A published poem! (Barcelona Notebook #4)

Happy Valentine's Day! I've had a poem published in Vox Mom (Mom Egg Review) in a collection on the theme: LOVE OF IDENTITY/IDENTITY OF LOVE, curated by Sharon Dolin. If you would like to see the poem without further introduction, head right here (mine is number three).

My poem, Face card: Queen of Shadows, is a Barcelona poem from June 2015. On day eight of the workshop, we went to the Museu Picasso to see Picasso - Dalí   Dalí - Picasso, which paired works by the two artists at various stages of their careers. Sharon Dolin had sent us off with the suggestion to write a poem in a form. She offered the cinquain as a starting point. Five-line stanzas with the following syllable counts: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. Here's a self-explanatory cinquain.

Syllable Game

first two

then double that

another pair makes six

now stretch the line way out to eight

and back

I was taken by an early Dalí portrait, paired with a somewhat earlier one by Picasso. Dalí reworked his portrait after meeting Picasso for the first time in 1926. To see the effect of Picasso on Dalí, follow this link and scroll in EXHIBITION until you find a page that looks like this:

There you will see Dalí's Portrait of My Sister (1923) on the right, as I saw it in the museum in June, paired with Picasso's neoclasical Portrait of Olga (1917).

The primary gesture of the poem "wrote itself" as I stood in the gallery, making notes and sketches. I turned it into a cinquain. My poem has four stanzas of five lines and follows the syllable pattern (with one change inspired by the portrait's shape).

Dalí's painting is owned by The Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg (Florida). Interestingly, this museum presents the painting on its website the other way around, with the "older" face on top. While the frustration of the mentee/mentor relationship between the two artists may be at the heart of the aggression I sense in the painting, it may also come from tension between the two siblings, as the St. Petersburg site suggests.

I've learned a bit more about the cinquain. The originator of the 22-syllable stanza was Adeleide Crapsey (1878-1914). Her cinquains are one stanza long and have a quality of the tanka or haiku. My poem is its own version of the cinquain, an enjoyable syllable game.

The Great Poetry Disruption (Barcelona Notebook #3)

Readers of Chapter This may have stopped wondering what happened to this blog. Where did it go after an intense daily series in the month of May, scattered postings over the summer, then silence since September?

The answer (more or less) is poetry.

In June of 2015 I joined a 10-day workshop called Writing about Art in Barcelona with poet/instructor Sharon Dolin. In fact, I attempted to start an occasional series on this blog to report on the experience. I made it to Barcelona Notebook #2. I chose the workshop for two reasons. 1) I wanted to return to Barcelona, a place I had visited with my one-year-old son 17 years earlier, when he was a healthy little guy and life felt lucky. This Barcelona visit was a way to honor his memory at the time of his 18th birthday, a decade since his death. 2) I wanted to write about art and memory in Barcelona.

Jiwar reading room
June 2015

I planned to write in prose, although I knew the workshop would focus more on poetry.  During the ten days, we visited a plaça with a bomb shelter; Gaudí's Parc Güell; museums dedicated to Miró, Picasso, and contemporary art; Gaudí's Casa Batllo. We toured an artist's studio, met a Catalan poet.

Each day at the Jiwar center, we workshopped the previous day's work and discussed a new assignment. We learned about different ways to consider ekphrasis, i.e., writing from art, and Sharon's taxonomy of ekphrasis was exhaustive and inspiring: describe an artwork, write of the artwork without explicitly saying you are doing so, talk of art-making, write of museum experience, give an artist's portrait, and so on. A handy basic reference is Art and Artists: Poems, edited by Emily Fragos.

View from Parc Güell
over Barcelona

Before we left for each day's outing, Sharon also offered guidance on a particular poetic form to try. For example, when we visited the sprawling, inventively tiled Parc Güell, she suggested we write in a mosaic way. On another day, she suggested we write a poem in a strict form (a cinquain, or perhaps a villanelle). The six of us - five participants and Sharon - scribbled in our notebooks, snapped photos, and walked around with our eyes in the clouds. Sometimes my husband and daughter joined us on these excursions. (If you ask my daughter, we all looked pretty weird.)

Everyday, I produced a poem. I did not write prose. Over the 10 days, my poems progressed from idea-laden prose-like texts (with line breaks) to something freer, more playful, and somehow much less. That is, I began to see that despite the many ideas wanting to crowd their way in, I would find the heart of the poem when I left most of the "stuff" out.

