Guest Poetry Blog Series #5. Introducing the Fifth Contributor, American Poet Susan Browne, Part One of Two – Infinity on Fire

 

 

American poet Susan Browne

Bonanza

Amanda shows me my bones,
A picture of my spine, ghost-like,
Snake-like, like it could rattle.
I say, Amanda, it looks crooked, why
Is that? She shrugs, You’re not the only one.
Your bone-density’s fine. You can go now.
My plebeian spine walks me toward
The mammogram room where I flop my boob
Onto the plastic tray. Flop is not exactly accurate
Concerning these tater tots.
Darlene tussles with them, trying to yank
What’s barely there & squish it under
The plate. Wait! I say, trying not to yell.
Darlene waits, complimenting me on my earrings.
I explain where I bought them in case she’d like a pair
& she asks if I’m ready & before I answer
My flesh is smashed & splayed into place,
I’m told not to breathe, the machine whirs,
My spine curves even more weirdly.
I am bones hung with a hunk
Of tissue muscle blood, I am not the only one
Who rattles & spins on the wheel of living’s roulette
& finally Darlene says you can go now as she stares
At a computer screen. Is her expression alarmed
Or maybe her mouth’s just slightly crooked? I stand
Straight & naked from the waist up except for my earrings,
The room cold slabs of concrete where the body is a dumb
Animal searching for a way out. Bloused, I elevator
From the basement & walk outside into a bonanza
Of sunshine, the crowded street, the amazing meat
Of us, the jostling bones of us, the creaking, the sloshing,
The man carrying his baby against his chest in a sash
As if he’s holding eggs while riding a unicycle,
The old lady pushing an older lady in a wheelchair
So slowly the universe could be redesigned
Before they cross the street to the storefront brimming
With apricots & artichokes. Doesn’t take X-ray eyes
To see something inside us all, like a secret
I wish we’d tell without fear, leaning close,
Nearly kissing the other’s ear.

Susan Browne from Rattle, finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, 2019 and forthcoming in Monster Mash, Four Way Books

Richard’s Lead-in for Susan Browne and Her Blog Post Introduction

I am so pleased to introduce the fifth guest blogger in this new series of poetry blog posts: California-based American poet Susan Browne. Part Two of her blog posts will feature the American poet Chelsea Harlan whose debut collection has been recently released by The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press.

But first my lead-in to Susan in her own words that begins with her poem Bonanza, this celebration of one body, then many bodies. This celebration of what it is to be human. Our bones hung with a hunk/ Of tissue muscle blood,….And Susan’s intro ends, also, with a poem: Love Letters. A gorgeous hymn to being alive, to being able to say: I see you/ dear vanishings.

I give huge thanks to Susan for being part of guest blog series, for her poems and for these inspirational words on poetry from her introduction below:

I can never get to the end of learning my craft. It’s infinity on fire.

*

Poetry is the beauty and the burning. It’s silence to sound and seed to sunlight. A way of being intimate with all things, of praising them, a way to think and feel far into things. Poetry pinches us awake, sings to us in strange and familiar melodies. It belongs to everyone.

It’s appropriate Susan is the first American guest blogger because I first discovered her in an anthology of firsts edited by American poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Never Before: Poems About First Experiences. Susan’s poem was First Drink which I used for many years as a writing prompt in my poetry therapy work at drug and alcohol recovery centers. To read First Drink please click here for my August 2019 blog post on Susan and her poetry.


In 2016 I had the good fortune to join a two week residential poetry retreat with American poet Kim Addonizio at the La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy. There I met Susan in person. A great friend of Kim’s she was there to add another accomplished poetic voice to our sessions. Those sessions led by Kim gave us all so much in those two weeks and on top of those poetry writing times, a special memory for me were the many early morning walks a few of us, including Susan, took most mornings up the mountain to the hilltop town San Libratore from la Romita. In a recent email Susan adds this recollection form that time: I remember our walks at La Romita. I remember what a fabulous time we had, so many stories, good food and wine, and laughter. So much laughter!

