Poohsticks get me back on Verse after overdose of Tweets. Notes from an Apprentice Verse-Maker (2)

Twitter – part of an apprenticeship in writing poems.

I’ve become a Twitterbug!  Made it: through nine years of work-shopping a poem a week; two Collections published;  a small nod from officialdom in terms of winning an invitation to read for Poetry Ireland; the odd publication in a journal – detour of winning a prize on radio and hearing a poem set to music (mega fun) - and reading at the odd festival. Now it seems overdue to focus on how to make a possible readership aware of the glories awaiting them between my covers. In other words, I’m buying into something I’ve known all along, publishers present - and in future – want authors who will sell books.

Learning Social Media to introduce verse and prose.

I’m not great at writing begging letters for invitations to read (you don’t know what you’re missing, I’d be delighted to receive an invitation from you) and anyway that wouldn’t be obvious to publishers unless they get results. I’m a bit lost on Facebook, they keep changing rules I can’t keep up with. Given a hand to set up a blog and twitter account, I set off and I’m hooked! Moi – who hates everything IT! Now, I’ve taken a computer on holiday for the first time ever. I’m writing Tweets watching TV. My old self, luckily demolished (see Fear Knot – published by Doire please note!) is turning over in her mummified grave. I’ve discovered the adrenalin rush – or is it testosterone, given research on how power poses, affect testosterone and cortisol levels (see TED talk on topic) – possible when a Tweet is’ favourited’ or re-tweeted. I’m oiling up my community support gears. Enjoying the challenge of discovering how to apply what I previously learned about supporting and joining community to this medium. Highlights of the last week involved getting over the ‘50 Followers’ hump and Poetry Ireland re-tweeting my notice that Skylight 47 has a submission deadline of 1^st April, thus bringing it to the attention of a much greater ‘target audience’.

Scary Success at Starting Something New.

I know I’ve made it when my daughter notes I have so many Tweets. Maybe I’m over tweeting! Somewhere I’ve ticked a box that has my Facebook page full of tweets. It’s scary. And I launched my second ‘public profile’ photograph – even more frightening (with a bit of preening when people ‘like’ it), who is this woman?

Restored to Verse-Making – Poohsticks* at Belvedere House on Mothers’ Day.

I wake up on Monday morning wondering have I ceased being in line to write verse altogether. I reflect on yesterday – Mother’s Day. I was blessed to meet family at Belvedere House, Mullingar. Seeing my grandson engrossed in following his twigs along an accessible stream while we waited, reminded me to initiate my grand-daughter (who has just got started on the walking) into the joys of Poohsticks too. She had just added ‘lake’ to her short vocabulary – probably any patch of water for now, but she will learn to distinguish further. Those Poohsticks, meandering along the stream, are mesmerising. The pleasures of dropping twigs on one side of a bridge and rushing to the other side to see them come through or lamenting their imprisonment - in mud or log-jammed amidst others underneath the bridge, hotly disputed debates about whose stick it is that is winning, memories of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin and the knowledge we’re participating in a ritual begun several generations past. All of this is a necessary respite from Twittering. Listening to birds – in full song at Belvedere House at the end of March - and the legacy of  A.A. Milne restores me. Maybe I could try writing a poem again.

*The little book of Poohsticks, Rules and Tactics, stuck in to The Enchanted World of Winnie-the-Pooh, Published by Dutton , gives:

 ‘Introsticktion/ The very first game of Poohsticks was played by by Pooh by himself. // One morning he was crossing abridge on the edge of the Foreset, when he tripped and dropped a fir-cone into the water.//Pooh noticed a curious thing: he had dropped the fir-cone on one side of the bridge, but it came out on the other. A second fir-cone did the same. Then he tried dropping in two at once and guessing which would come out first.//And so the game of Poohsticks was born.’

This is a gorgeous book of introduction to the world of Pooh and friends, author  A.A. Milne & E.H.Shepard (illustrations).

