of her friends and followers: join a closed group on Facebook wherein poets would be given weekly prompts and asked to write and post their poem to the group. We were also asked to read, comment on, and critique each others work.

The idea was, as Jo herself put it, part of “a range of crowd-sourced projects to raise the standards of, and promote the pleasures of contemporary poetry…52 uses social media to connect writers and to raise their standard of writing through creative friction.”

Every week, Jo posted “a new exercise to help you write a new poem. You write it your way – to the very best of your ability. You improve, you expand, you develop.”

Along with over 540 other members, I took up that challenge. Each Thursday morning (UK time), we were given a new prompt and some examples of how other poets may have tackled the subject. (You can see all the prompts here: 52.)

The prompts were one word or a phrase or just an idea. Some of the challenges were excruciatingly hard, especially those that asked the poet to get out of his or her own skin, style or comfort zone. Others fit nicely into a familiar pattern, yet encouraged the poets take their own style to a new level.

The first observation I have about this group is what a wonderful collection of people Jo attracted. As the year went on, many of us grew close and supportive of each other’s work and struggles. Some of us have became friends outside the group.

The second is how gratifying to get almost instant feedback on a new poem or idea of a poem. 52 was like a private workshop that helped flag lazy writing, praise winning phrases, and challenge each other to improve our work.

The third observation is how HARD this challenge was to accomplish. Some weeks came easier than others — being on vacation, honeymoon, or holiday certainly helped — other times, when the week was particularly busy at work or something else was going on (my wedding!), it was more difficult.

But I did it. I wrote a poem every week. How many of the poems will actually survive is another issue. At least one, “Weather,” from the sixth week of the year, has been accepted for publication. Others I’ve read at readings to some applause.

One poem, “Blended Family,” written in response to the week eleven prompt, “Songs of Praise,” was read at our wedding by Samantha’s eldest daughter. (You can read it here.)

Writing a poem each week was certainly worth doing, but I don’t think I’ll try it again. I don’t write well this way, with the pressure of a looming deadline (poems had to be posted before the following week’s prompt), I prefer to let the poem come to me and steep, and work on it as I see fit.

And yet, this challenge has had a positive impact on my work. It has freed my work somewhat — many of the challenges were not the subject of my past poetry; some forced me to write about things I never thought to tackle in poetry.

I’m grateful to Jo for the challenge and to those who read my work and shared thoughtful comments on my posts — or called me out when I wasn’t hitting the mark.

There’s a handful of members with whom I’ll stay in touch and perhaps even continue to share poems. Most of them I would not have met were it not for Jo’s group and the platform of Facebook.

As for the poems, I plan to spend the next year going over them with a sharp pencil and a sharper eye, finding the gems, excising the fakes, and possibly building this group of 52 poems into something worthy of the group and this very special experience.