It seems I've lost my head. Take a look at my posts July-September 2015. The anniversary of Simon's death and some dragonflies yanked me back to memoir/prose, but otherwise the impulse to write in verse has become powerful and, well, disruptive. I posted a few poems. I even posted about being confused about writing in verse or prose. In the "back end" of this blog, I count seven draft posts along my "old" lines over the past six months. Unfinished, unposted.

I've been busy, and, I promise, I'll be back.

Barcelona Notebook #2: Return to Sitges

(c) 1997 and my favorite from that trip

It was a deliberate act of reiteration, returning to Barcelona at the end of May. In 1998 when Markus and I traveled with one-year-old Simon, we flew from Detroit to Barcelona. It was Simon's second flight to Europe, having attended the funeral of his great grandmother Bichler in Leonding (outside Linz, Austria) when he was five months old. Our destination was Sitges (rhymes, appropriately, with "beaches") on the coast about 30 minutes southwest of Barcelona. We'd been unable to get a room for the first night in the Meliá Sitges hotel, where Markus had a conference to attend, so we booked into a place we found in a travel guide. As I recall it, our trip was essentially pre-internet. I'm willing to bet Markus didn't even schlepp along a computer.

This time around, in 2015, we had a repeat of the first-night scenario. I looked for an Airbnb* apartment for Markus, Miriam and me in the Gràcia district of Barcelona to be near the location of my writing workshop at Jiwar. We made the decision to travel just four weeks to our arrival, and I had to work fast to figure out the Airbnb process as a first-timer. The more I looked, the less I found. Finally, an apartment was available for all but the first night. It was around the corner from Sagrada Famìlia, which would be 15-30 minutes from my workshop, but it would be beds and a shower. Meanwhile, hotel rooms for our arrival night on May 30th were vanishing with prices pushing 500 Euros a room. Why? It turns out there were a couple of festivals, but the big event was the final game in the Copa del Rey: Barcelona vs. Bilbao. Spain's premier soccer final, played in Barcelona. No wonder.

Casa Mallagrena B&B in the mountains outside Sitges, 2015

There's some symmetry, then, to the fact that we booked a room just outside Sitges for one night at Casa Mallarenga, a mountainside bed and breakfast run by two Scots. Hosts Caroline and Peter offer pleasant accommodations and a tasty breakfast that includes two national specialties: pan Catalan (toasted bread smeared with a soft tomato and seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper) and orange marmalade (homemade) on croissants and toast.

The B&B is decorated with posters depicting the Hebrides, plus Harris Tweed pillows on the sofas. We got some ideas about places to visit along the Scottish coast, and I'm pleased to say it was a Scotsman who turned me on to the salty pleasure of pan Catalan for breakfast. It does go with coffee!

Markus on the steps of the seaside church in Sitges, 2015

The evening before, after settling in to the B&B, we drove down to Sitges to wander around and find dinner. It's a Mediterranean coastal town of 28,000, known for its gay friendliness although equally enjoyed by all kinds of people. Markus, Simon, and I spent about four days there in 1998. While Markus was at the conference, Simon and I rested and played on the beach. In the evenings, Markus joined us for walking around and more beach time.

In this picture, Markus is holding a small photo album that I made of our 1998 trip to take along. We compared features in the photos with the places we found. Did we remember this place? Was that where we had the picnic? Is that the swingset Simon played on? Seventeen years is a lot of time. I found my basic memories were correct: the conference hotel was somewhere up there, behind the church (true). That must be the beach we went down to (true). But did I remember being there, in that coastal town, with Simon? Only the pictures, really, I remember the pictures from studying them. But the feeling of Simon on my lap, nursing, running in the waves... Memory is an elusive modality.

Akelarre Taverna in Sitges, 2015

Our night wandering in Sitges took us to a tavern where we settled in to watch the Barcelona vs. Bilbao game on television. We took a liking to pinxos (yummy things on a slice of baguette, self-serve from the bar, and you pay by the number of skewers on your plate at the end). We learned to call cervesa by its Catalan name, caña. Barcelona won, of course. They're winning everything this year. The folks in the tavern paid mild attention to the game.

A few more photos from 2015 and 1998 in Sitges.

Mediterranean boys, 1998

Seaside picnic, 1998

Evening strollers, 2015

*Airbnb, for those who haven't tried it yet, is an international network of bed and breakfast type accommodations hosted by regular folks (more or less). You book via a website, on which you have to build a profile and prove your identity to be taken as a safe renter. Now that I've done it once, I feel comfortable about trying it again.

Launching Barcelona Notebook

I have been away--away from home, away from cat (hair), away from media. Well, most media. I traveled to Barcelona for a 10-day poetry course. How's that!

