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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello, and welcome to our third week of Follow A Fish poetry podcasts. I'm Sue Boudreau, and this is Deborah Schmidt, my friend, longtime neighbor, and fellow poet and musician. By the way, the music in this podcast is hers. Deborah, could you tell us a little bit about the music we're using for the intro, outro, and also sometimes in between sections?
Deborah:Sure, and thank you so much for putting that together. I think you've done a lovely job with it. That piece is called Penelope Rag, and it is written by a local Bay Area composer, John Partridge, who very kindly gave us his permission to use it. He is a specialist in composing ragtime music, and he's just got such a fecund and melodic imagination. It's phenomenal.
Deborah:Well, thank you.
Sue:I'm just so happy to have it. It fits so well, I think, with what we're doing. Yesterday, we read two poems about the decline of mothers, because we're continuing with our theme of grief. And this time, we're reading and chatting about my poem, The Toll, which takes a contrasting view of grief, this time centered around war, ecology, and the death of a student. The Toll for Luka by Sue Boudreaux.
Sue:Church bells to cannons, peace into war, lances and armor, or bullets and bombs at last, the bells toll. Rock eroded, silted and compacted, subducted and melted to magna, finally freezing to stone once again. Breath turned to sugar by plants, then eaten and turned back into meat. Everything was everything, and everything will be, all rest of the world recycling unseen before and after we're gone. Bells toll for the death of a girl caught in a fire that flashed incredibly fast.
Sue:Burned and buried, ashes to earth, the back door blocked by the roof that fell in. A sparkly spirit, her life stilled so much too soon. The ripples in family friendships will last. A paddle pulled through green water, yellow pollen twirling in small circles on the surface of the slow flowing stream. Water remembers elephants too, the ecosystem of loss and rebirth.
Deborah:Sue, that poem is so moving. It's just devastating. I love the double meaning of the title, and you carry us with you through a journey of grief that has such impact and scope. You begin with a reversal of the phrase from Isaiah, swords into plowshares. I'd love to hear you tell us about your choice to begin with this imagery of violence and destruction. I don't know. There's something about the heaviness of church bells that both toll, but also I read recently that church bells were collected all around England to be made into armaments for the war, and that has happened throughout history. And metal would be recycled, collected and recycled to armaments and back again. And that kind of gave this whole idea of things recycling.
Deborah:Right. So it's not just one way, it's two ways. Right. Cycles of war and peace, and the uses of metal. Wow.
Sue:And then that led me on to the idea of cycles in nature, some of which are slow and some which are faster. Yeah. And I think that thinking about death like that helps me to cope with it, with the idea that things will be recycled, that matter cycles, and maybe souls do too. Yeah.
Deborah:I'm actually gonna skip ahead to a question that relates to that. In stanzas two and three, you bring us that long view geological time and the constant metamorphoses of life cycles. And there is a sort of dread inevitability here, but also comfort, as you've said. Have you always been able to access this perspective, or did your scientific training help you to get there? I see science often as allegory.
Sue:I have to say there's something about the way that rock cycles that surprised me. It kind of surprised me because I didn't study geology. It was only later in life that I had to teach it, so I had to learn about it too. I spent an entire day reading Rough Hewn Land, which is like basically a geology textbook about the kind of conveyor belt of the rock cycle and being really, really struck by it and the sort of depth of it. So I guess yes, but also the writing of this helped me to deal with this just unspeakable tragedy.
Sue:This was a girl who was particularly amazing. She was particularly imaginative and kind, even in the storms of seventh grade. And to lose her was just an enormous, unhealable wound for her family.
Deborah:Yeah. For the whole school, I imagine. Yeah. So you introduce a strong, recurring dactylic rhythm in the first stanza, triplets accented on the first syllable. I'm going to read some of that.
Deborah:Church bells to cannons, peace into war, lances and armor or bullets and bombs. At last, the bells toll. I recently learned this great thing that is going to help me remember the meaning of the word dactyl finally. It comes from the word for finger, and it refers to the relative length of the finger joint. So if you look at your index finger, you've got a long joint followed by two short ones.
