Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. Deborah Backel Schmidt and Sue Boudreaux here, your Follow A Fish poetry conversations and inspiration podcast hosts. Friends and neighbors for ages now enjoying the deep conversations of being poetry podcast pals. Every episode concludes with a prompt to inspire you to write and send something in. Last week, we read activist poetry inspired by the seer of current events.
Sue:Now, the restorative power of nature, nature in need of restoring, the power of stories and poems to soothe and activate us, to take action for nature. If poetry can make a difference, it's needed. The crisis of nature is essentially a crisis of human behavior. On that note, Sue, that's me, will be launching a new podcast and community forum, restoring nature, restoring us. Stay tuned.
Sue:We'll start with some lovely listener poems sent from our first prompt, fish. So I'm going to read Pete Brown's Sunstar sashimi poem. Not ablaze with rays of burning gold, more like a cooling lava flow through cracks and crusty ash it glows. Two dozen grey arms flex as rippling tube feet grip on slippery rocks and sniff the seafood scented waves. Two dozen eye spots scan the pools festooned with knotted ropes of kelp for signs of intertidal life.
Sue:At last, the sun star settles on a bed of mussel sushi and sends its stomach out to lunch. I love the contrast with the actual sun and the simile to cooling lava flow, because I hadn't really thought about it, but they do look like that squeezed into the corners of tide pools. And I also love the sense of menace as as a predator scans for prey, and I don't normally think of starfish as predators, which of course they are. I love the visual of knotted ropes of kelp, and it makes me long to go rock pooling again soon. Sea stars, by the way, are making a comeback after a devastating wasting disease virus, by the way.
Sue:The virus has been identified, the bacterias have been identified, and captive breeding programs and natural selection are offering some hope for a more resilient future generations of sea stars. Sea stars eat purple urchins by the way, and purple urchins have been booming and destroying kelp forests off the California coast. Too much science? Pete used to work at the California Academy of Sciences Aquarium, and, they are a key player in this ecological rescue. I also loved the surprised landing of the poem.
Sue:It made me laugh, and it's scientifically accurate. They do use their tube feet to grip, pull, and tire out muscles who then open up and yep, stars the send their stomach out to envelop the soft muscle. The stomach secretes strong digestive enzymes and they pull the whole gooey mess back through their mouths. You're welcome. That was delicious Sending its stomach out to lunch, quite literally.
Sue:Deborah, I wonder if you could comment on the structure of the poem or on what struck you.
Deborah:You know, that last ending just cracked me up as well. It's just it was such a surprise, and I don't have the basis and science that both of you do, but this poem is beautifully crafted as well. It's got a nice recurrent iambic rhythm, da da da da da more like a cooling lava flow through cracks and crusty. It glows. There's that nice rhyme, which is a hidden rhyme because you have flow on a and glows on the end of a line, but not the next line where you expect it, where the rhythm would lead you to expect it.
Deborah:The images are great too. I especially do like the one that Sue pointed out about the cooling lava with cracks through which this glow emanates. That's just a gorgeous comparison. We have been sent a lovely poem by Allegra Silverstein from Davis, California. Allegra is a former poet laureate of Davis.
Deborah:The poem is called goldfish gift. The goldfish, I'm told, has a longer attention span than humans. This may be myth, but our lowered attention span is not. In a small glass bowl, two tiny goldfish are swimming. There's a large shell at the bottom.
Deborah:You said they could sleep there. You wanted them so much, and here they are. Watching them, I feel my attention expanding into a place of peace with no need for measurement, only these shared moments of movement in our small world. This is just a beautiful poem. It possesses such elasticity, compressing a wealth of movement and an expansive sense of time within a small compass that after reading it, one is surprised to discover it is actually quite formal on the page and consists of just four four line stanzas.
Deborah:I particularly like the break between stanzas three and four, during which we feel our own attention expanding into a place of peace. There's a break between the word expanding and the next stanza, which begins into a place of peace. I love the calming, alliterative m's of measurement, moments, and movement in the last stanza with no need for measurement, only these shared moments of movement in our small worlds. And in the end, you bring us to a place of equality with the little fish with whom we share this world.
Sue:Oh, thank you, Deborah. And Allegra is right. We are losing our ability to maintain focus with screens, scrolling, and brain training for instant gratification. And yet, here she is paying attention to a tiny goldfish in a bowl with an implied perhaps grandchild who put a shell bed in for the fish. From the small focus, she expanded her focus, reminding the reader how small noticing is the gateway to peace, and the metaphor of the goldfish pole, I thought was lovely.