You can discover the possibilities of Belvedere House at http://www.belvedere-house.ie/

Move Your Hand Across Paper - Notes From an Apprentice Poet

I've been walking about for a week,wondering how to get started on my next piece for writing.ie. I can’t get started. Then I remember Natalie Goldberg’s  The Rules of Writing Practice. Rule 1: Move your hand across paper. That’s how I recall it. The actual first rule is ‘Keep your hand moving’. In a gleeful first chapter to Wild Mind  (Rider imprint from Random House), and a follow on to Writing Down the Bones, she discovers her rules apply to sex too!

I set the oven timer to 10 minutes, sit down at the computer and type without ceasing – anything that comes to mind. After ten minutes I am surprised to find I have a draft for a third of the column. I am always surprised when things I should know work actually produce the goods! With a mental ‘thank-you’ to Natalie Goldberg, I set the timer again and return to the key board. A few hours later – allow extra for the breaks I took to gain perspective - of writing, but mostly editing I an able to submit Having a Laugh with Poetry to Vanessa O’Loughlin. Maybe it will suit, or maybe I’ll have to go again. But now I’m walking around having regained confidence in being able to find a way in.

I suspect I’ll be bringing you more about Goldberg’s Rules in future.

See http://nataliegoldberg.com/  She has a new edition of her book about art and colour coming

 http://nataliegoldberg.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_184/custom-8/images/natalie-goldberg-2013.jpg

More at:

http://whisperdownthewritealley.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/natalie-goldbergs-rules-for-writing-practice/ 

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Edition/dp/1590302613

1.   Writing Down the Bones - Shambhala Publications

www.shambhala.com/writing-down-the-bones-1.html‎

o     

For more than twenty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering onwriters with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she ...

Ripples in the Fabric of Spacetime - link

'... ripples in the fabric of spacetime'.

Lichen clusters on bare branches like bog cotton

'Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen' I quote childhood lines of memory on the board walk, amidst bare heather branches and lots of wet moss just under the water in this bog-land wilderness over looking Lough Gill. Inisfree is in view. It's the Sligo Way. I'm in my element. Not surprisingly, my companion is looking at me strangely. My grandfather used to recite the poem dangling us on his knee. These words of William Allingham were probably the first poetry I heard, apart from Nursery Rhymes. We've visited Dromahair. I have ancestors here.

There are wisps of cotton like lichen on bare heather. I have to stoop to prove they're not bog cotton. On the way down I spot a cluster of lichen on bare rock, squat to take a  photograph.

Having the Conversation - About Beauty, its Possible Obligations.

Thanks to the interest of my local community Conversation number three is about to begin!

A year ago I facilitated the first Conversation, in what has become a series. In Ashes, Having the Conversation About Faith - for those of any religion and none - had been in my mind for a while as an alternative to former Lenten talks. I didn't have the minimum six to begin and cancelled. But then some of my local community approached me and suggested we'd run it a neighbours' house. It was thought there were others who'd like to come along.

There were nine there the first night and fourteen at the sixth and final night.It became evident the Conversation itself was as important as the topic and that the poems added an essential dimension, centering and returning us to layers and places within ourselves.Talking about symbols chosen initially led to Dried Feathers on Bone, a poem I included in Fear Knot (Doire, 2013).

There were people who knew a lot more about poetry than I do and others who have little exposure to it. A confidential questionnaire at the end demonstrated how much the participants valued the experience. So we did it again in the Autumn for six weeks and raised some money for the Galway Hospice. We looked at each poem, asking only what it suggested to each of us at this time and kept away - at first anyway - from an aesthetic analysis. That time we took as our starting point Having the Conversation - Continuing in Confusion and talked about the value of confusion as well as how confusing it can be to sit in the middle of it!

I thought it was time to stop while ahead but then, one of the members said - as we put down our final coffee cup (yes, there was tea/coffee afterwards for those who chose to stay and more did as time went on) he thought I might consider a Conversation About Beauty, Its Possible Obligations and I was hooked.

