I never doubted my own self-worth as a human. Ellen: Well, I am not an academic. A Year of Being Here: Ellen Bass: "The Thing Is. The Buddhist story Bass cites offers some interesting food for thought. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Well, yours is Ellen Bass dot com, and I recommend everybody go there and listen to you read, and to see the many, many books you've written. When I saw him, the metaphor of what his tattoos meant (or what I claimed they meant), came to me immediately and the outline of the poem arrived in minutes.
You see something, the pork chops in your marvelous poem, Ode to a Pork Chop, which is my new favorite poem. If I no longer had my mind—. This particular poem, Ode to the Pork Chop, was… We are grappling, as many people are, with the way animals are raised, those of us who are not vegetarian or vegan. Ellen Bass lives in the relatively small city of Santa Cruz, two hours south of San Francisco, and from there has forged a career as a full-time poet and teacher without a full-time position at an institution. Marion: We experience, in those kind of overlays, those intellectual overlays, when somebody metaphorms something for us, is just a singular joy. Rich Territory: An Interview with Ellen Bass. After that I worked in Boston for a couple of years. Once I see something, once it's in the poem and I really focus on it, I never can quite go back to not seeing. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. It's very much like dumping a 10-million-piece jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Of course, as much as I hope to do this, what I am actually capable of doing will depend not only on my intentions, but what the muse grants me.
What's the process that you-. We were on our way into Ross, shopping for dresses. Its incantatory repetition, the anaphora of the word "because, " guides us through a tough night of labor, birth, and aftermath.
And then, what I love best though, is rewrite, because it's the tidying up. They repeatedly scheduled exams on Jewish holidays. To the sterile diapers and pale-yellow sleeper. Folded inside the brown paper bag I'd baked in the oven. Marion: I guess you were. “relax” with ellen bass. The refrigerator, dragged it to the curb, and called the used appliance store for a pick up — drug money. Undulant tangle of lobules and milk ducts, harmless and radiant against the black fat. When we know this from the inside, the caution that may have colored our days will dissolve like mist over the bay. We sent copies of the book to them and I recently heard from his wife on Twitter. It was a very fine line.
In this poem, If You Knew, even a man wheeling his suitcase through an airport and the clerk in the pharmacy who won't say Thank you come newly alive for us when we remember that they, like us, are drifting toward an irrevocable finality. I didn't want to be locked into the role of "teaching road warrior" where you have to drive long distances to various community colleges. I need time to gain a sense of the whole, so I just work on it when I have six or seven hours straight that I can work on the manuscript so I could hold the shape of it in my head. An Anthology of Poems by Women (1973). I'm so grateful for that process. Ellen bass the thing is poem. I mean, you can say to somebody, "Oh, you should read this poem about the pork chop, " but I can't paraphrase the poem because the words are exactly as close as we can get them, to saying something that you really can't just say right out. In those instances, the initial writing and the revision are somewhat different, but much of the time it doesn't come out all in a piece, so the writing and the revision just go back and forth. And I'll just say it to you because it's a poem that sustained me during many hard times.
I aspire to make poems from what was one of the most profound experiences of my life. What if you knew you'd be the last. As though I had never known a woman—an explorer, wholly curious to discover each particular. Marion: I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever been so surprised by anything when researching a writer, because I… A poet with a website is just a phrase that does not usually happen, a poet of a certain age with a website. And, being a Jew of a certain age—I was born in 1947, about two years after the last Jews were liberated from concentration camps—I am tethered to the Holocaust. Ellen bass the thing is the new black. Ellen: Do you love him too? He was a kind, quiet man who must have been carrying a terrible burden of grief and guilt. But I think that we aren't taught that process nearly enough. What is better than sitting down and talking with a group of people for a few hours and talking about poetry? Or the spirochete that screwed into my blood. As I say, "It's a kind of obsession. " So, the care with which I cook it, with which I make sure I use every little part of it, is really different.
Poetry does not go places by itself. Running your fingers, tenderly, through someone's hair? Then there's really making sure that the poem is sound. I haven't figured out what the piece is about. Ellen bass the thing is a joke. Collaborating with Ellen, Copper Canyon's Kickstarter program ran an initiative to provide Copper Canyon books to prison poetry workshops. Thank you for taking the time to investigate where "Rock Me" came from, and yes, I do think it is a kind of secret message about the poems in Indigo. It was winter and they traveled by night and hid by day. It's a practice, of course. There's so many aspects of writing I love.
And they've done brain imaging of people reading metaphors. Which is not to say that homophobia didn't wreak its own havoc. I wanted to hear about women's experience, and in my writing workshops women were writing about things they had never told anyone. Those of us who write from our own lives, which for the most part, I do.
I didn't have formal training as a psychologist, but in Boston I had worked with teens at risk. And my mother's bones so narrow, she had to be slit. Ellen: Actually, I've read about that a bit. When people ask how long it takes to write a poem, it's always hard to answer because on one scale, it took 40 years and on another just a couple days. Her mother lost her first husband and her entire family in the Holocaust and she spent the war years hiding with a Catholic man who was in love with her and who she married. Not too long after that, I began my relationship with Janet. And of course, it doesn't take murder for anti-Semitism to make an impact. And our greatest wounding—the imperfection that no amount of prayer or goodness or psychotherapy will ever do anything to erase—is that we are pinned against time. Growing up in high school I was boy crazy. She didn't find out she was Jewish until she was in her teens. So, let's make a date to do that, if you-. When I wanted to get back to poetry I didn't know how. Imagine looking at yourself in the mirror, or at your lover or your parents, and seeing you or them soaked in honey, stung and swollen.
When I interviewed Brenda Hillman, she commented that writing workshops give us access to our spiritual selves, because during our regular work life, we just don't have time for poetry. But the great thing is that there are people who help you with that. Watch her on YouTube. The soldiers could easily have captured or killed them, but they chose not to. Then I waited a few weeks to try to write the poem. So that's a challenge. Mark Doty has a wonderful poem called Little Rabbit, Dead In The Grass, and in the middle of it, he says, "And now we come to the so of the poem, " and there's a question mark after so. Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy? My intention now is to delve deeper into what it was like for me to lead people through that uncharted territory.
I wandered in misery for a lot of years—then I had to make a choice. Is that where you had your daughter?