Sue:This resonates with a famous quote from Mary Oliver who said, the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness. Paying attention to everyday beauty, this poem reminds me to do that. We did intend to find more sweet nature poems of our own, but after our usual poetry back and forth, a highlight of this whole podcasting experience, Deborah and I found that we were both semi obsessed with, crows and ravens. So we're going with that because I guess we felt the need for a little levity, and who can argue that the blackbirds flapping and chattering in the telephone wires are up for that? And crows and ravens are part of nature.
Sue:We hope you enjoy hearing the poems as much as we enjoyed reading and writing them. Poems and accompanying artwork can be found at our website curiositycats excuse me, curiositycatpodcasts.com. And Deborah's going to start by sharing her poem in the season of crows.
Deborah:This one of mine, In the Season of the Crows, was inspired by a gorgeous pair of nineteenth century folding screens by Kishi Chikudo in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of grown twisted and spent. Persimmons glow against dark branches. The sun has poured itself into the harvest, yet remains sovereign of these radiant hours. Hours. Sky and ground are gold leaf on silk, weightless sheets of pure beaten metal lacquered in place.
Deborah:And into this brassy splendor come the crows, messengers of the gods, spirits of the dead, pathfinders. They are saturated ink, burnt oil kneaded with animal glue, molded into dense embossed sticks, cured with oak ash, ground on stone, stirred with just enough liquid to swell the brush. So sooty are they, beak to foot, that we expect their very blood and entrails to glisten like hot tar. Only hints of reflected light define here an eye, there a feather's edge. Wings akimbo joined at the feet, they whirl around some contested prize.
Deborah:They forage. They feast. They convene and confer. They plunge, perch, pronounce. They observe.
Deborah:They opine. They purr. They rattle like dried gourds. They caw, cackle, and screech, and then they flap away. Their darkness given animate shape, black holes in the golden day through which night speaks to us, of the divinity of origins, the inevitability of death, the triumph of regeneration.
Sue:Wow. I love your opening stanza about paradox and opposites, black and gold, and the visceral description of autumn pumpkins shining against vines, grown twisted and spent. So many gorgeous descriptions and allusions in your poem, and some lovely as well. They forage, they feast, they convene and confer, they plunge, perch, pronounce, observe, and opine. I especially love that we feel similarly about the portent of crows, how they represent more than just blackbirds flapping around the neighborhood.
Sue:I'm pretty sure we have a posse of neighborhood crows that hang out next to your house on the power lines watching us and talking smack.
Deborah:Yes, we do.
Sue:I had some lines that I especially loved. Pumpkin shine among the vines, and so sooty are they beak to foot that we expect their very blood and entrails to glisten like hot tar. I love that they are darkness given animate shape and black holes in a golden day. And I love the landing, the inevitability of death, and the triumph of regeneration. I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about this art piece that inspired your poem.
Sue:And do you often use art to inspire poetry? Do you have a practice to bring a notebook to art galleries or concerts, for example?
Deborah:Oh, thank you, Sue. Yes. Great question. This particular piece is two very large folding screens. I would say they're probably six feet tall by 10 feet long, two of them, and they each consist of, I think, six panels.
Deborah:And they show the crows in a variety of aspects on this brilliant gold background. So really, it's very monochromatic with just little touches of red for some berries here and there. Just a stunning thing. I mean, we walked into this gallery where this one piece was part of their permanent collection of oriental art, and I was just floored. And yes, art does often inspire me.
Deborah:I do bring a notebook when I go to galleries because I just know something's going to hit me. I don't usually remember to bring one to concerts, but I almost always end up scrolling the beginnings of the poem on a program with a pencil that I have now with me.
Sue:Yeah, I actually do the same in church services too sometimes, and when I I go to was wondering, where do your feelings about crows come from? Is it direct experience stories, or legends, or what?
Deborah:It's really both. I think it probably started out with direct experience with crows, and then I read a lot of mythology as a kid. The Norse god Odin has these two That's right. He had two companion spies called Hugin, which means thought, and Munin, which means memory. And they fly around the world to gather information and bring it back for him.
Deborah:So that's one of the reasons he is the all knowing father god. Then the Greek god Apollo is also associated with ravens who were considered messengers. And because they're scavengers, they are often linked in myth and legend with battlefields, death, and the afterlife. The Celtic warrior goddess, the Morrigan, often appears as a crow. She watches over warriors and the dead.
