Shack on the Edge of a Field

This post, on this blog, is a little shack holding a place for a still-in-construction website devoted to the writing life of Polly Brown, a poet, writer, and teacher who lives in Maine.

My page on the website of Every Other Thursday Poets no longer exists, although the group is still meeting and still a kind of paradise of encouragement and challenge for its members. But quite a lot comes up if you just google polly brown poet. 

You can track down copies of my most recent book, Pebble Leaf Feather Knife, by going to the Cherry Grove Collections page for the book  https://www.cherry-grove.com/polly-brown.html 

or by going straight to Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

To explore my blog about the daily texture of progressive education, written to explore the richness of teaching within an extraordinary community of learners, go to ayeartothinkitover.com 

The other posts on this blog (right here) offer an odd amalgamation of experience bridging the writing and teaching parts of my life, embraced here, pretty accurately, by the name Villages. My favorite post (right now) is the one about Darwin's letters: http://pollybrownpoet.blogspot.com/2010/07/ive-just-finished-reading-selection-of.html

Writing to Learn, Writing to Nourish Community

My friend Cheryl Perrault is a poetry Johnny Appleseed, planting seeds, serving as a powerful mentor for poets lurking in the shadows of their other selves. She encourages us to give more generously whatever we have to give, and wants us to see that we have jobs to do as poets in the world--some in situations in which the word poem is never spoken, in which we are poets operating undercover as teachers or therapists or healers--or carpenters, or chefs, or farmers, or physicists.

When Cheryl entered my writing and teaching life, one of the first things she did was to give some of my students a place to read their poems. This happened as part of her poetry and music series Wake Up and Smell the Poetry, which takes place one Saturday morning each month, in the recording studios of the Hopkinton, Massachusetts Community Access channel, HCAM. (Edited video recordings are used in HCAM's broadcast programming, and can also be watched online. The ongoing series is available to any community video channel that requests it.)

From this series so full of treasures, I still treasure most the experience of listening as my students read to adult strangers. It's the kind of memory in which I know exactly where I was sitting, in semi-darkness, stunned by the bravery Cheryl elicited from them, too.

Here's an example of Cheryl's impact on me. Because of her, I've performed--many times, by now--a poem-and-music version of a poem called "Russian Music for Piano." As I was preparing a reading for a place with a piano, Cheryl suggested that I could play, between sections of the poem, parts of the simple piano pieces the poem describes and traces through my life. Every time I've repeated this performance I've come to understand both poem and music in new ways, deeply grateful to my listeners for the glimpses into their own lives they've shared with me in response.

My grandmother played these pieces in a 1917 edition, from which this is one page. The collection is still in print, though, so I can play from pages easier to handle.

Last week, Cheryl asked me to be part of a blog-hop. (I like calling it a blog tree.) I've learned that mostly I should do whatever she suggests (even if I rename it.) The assignment involved answering some questions I usually dodge: What am I writing / working on? How does my writing differ from other writing in its genre? Why do I write what I write? How does my writing process work? What are my future plans for my blog? In my answers, I've focused on writing about teaching, and also on writing poetry.

You can read Cheryl's very different and fascinating answers to the same questions, at http://www.blog.cherylperreault.com/  I've persuaded a few other writers to do the same on their blogs, and you'll find their responses to the questions sometime soon, on the blogs I list at the bottom. Meanwhile, I've linked to great things they've posted recently.

What am I writing/working on?


In my poetry, I seem to be turning a corner, right this very minute. I recently became gloriously overwhelmed by a writing workshop at the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences, at UMass Boston. I went there wanting to write more bravely and accurately about my father's war, and its impact in his life and within our family. Sometimes intentions bear fruit directly as well as indirectly, and most of the new poems I've been drafting rise out of the experience and encouragement and rich provocation of the Joiner Institute. (You can read some about my teacher-as-student experience at the Joiner here, and some thoughts about writing as peacemaking here.)

I'm still revising my full-length poetry manuscript, What There Is. Do you live next door to a publisher who's searching for poetry manuscripts? Please let me know. (Okay, joke. If you went excavating, you'd probably find at least one poetry manuscript searching for a publisher in every corner mailbox you pass. Or you can imagine the equivalent in electrons--since poetry submissions increasingly happen online.)