So next Monday evening 12 (so far) of us will sit down to talk about beauty. We'll start with Keats, definitely include some Contemporary work - we've read Carol Ann Duffy, Blake, Vaughan, & Heaney. Theo Dorgan's book of Uncommon Prayer was a good resource and we've looked at Millar duMars The God Thing. We've visited with Zbigniew Herbert, Milosz, Denis O'Driscoll and lots of Mary Oliver - and wander where the conversation and poems elicited bring us.

My local community are responsible for encouraging me to continue.Thanks to them I've had a wonderful chance to pilot a project I  hope to continue elsewhere.It has enabled me find a new way of drawing on my thirty years of group and workshop facilitation and include it with my new interest - poetry.

Contact information and further relevant details below.

POETRY READINGS

& WORKSHOPS

with Susan Lindsay

WORKSHOPS

Having a Different Conversation – About … 

Susan Lindsay is available to facilitate conversations mediated

by poetry, on particular topics. The extra dimension poetry

brings has become as much valued for itself as for what it

contributes to the conversation in these facilitated workshops.

It brings new perspective to a topic, a holding ground for 

the discussion, with the added benefit of providing a way into

discovering  poetry or a way into further enjoying it with others.

No previous experience of poetry, or the topic under discussion,

is needed. About - Faith, for those of any, or no, religion and

About - Continuing in Confusion have been recent workshop

titles. ‘... Conversation – About Beauty,its Possible Obligations 

is mooted for the future.

READINGS

Susan Lindsay is available to give readings from her books-

Fear knot (Doire Press, 2013)

Susan Lindsay’s poems are sometimes enigmatic, often startling. She is a poet acutely aware of the complexities of language, the levels of meaning a poem can have. When I read one of Susan Lindsay’s poems for the second time I always discover something quietly subversive lurking there which I missed first time around. Fear Knot is a daring collection of poems. A triumph.- Kevin Higgins

Whispering the Secrets (Doire Press, 2011)

The voice of experience wrought in lines that are lucid and direct…. this testimony of a survivor is suffused with joy and passion and a clear eyed appraisal of what it means to be mortal.

- Paula Meehan

…a book of courage and resolve. She writes of the “Fifth Province”, of confrontations and renewals, of dreams and shifting identities. … Lindsay writes poems of deep emotional control which communicate an affirmative celebratory mysticism. – Paul Perry

That was gorgeous. Beautiful writing. – RyanTubridy, 2005, The Tubridy Show, RTE Radio 1.

Susan Lindsay was born in 1950 and graduated from Trinity

College, Dublin in 1975. She followed a career in psychotherapy,

facilitation and as a consultant to organisations for thirty years.

Retired from psychotherapy, she is drawing on her former

experience to write and to facilitate workshops mediated by poetry

(such as the recently piloted Having a Different Conversation series),

as well as acting as a co-editor of Skylight 47, a biannual poetry

paper launched in association with the tenth anniversary of Over

the Edge Literary Events. In 2011 she was invited to read for

Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Whispering the Secrets, her

Debut Collection of poetry, was published in 2011 by Doire Press

and a second collection Fear Knot in 2013.

Susan Lindsay Tel. 353 91 776881. 353 86 1671524. susanharrislindsay@gmail.com

savour / yellow cowslips...

The Trick Cyclist                                              

Wobbles/...hits the high wire/...

dismount to savour/

yellow cowslips

on the verge.

Full poem in Fear Knot  - click on cover right for direct link.

Philomena - the Bigger Picture. Martin Sixsmith - at Ennis Book Festival

Americans could pay more Irish to adopt children 

Sixty thousand children from mother and baby homes were ‘sold’ to the U.S. by Church and State. Fifty per cent more women died giving birth in those homes, than in the general population. One civil servant questioned the birth certificates being issued. One mother, in all that period, managed to get out with her baby and keep it. Following gasps of air sucked in or expelled, there is a profound silence in the auditorium of the Glor theatre in Ennis on Sat (8.3.2014) as Martin Sixsmith, who brought us the story that led to the film Philomena, tells the largely female audience the result of his continuing research for a forthcoming BBC documentary. I feel sick. The word slavery rises in my mind. It won’t go away. This is slavery.