If this is your first time hearing of Susan and her poetry here below is her extensive list of poetry credentials followed by her intro which includes her two poems and such wisdom on the nature of poetry!! Infinity on fire.

Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sun, The Southern Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, American Life in Poetry, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She has published three books of poetry: Buddha’s Dogs, Zephyr, and Just Living. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, the River Styx International Poetry Contest, the Catamaran Poetry Prize for Just Living and the James Dickey Poetry Prize. She received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and collaborated with poet Kim Addonizio to create a word/music CD. Her third collection. Her next book of poetry, Monster Mash, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She lives in Chico, CA. www.susanbrownepoems.com.

Two Poems by Susan Browne and Her Introduction to Her Poetry Journey

Bonanza

Amanda shows me my bones,
A picture of my spine, ghost-like,
Snake-like, like it could rattle.
I say, Amanda, it looks crooked, why
Is that? She shrugs, You’re not the only one.
Your bone-density’s fine. You can go now.
My plebeian spine walks me toward
The mammogram room where I flop my boob
Onto the plastic tray. Flop is not exactly accurate
Concerning these tater tots.
Darlene tussles with them, trying to yank
What’s barely there & squish it under
The plate. Wait! I say, trying not to yell.
Darlene waits, complimenting me on my earrings.
I explain where I bought them in case she’d like a pair
& she asks if I’m ready & before I answer
My flesh is smashed & splayed into place,
I’m told not to breathe, the machine whirs,
My spine curves even more weirdly.
I am bones hung with a hunk
Of tissue muscle blood, I am not the only one
Who rattles & spins on the wheel of living’s roulette
& finally Darlene says you can go now as she stares
At a computer screen. Is her expression alarmed
Or maybe her mouth’s just slightly crooked? I stand
Straight & naked from the waist up except for my earrings,
The room cold slabs of concrete where the body is a dumb
Animal searching for a way out. Bloused, I elevator
From the basement & walk outside into a bonanza
Of sunshine, the crowded street, the amazing meat
Of us, the jostling bones of us, the creaking, the sloshing,
The man carrying his baby against his chest in a sash
As if he’s holding eggs while riding a unicycle,
The old lady pushing an older lady in a wheelchair
So slowly the universe could be redesigned
Before they cross the street to the storefront brimming
With apricots & artichokes. Doesn’t take X-ray eyes
To see something inside us all, like a secret
I wish we’d tell without fear, leaning close,
Nearly kissing the other’s ear.

Susan Browne from Rattle, finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, 2019 and forthcoming in Monster Mash, Four Way Books, 2023

Some words about my poetry journey:

My love for poetry began when I was eleven. A neighbor, an artist, gave me a book of poems. She must have seen my hunger and fed me. The book was archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis. Archy is a cockroach and Mehitabel is a cat in her ninth life. These two live in a journalist’s house, and when the journalist goes to work, Archy hops up on the typewriter and writes poetry. In a previous life, Archy was a free verse poet. He records his thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and Mehitabel offers him many stories from her treasure trove of nine incarnations.

Mehitabel has an exuberance for living, (toujours gai), and so does Archy in his grouchy way, but he has a darker, more philosophical vision. He has to throw himself headfirst onto each key to operate the typewriter, and he can’t make capital letters because he doesn’t weigh enough to hold down the shift key. I was inspired. I read and re-read this book. It was surprising, funny, and took on every subject from the mundane to the celestial. The language was ordinary but also possessed its own original elegance. I loved the flow and construction of the lines down the page and was amazed at the lack of punctuation, how it wasn’t always necessary as I had been taught in school. Poetry was liberty. It was wild. I learned from Archy what I would learn again later from Leonard Cohen who wrote: Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers.

I immediately wanted to write it. I remember the day I wrote my first poem, sitting in the living room listening to my parents and their friends talk. It was one of those social occasions where the kid sits there all dressed up and remains quiet. It was raining outside. Bored, I went over to my mother and asked if I could get a pencil and a piece of paper. I came back into the living room and sat in my chair by the window. The poem I wrote was about the rain. I titled it, “The Rain.” It was fascinating to me, to take what was inside, feelings and thoughts, and connect them with the outside: the rain on the inside and the rain on the outside. I wrote the poem in quatrains—without knowing what a quatrain was—and at the end of every other stanza I repeated: “What’s a poor child to do?”