Meanwhile, at A Year to Think It Over I continue to write about "the daily texture of progressive education," trying to do justice to the experience of teaching in a place where I could truly come to know and work for my students. I'm also trying to describe what it was like to learn with my students, and with parents and colleagues.

How does my writing differ from other writing in its genre?


My poems are more structured than some, and less structured than others. They're simpler than some and more complicated than others. Here's a tiny sample, if you scroll down. I never intend my poems to be puzzles--I don't think most poets intend to write puzzles--but I figure it's legit to expect a second reading.

I love giving live public readings--but I'm also interested in each poem as a visual object on a page, in the effects of line breaks and stanza breaks and margin choices. Emphasis on the word choices.

I've been told that my blog entries aren't actually blog entries; they're essays. That's probably a fair critique.

Why do I write what I write?

I write in short forms because it feels right to me.
Grace Paley, when asked why she wrote short stories instead of novels, answered that life is too short for the writing of novels. I'd say the same thing, only more so. Life feels too short even for short stories! I love working on poems short enough so I can carry them around in my head, but still long enough so I can get into trouble, and swim back to shore through the writing and revising of the poem, learning as I go.

Blog entries are the poems of the creative non-fiction world. Snacks. Well, no--tweets are snacks, I guess. Maybe blog entries are light meals to be eaten on the trail? But I'm still working on how to construct the smallest, tightest package of ideas that also feels rich enough.

Here's another kind of answer: Both my parents wrote poems which weren't published but had a life in the family and community. (I'm spending some of my time this summer helping my mother work toward a new collection of her poems.)  To me as a kid, writing poetry seemed like a normal thing to do--as if I'd grown up in Russia, say, or some other parts of the world. (Yet another kind of luck.)

I'm not going to say I have to write, but my life is immeasurably more thoughtful and more joyful, both, because I do. That's what I've wanted to give to the hundreds of students I've worked with as children or adults. Thoughtful includes responsible, and joyful includes wild and spontaneous. So there you are, dancing in that same duality--or "creative tension", in the words of Dick Zajchowski, formative Touchstone School Head--that I've sought to embrace in all my teaching life. Serious playfulness. Playful seriousness.

And here's yet another kind of answer: Sometimes I think that I might shamelessly pretend to write, in order to have the pleasure of friendships with other writers. In some overwhelmed or blocked chapters of my life, that's been approximately the case.

How does my writing process work?


I have no idea how my writing process works. I have no method except paying attention, and no philosophy except the learned benefit of giving myself permission to engage in a phenomenally inefficient language activity.

I'm slow, at every kind of writing I do, especially poems--and slow at almost everything else I do, also. Quite a few people live in here, and what I say in ordinary conversation often seems messy or slipshod, and true to only a minority of them. In writing I've learned to give all those selves a chance. The process of revision, very important to me, is a kind of coming to consensus. Increasingly, though, I hope for the kind of consensus in which different voices can live side by side, and be a chorus instead of a riot. (Still, somewhere down the road I might want a riot instead of a chorus.)

My future blog plans:

I'm posting this on two blogs, on an old, neglected one called Villages, and also on A Year to Think It Over.

I've never had plans for the poetry blog, and it's not exactly about poetry. Pin me down and I'll say Villages is about virtual villages created by language. I've enjoyed imagining myself as a member of a village that includes Charles Darwin, or the Canadian writer Val Ross, or all the people I love, finally in one place. But I have no idea what will happen next there, and this will be only the fourth post.

What about the blog about teaching and learning? I do expect I'll come to a time when I'm ready to move on. I hope I'll be able to keep paying for the domain, so those anonymous wonderful whoever-you-are people in Australia, the country of my most faithful audience, will still be able to find the posts they like.
Readers arrive from other countries, too. In the past few days, for example, the blog has been read by people in Vietnam and Kazakhstan and Brazil and Cameroon and Serbia (among others)--and even the United States. Monitoring my blog I refresh my memory of geography. A world map highlights the countries of readers, and if I scroll over the country list I see larger outline maps of each of them. This makes me feel both fascinated and thwarted. I wish I knew more about all those people (and their villages)--but Word Press hasn't yet developed that kind of oversight.