Maybe the women were not owned but their incarceration was a form of slavery. 

Dublin’s Archbishop McQuaids’ influence, in particular, fueled the teaching that single pregnant women had sins to propitiate. (Many of the Nuns were victims of this misogyny too). Maybe the women were not actually owned, although one has to ask who ‘owned’ their children, and I don’t want to take away from the slavery of others who were owned, sold, chained and manacled by suggesting, that this too, is slavery. But if you have no way to get away, if you have to pay off the indenture of your pregnancy, birth and housing for self and baby by hard manual labour (because you can’t possibly raise that amount of money yourself), what else can it be called?

People come to believe the justifications their abusers insert in their minds.

The first aspect of slavery is ownership but the second, pervasive and enduring, is what happens in your head. It is when you come to believe you don’t have a right to a life of your own. Abusers, rapists and persecutors of all kinds tell themselves stories that justify their abuse. They develop a twisted perspective that their wrongdoing is ‘for the good of’ their victim and instill this deep into the consciousness of those they abuse who, literally, can’t defend themselves from this insertion because the invasion of their identity is so destroyed by the trauma they are enduring. They, then, come to believe that their abuse is due to their own fault! This is what abuse is. It is this belief, in the traumatised and in the perpetrators that has to be exorcised.

Perpetrators have to come to see the harm they've done before their cure can begin.

As with addicts, until perpetrators can genuinely acknowledge themselves the harm done, both to themselves and others no possible cure can begin. We have to get this corrosive perspective of sinfulness out of our heads and put right the continuing wrongdoing.

First steps to a world fit for their grandchildren: change the law and rid ourselves of corrosive attitudes

A first step is to change the law here to allow mothers and children seeking to find each other to do so. If Philomena and her sisters in motherhood lived in Northern Ireland this could happen because the updated laws make it possible. But we also need to challenge attitudes and delusions that ultimately lend support to perpetrators and misogyny. The women whose children were sent away should not have to carry this burden alone. The remnants of these corrosive attitudes need to be removed from Irish society and the ground harrowed to make it a better place for their grandchildren.  

FEAR KNOT

Fear is a strange thing. It can galvanise you into action, paralyse you – as the rabbit caught in headlights – or put you into denial so that you don’t even know that you are – afraid, that is.

Some years ago I wanted to explore the roots of the paralysis that can attack when action is needed, the kind that can lead to procrastination or a time of slowing down before important events, when speed would be a more helpful option. Brendan Kennelly had just published a book of poems exploring different emotions. I was about to commence a six months poetry course with Faber Academy, Dublin, under the tutelage of Paul Perry. It offered a space away from my usual poetry confreres, or maybe that should be ‘my consoeurs’! The anonymity of Dublin was to offer me a time to experiment further with poetry and push out the boundaries I’d reached in workshops with Kevin Higgins at the Galway Arts Centre. I wanted to see if I could swim in other waters.

 I’ll choose one emotion, I thought, fear could be good. Put it this way: next time I will be choosing joy! For I am not sure if the universe may offer up opportunities once we invoke a particular muse. I was presented with challenges that, for me, took me well into my chosen subject: fear of loss; of being ill; of dying; of being alone and of going mad. Nothing extreme then!

The core of all this is the fear of change. I’ve been exploring the question of change all my working life. Some people call psychotherapists ‘agents of change.’ Most of us want to reach a safe place where we need not fear any longer. We may then die of boredom but we don’t mostly have things remain static long enough to discover that. Stasis in biology comes close to being a definition of death, something that comes from stagnation. One quotation I came upon in my challenge to learn resilience said, ‘Give me a new challenge every day.’ ‘It was far from that I was raised,’ as they say, but I have come to see the value of it. The challenge to be creative is, literally, the gift of life. It was lucky, then, that I had poetry as a tool.

The poems are collected in Fear Knot, published by Doire Press, 2013. You can press on the Fear Knot cover  to the right of this blog to purchase a copy from Doire. I hope to talk about some of the poems in future blogs.