What can a child do in a world of adults that often seems false, trapped in convention? This was the 1960’s. I didn’t know how to articulate my growing concern about the world that was so troubling. I loved my parents, they loved me, but something was wrong. Many things were not being said, and I felt them. I wanted to be able to name how I was feeling and what I was witnessing, and to do it in an interesting way. I wanted a rhythm to it and some rhymes; I wanted to make pictures in words, with a connection from the inner to the outer landscape. I wouldn’t read Emily Dickinson’s poems until I was in college, but I had the desperate desire to tell my truth and tell it slant. This process would become my way of being in the world.

For years I wrote poetry without any instruction. My father told me he used to find little scraps of paper with writing on them on the floor of my bedroom. When I published my first book, he said he wished he had saved those scraps. That was a sweet idea, Dad, but I don’t think it would have made our fortune.

Poetry is a continuous experiment beyond the realm of the marketplace. Alive and ever-changing, shape-shifting. Poetry is beyond anyone’s grasp or control. As a young woman, I adored that about it. So much of life looked like a trap for a woman. Poetry was a place where I couldn’t be hunted down. I wouldn’t let what was wild in me be domesticated out of existence, and every poem I wrote, from a scrap on the floor to a poem published in a literary journal, was an escape hatch. And yet, poems show us to ourselves; they tell all the truths, the secrets we can barely tell ourselves, so poems are also the opposite of escape.

At first, poetry had nothing to do with schools or teachers, but then I spent many years studying it. One of my greatest experiences in a poetry workshop was a three-day seminar led by American poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012). I filled two notebooks, writing down what he said. Here are a few lines:

Poetry is a living object.
Get stark, primal energy into the poem.
Good poetry is truly caused by something.
Real surrealism has to have truth in it.
Get away from writing cleverly and write from a deeper place.
One of the functions of poetry is to teach people feeling, to reawaken feeling.

I can never get to the end of learning my craft. It’s infinity on fire. And as a fellow poet said to me recently after I complained about my frustrations with my work and about the art in general, “Susan, it’s just a poem.”

What? I spent hours, days, weeks, months trying to get this poem to fly, and it’s just a poem? I thought he’d lost his mind.

But he’s right. And I could relax and start again, ever the novitiate.

When I write, I don’t throw myself headfirst onto my keypad like Archy. But I admire him for it, finding his own writing process and doing what he has to do:

they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now

Poetry is the beauty and the burning. It’s silence to sound and seed to sunlight. A way of being intimate with all things, of praising them, a way to think and feel far into things. Poetry pinches us awake, sings to us in strange and familiar melodies. It belongs to everyone.

Love Letters

autumn leaves glitter in their brittling
someone plays the french horn on the shore
beneath the blue flame of sky the sound
like silver glinting across air like tinder

dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore

someone stomps out of the reeds
holding a fishing pole
commands the horn player to stop
I walk by into silence

missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain

a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires
I imagine mother earth is tired

our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold

dear humans
beautiful & dangerous
what will we do next
I keep thinking about love

about a man
who wrote to me years later
to say he was sorry for
loving badly

he was a painter
& painted me standing in a field
of wheat wearing a yellow dress
& straw hat

like I was part of the land
the soft-gold dusk the wind
he sees me is what I thought
I was seen

& it felt like love
it didn’t last but what lasts
love lasts because here it is again
as I walk around the lake

we could have done better
we were learning are we learning
the water is low the color of slate
covered in crushed diamonds

the geese gliding
the hawk & falcon
the insects busy
building their empires

the snake undulating
across the road
disappearing I see you
dear vanishings

Susan Browne from New Ohio Review, Fall, 2020 and forthcoming in Monster Mash, Four Way Books, 2023

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