Several people have suggested that my blog entries about teaching and learning may have another future as a book. For  the time being, though, it works well for me to focus on one little knot of energy at a time, without worrying about larger structure. Does that sound suspiciously like the freedom within which I like to approach each new poem? Or the freedom I tried to give my students? Hmmmmm...

And now, here's your reward if you've made it this far through the longest blog entry I've ever written. Here are links to blogs by three writers I respect, enjoy, and highly recommend.

Alex Dunn works as an environmental educator with magical power to turn kids on to the night sky (just as an example.) I've watched him in action with my own students. He also writes two blogs. The Daily Bird New England tells me when to wake up and view species who've just arrived. Tree swallows! Moogle Gaps feeds my map obsession. I've used the links to send you to some recent posts I enjoyed.

Polly Ingraham has taught in all kinds of schools, including a charter school where she taught with my friend Kate Keller. She writes about all sorts of things, including overlaps between the secular and the sacred, in a blog called The Panorama of a Pastor's Life. Here's a recent post about The Fullness of Time  and an organization called A Better Chance.

Colleen Redman lives and works as a poet, photographer, and journalist in Floyd County, Virginia. In one way her blog is very local, focused on the community of artists and musicians and craftpeople and farmers who call Floyd home. Reading Colleen's posts about her community I figure they're lucky to have her, and I start thinking about the individual in community from a new slant--Colleen's! She also writes funny, observant, and moving poems, and you can find her reading aloud a wonderful poem about her brothers' deaths, here.

Finding, Losing, Recovering Val Ross

Eartha, at the DeLorme headquarters in Yarmouth, Maine

Recently, I found a book I'd bought for my classroom, brought home to read myself, and lost almost immediately. The book was about mapmakers, about being lost and found, and when it surfaced this time I held onto it long enough to read it, through the pitch and roll of various storms, snow and otherwise.

Val Ross wrote The Road to There as a series of stories, portraits of people struggling, being resourceful, being devious; going to extreme lengths to make or even just modify maps, or to hold in their hands maps that intrigued them; facing the suppression of maps that threatened the powers-in-place; scaling peaks, flying over wilderness, leaving our planet, all in order to say, “This is next to this, and over here...”

 As I read, I kept turning to the photo of Val Ross on the book jacket: open face, huge grin; curious, amused, ready for anything; somebody enjoying her life. Through the whole second half of the book, I kept thinking, "I'm going to write and tell her how much I’ve liked it..."

When I finished the book and went hunting, online, for a way to contact Val Ross, I was in no way prepared to have Wikipedia tell me that she had died in February 2008, of brain cancer. I was so shocked, so sad, I burst into tears.

There's a community page for her on Facebook. I "liked" that. Elsewhere on line, I found a piece one of her friends had written, about having lunch with Val, regularly, over a period of 30 years; about their last lunch. I learned that The Road to There had won the big Canadian prize for young adult non-fiction, in 2003. I learned that her book about Robertson Davies, on which she kept working after getting her diagnosis, had been published posthumously.

Each of these things brought some obscure comfort. Here’s the best part: Val Ross wrote another book for young people. This one is called You Can’t Read This, and the blurb says it’s about the banning of books, “and how people everywhere throughout history have devoted their wills and their brains to reading and unleashing the power of the word.”

I’ve just ordered it. I may be laughing at myself a little, but I feel as if she’d left me something in her will. Thank you, Val Ross. Thank you, thank you, the power of the word.

Reading Charles Darwin's letters

I've just finished reading a selection of Charles Darwin's letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt. It took me a long time to read even this small selection in its tiny print: reading, detouring to other books, reading again. Suddenly at some point I was hooked; it felt like a scientific thriller in the form of letters; I read whenever I could.

Towards the end, I was aware of the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, floating towards Darwin slowly, by sea. I knew friends would work out a way for Darwin to acknowledge Wallace's brilliance and still assert his own primacy. I knew that Darwin would survive the panic of exposure, and take his ideas further. But I read with urgency, all these years later: I had to see how he himself would describe it.

Other peoples' letters to Darwin are quoted, or implied in his answers, so we get some sense of all of them, all their lives.