Deborah:And the Celtic god Bran, the blessed Bran actually means crow, was linked with prophetic ravens that watched over the land after his death. And then in the indigenous cultures of our own Pacific Northwest, Raven is a creator, transformer, a cunning trickster who brings light to the world. In many European folk and fairy tales, and I read tons of those as a kid, witches and sorcerers transform into ravens to evade capture. So I think, as a child, and this maintains into my present life, you know, when I see the ravens and crows, I have this inner sense that they are actually masquerading as ravens and crows, and they're really some more powerful being just visiting us.
Sue:Yeah. Me too, for sure. Thank you so much for that sort of summary of the mythology around ravens and crows. I was wondering if you could talk a little little bit about the structure of the poem. To me, as an untrained observer, it seems like it's a very it's very free verse, and I think that that's what it's actually called.
Sue:Is it called free verse? Absolutely. And I was wondering if you could talk why and how you decided to use this structure, and also a little bit about what is free verse? How does that how is it different from a piece of prose, for example?
Deborah:Sure, yeah. I find that every poem dictates its own form to me, and I generally start with free verse. I don't always. Sometimes I do set out to write a formal poem, and in that case, I'm trying for the meter that I need from the very beginning. But very often, I will start in free verse, and then the predominant rhythm asserts itself or a shape asserts itself.
Deborah:But free verse is a choice if you just want the language to roll and you don't want anything to hold it back or dictate to you how those lines are behaving. And free verse as opposed to prose prose can definitely be very poetic. I mean, I'm sure you can think of lots of examples of gorgeous poetic prose, But poems, of course, are defined by this heightened, condensed language and often relying on rhyme and rhythm. The line breaks in poetry will frame the images or otherwise be sort of artfully disposed to break the image in a thought provoking way or to create a thought break. There are other reasons for breaking lines the way people do, too.
Deborah:Whereas with prose, the lines will continue from edge to And there is this thing you've seen too, I'm sure called a prose poem, which is really poetic language, but it's in the edge to edge format of prose.
Sue:Interesting. Yeah. Because line breaks is something that when I'm writing, I actually have quite a bit of fun messing around with those because it's like a place to take a breath. Yeah. And sometimes you can put a line with two breaks above it and below it so it really stands out.
Sue:And that's like putting a frame around something and saying to the reader, Look at this. Think about this for
Deborah:a moment. Exactly. It really brings an impact to it. You can tell everybody is a visual artist so cute. That thinking visually really carries.
Sue:And, yeah, thank you. By the way, you can see the written versions of all of the poems that we read on our website, curiositycatpodcasts.com, because it really is fun to see how they look on the page and enjoy page breaks. And now I'm going to reread Deborah's beautiful poem, In the Season of Crows. All is distilled into paradox, essences and opposites, black and gold. Pumpkins shine among vines grown twisted and spent, persimmons glow against dark branches.
Sue:The sun has poured itself into the harvest, yet remains sovereign of these radiant hours. Sky and ground are gold leaf on silk, weightless sheets of pure beaten metal lacquered in place. And into this brassy splendor come the crows, messengers of the gods, spirits of the dead, pathfinders. They are saturated ink, burnt oil, kneaded with animal glue molded into dense embossed sticks, cured with oak ash ground on stone, stirred with just enough liquid to swell the brush. So sooty are they, beak to foot, that we expect their very blood and entrails to glisten like hot tar.
Sue:Only hints of reflected light define here and I. There are feathers edge. Wings akimbo joined at the feet. They whirl around some contested prize. They forage, they feast, they convene and confer.
Sue:They plunge, perch, pronounce, they observe, they opine. They purr, they rattle like dried gore gourds. They core, cackle, and screech, and then they flap away. They are darkness given animate shape, black holes in the golden day through which night speaks to us of the divinity of origins, the inevitability of death, and the triumph of regeneration.
Deborah:The prompt for today is to write an ekphrastic poem, a poem inspired by a piece of artwork. If visiting a museum is not an option, you may find something in your own home or at a neighbor's. Online images work too, but I find that artwork in the flesh always moves me more deeply than photos or prints even. The texture of real paint just speaks volumes, and seeing a sculpture in the round is always ideal. We would love it if you would submit your responses to the prompts to curiositycatpodcasts@gmail.com.
Deborah:You're welcome also to send us a voice recording as a dot WAV file, or let us know if you'd rather have us record it for you. We promise to respond to all submissions, and we may read one of your poems aloud. Also at curiositycatpodcast.com, you can read the show notes, see the poems in print, and see the artwork chosen to go with them. You can leave us a rating and or a review via your podcast provider, and please share us with your friends. Thanks for listening.
Deborah:By the way, the music you're hearing is composed by John Partridge, local composer, and played by John with me on flute. Production and editing is done by Sue Boudreaux in El Sobrante, California.