Deborah:It used to be in poetry, Greek and Latin poetry, that the stresses were by length rather than by emphasis, but we emphasized through a change of pitch. So it has become, for us, the strong weak weak. But still having that finger image in mind can help us remember what the dactyl means. Think it's pretty great. And this rhythm recalls for me the famous phrases from the burial rite of the Book of Common Prayer, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Deborah:And I wondered, were you consciously referencing
Sue:Yes, I find that one of the most powerful passages that I can think of. And it fits beautifully with the way that science talks about the recycling of matter.
Deborah:Yeah. There's both a way that we feel both incredibly unimportant in one way, and part of the world, we're part of the world, we're not separate from it. And I find that an interesting idea. Yeah.
Deborah:It's profound. It really is. It changes our relationship to the world ecologically. It's what we need to do right now. Yeah.
Deborah:You you quoted, in a way, paraphrase, returning ashes to earth. You have very effectively placed the particular loss in this poem in the middle after establishing these long cycles of geological time. And I'm curious about how you decided to sequence the stances.
Deborah:I honestly have no idea. It just I started thinking about church bells to canons, and it was at the same time as as Luca had died. And I'd been to her memorial, which was absolutely packed church, Saint Mary's Church in Moraga at nighttime. And there was something around in my subconscious. And I guess that's one of the reasons we call this follow a fish, because that's kind of what happened is that I don't know where it came from, I just know that it did. And that I was open enough and relaxed enough to let whatever was under the mercs float to the surface.
Deborah:Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. And did you move stances around after they came out initially? You remember?
Deborah:No. I don't think so.
Deborah:No. Wow. So it's the original order. Yeah. Works really, really well.
Deborah:And then the gorgeous imagery of your final stanzas. I just love these lines. The ripples in family friendships will last. A paddle pulled through green water, yellow pollen twirling in small circles on the surface of the slow flowing stream. That brings us to reflections on what is lasting memory and, as you stated, the ecosystem of loss and rebirth.
Deborah:So you've talked a little bit about how you arrived through the consideration of the long earth cycles at this place of acceptance and even hope. But what else played into that? I don't understand. Into finally arriving well, at least at the end of the poem, the place of acceptance and hope. You say water remembers, elephants too, the ecosystem of loss and birth?
Deborah:I think it's that I fundamentally edge towards optimism. That I have to find a way out of the darkness. And the loss of a student, an empty seat, is an appalling thing for a teacher as well as of course for everybody else. But I mean, we're no longer used to that. In the old days, before vaccinations, regularly kids would die.
Sue:But I think in the whole time I was a teacher for thirty years, we lost two students that I remember very vividly. And I can't stay in that darkness forever, and so that's where I use, I guess, kind of science to climb out. And that's in many ways what I wanted to pass on to my students too, is this idea that in the end, things come and they go, and it's part of the rhythm of life.
Deborah:Beautiful. Did you read it to them? No, no. I've hardly read it to anybody. Now I have the pleasure of reading Sue's poem, The Toll, for Luca.
Deborah:Church bells to cannons, peace into war, lances and armor or bullets and bombs. At last, the bells toll. Rock eroded, silted, and compacted, subducted, and melted to magma, finally freezing to stone once again. Breath turned to sugar by plants, then eaten and turned into meat. Everything was everything, and everything will be.
Deborah:All of the rest of the world recycling unseen before and long after we're gone. Bells toll for the death of a girl caught in a fire that flashed incredibly fast, burned and buried, returning ashes to earth, the back door blocked by the roof that fell in. A sparkly spirit, her life still much too soon. The ripples in family friendships will last, a paddle pulled through green water, yellow pollen twirling in small circles on the surface of this low flowing stream. Water remembers elephants too, the ecosystem of loss and rebirth.
Deborah:And here is our extended prompt for this week. Try an elegy, which is a poem that begins as lamentation for the loss of someone beloved, but moves through admiration and praise toward consolation or solace, often in the shape of memory and legacy. You can find a great article defining an elegy in the glossary at poets.org, which is a great resource, by the way. And that article has an extended quote from another great resource, which I believe you can find both in print and online, Edward Hirsch's Poet's Glossary, which also has a beautiful article on the elegy.
Sue:What a lovely idea to do an elegy as opposed to just a poem on grief. You'll find in the show notes the links that Deborah has talked about. Next week we'll be sharing poems on activism. Please check out the written poems and added artwork at our website at curiositycatpodcastscasts.com. It's linked in our show notes.
Sue:And of course, please rate and review us, and subscribe and share this with your friends. We're looking forward to hearing from you.