At first, it's mostly family, as he voyages on the Beagle, calling out to them in England, out of his plaintive homesickness (and seasickness)--but also out of his wild enthusiasm for what he was seeing: rocks and plants and fossils; mussel shells high on the ledges of mountains.

Later he wrote to a widening circle of geologists and botanists and pigeon fanciers; to Asa Gray at Harvard; to clergy in their country villages, whom Darwin urged to collect whatever specimens he needed. "Send them soon," he said, and promised to pay for the postage. Once, at the beginning of a letter, he promised not to beg for anything, and then begged after all, at the end.

In return, he offered his own results: strange tales about the sex lives of barnacles; how long dried seeds would float on sea water, and what proportion would germinate afterward; small sketches of flowers visited by bees.

He also crowed about his growing family, blessed the relief of chloroform for Emma's later childbirths. He mourned the loss of the children who died. He worried about his own health.

Above all, he thought. He thought, in the form of fairly awful handwriting.

All those letters, carried by horses, by boats, gave Darwin another village besides Down. A slower village than our electronic one, but a village composed of words and imagination (and some skeletons, carefully wrapped.) He made his discoveries partly because he could write, and use writing: to beg for what he needed; to summarize the evidence that increasingly convinced him; to argue; to admit to bafflement.

In a famous early letter Darwin says he is "dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects." But the letters gave him, over time, people to talk to about insects, about all that detail of life in which he kept himself so gleefully immersed. Eventually, in fact, the letter-writing gave him vital contact with the few people to whom he could confide what he thought it all meant. In all his virtual village there were just two or three houses with knowledge of what was actually going on in Darwin's study. But there were those few, and letters gave them to him, and him to them.

If he were living and working now, would Darwin be writing a blog? Not necessarily. Maybe just a lot of emails--because he was so careful in the choice of his audience, and so concerned about being overheard by people who would not agree. He had less courage than his few close supporters wanted him to have, but enough courage to keep doing a very basic thing: to think, and follow the path of his thoughts.

Frederick Burkhardt, fellow of Clare College, patient decipherer and editor, is gone, having died in 2007. Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a wonderful forward which I read again after I'd finished the book, is also gone. Darwin himself, of course, is gone. I can't thank any of them. But here I am, along with others keyboarding at this very moment, treating these words formed of electrons as a kind of heaven we can address, a sort of garden in which we can place a few flowers and hope that somebody will see and smell them. A village in which all times can live together.

Village

This is an experiment. It's snowing again; I'm thinking how much I'm frightened by driving in snow, and how all the poets in my life, and most of the people I love, are a car ride or a plane ride or a train ride away.

(A ferry ride, some of them, and I wonder what it would be like to cross Long Island Sound on a ferry with snow falling into those gray-green waves. Every time I look at the inkblot of a storm on the weather map--where the snow often changes to rain once it's out to sea, which is grey or white changing to green in the color language of the map--I think of fat white wet flakes landing and disappearing on each swell.)

All my adulthood I've wanted a village in which everyone important to me lives either next door or across the common: family, friends, fellow poets, fellow teachers, past students, heroes and heroines, living, gone, all of us somehow close by. Picnics. Spontaneous parades. One night, all of us gather between the trees to look at Jupiter and a thin slice of moon, setting.

Three things resemble that, for me:

One is the body of my poetry, which exists because I discovered that words could hold in the light people from whom I was distant, and times.

The second virtual village is my teaching life, in which, for example, with my students' help, Sarah George Bagley and Henry David Thoreau and Abby Kelley Foster can all come to life together, and speak to us.

The third is this screen on which my words appear, on which the words of others appear, magically, so that conversations can happen that would not have happened, and often hold meanings that wouldn't have emerged any other way.

Electrons don't have the taste real stuff does; they taste sort of tinny; it feels like you should take them out of your mouth and put in bread with pesto, or chocolate, or anything else. But I am getting so I can ignore that, the same way we all ignore the fact that words aren't things. My grandson Abe was so young when he agreed that "horse" could be the word, or the horse, or a picture of a horse. All of them could gallop effectively.

So maybe the word "village" can be the buildings, or the voices, or the electron pictures of the voices, or any conjuring of a group of people who--this is the crucial part--listen to each other, in any way.