The pleasure of a writing workshop in June is a tradition I've kept nearly every year for the last 11 years. I took part in the annual Writers at Work conference as a Salt Lake local 2005-2009. I missed 2010 (we were moving) and 2011 (residues of the move). Since coming to Germany, I've returned to Salt Lake City three times for the June conference (in 2014 as a fellowship winner). In fact, that wonderful organization is holding this year's conference right now, 5,000 miles away.

Writers at Work is a great conference for new-ish writers. I'm proud of and grateful for my own pedigree: Brenda Miller (2005), Jesse Lee Kercheval (2006), Christopher Cokinos (2007), Abigail Thomas (2008), Eileen Pollack (2009), Steve Almond (2012), Katherine Coles (2013), Robin Hemley (2014).

From my seat on the back deck in Flein, where two black cats slink around in the overgrown grass, the blue-blue Utah sky feels far away. This year's conference site at Ft. Douglas looks out over the University of Utah and the Salt Lake Valley; I bet standing there I could almost see Simon's grave at Mt. Olivet. So here's a shout out to all my dear people and places in Salt Lake: I miss you this year, so far away.

I have stayed closer to home this time. At the AWP conference in April, in addition to gathering information about low-residency MFA programs, I searched for English writing opportunities in European locations. The final evening of the conference I caught the last ten minutes of a reception hosted by various residency programs, hoping the promise of "and international" in the description would yield options.

Postcard for writing workshop
with Sharon Dolin

I passed by a postcard with an image that did not quite capture my recollection. Writing About Art In Barcelona. I took the card and walked on, looking to pick up whatever else I could find. Barcelona? Art? Poetry? Me?

A brisk motion with a VVRRT sound grabbed my attention from the right. That sculpture thing, life size, had just rolled down from a stand at the wall. A slender blond in a black top was gathering it in. I connected her to the postcard in my hand and started a conversation about how, although I live in Europe and would like good writing opportunities there, Barcelona Art Poetry had not been on my mind.

And then I felt a tingle in the softness of my knees and elbows, radiating from my spine. That adrenal fight-or-flight-something-is-going-on tingle. I had been to Barcelona once before, and I had seen the sculpture on that postcard. Markus had attended a conference in the beach town of Sitges, and Simon (age just barely one) and I had traveled along. May 25-June 2, 1998.

Fundació Miró May 1998

Back to Barcelona, 17 years later. What a beautiful trip we had--happy new parents and a healthy, bouncing boy enjoying a (mostly) vacation trip. Back to places I'd visited with Simon, long before I had any idea how much a child can suffer and that he would be that child. Before I knew how diminishing it is to lose the brightest light of your life. Back in 1998 I didn't even know yet what it feels like to have the brightest light turn into two with my second child.

The details: the workshop fell within Miriam's two-week vacation (Pfingsten). We could all go! That is, we could get an apartment in Barcelona, and Markus and Miriam would go shopping and see various sites while I attended the daily two-hour workshop. Most afternoons they could join cultural visits with the poetry group. To boot, Markus had a two-day conference in Toulouse the end of the prior week. He flew there and took a train to Barcelona, where he met me and Miriam at the airport. I stayed on for the last four days alone, while Markus and Miriam returned in time for her to get back to school. Super tidy.

I have so much to process, so much to report. I will be writing a new series here: Barcelona Notebook. It will be more occasional than daily, and it will be my opportunity to reflect on both trips--1998 and 2015. Learnings from a 10-day writing workshop could take forever to settle in. Let's see where this goes. I hope you'll come along!

Thisbe Nissen's reading
recommendations in 2008

Meanwhile, I am back to what I left when I departed. I'm working my way through a re-discovered reading list, given to me by Thisbe Nissen in 2008. Those interlibrary loans burn holes in my night table. I returned the Mangusso and Flynn (I mentioned them on May 18th) before I left for Barcelona. John D'Agata's essay collection Halls of Fame awaited me after the trip. I've been back for "two sleeps" now (as Simon used to say). D'Agata's words go into me like perfectly toasted nuts--irresistible and long in the chewing. For example, the essay about Martha Graham, written as alphabetized portions of dictionary definition. I'd never heard of D'Agata in the summer of 2008 when I talked with Thisbe. That fall I read his anthology The Next American Essay for two classes. I liked it so much I typed up every bit of his interwoven essay introducing the other 32, just to see what it looked like in one piece. (Side note: Thisbe's recommendations are written in three colors of ink. I'm practically certain she was using my four-ink pen, which had actually been Simon's.)

This list is a treasure. Marilyn Ablidskov and Mary Allen, whoever you are, you're next. I've already read the Hood and the Hall (both grief memoirs).