writing prod
Posted by Daniela Elza on Nov 14 2008 | Comment now »
Here, for those of you who keep complaining you are not motivated enough, like to procrastinate with your writing (instead of precrastinate), or just end up struggling with that pesky editor in your head, Dr. Wicked has a cure for you. Check out his Write or Die: Putting the Prod in Productivity tool. Especially those of you who are committed to the nanowrimo this month, or would like to start now (for unmentionable reasons). This might just get you there in half the time.
They have also the young writers’ program which my daughter took on as a challenge a couple of years ago, when she was 10 or so. I am not sure if she finished the novel (almost did, but the ending was giving her some trouble), but she did a lot, and that got her going on a “better” one. The one thing she did not agree with was going for quantity instead of quality. Yet, it may be almost impossible to get her to do that writing for school. Why?
“In our day the intensification of consciousness, in the form of techniques of meditation and the like, has become heavy industry. I have been somewhat puzzled by the extent to which this activity overlooks or evades the fact that all intensified language sooner or later turns metaphorical, and that literature is not only the obvious but the inescapable guide to higher journeys of consciousness.” —Northrop Frye
(from Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature)
What is wrong with the way we teach literature, and I would say especially poetry, that puts people off it for life, and they may not read a book for the rest of their life after they leave school?
Is it because we are so concerned with the form that we forget the essence, the passion that gets people writing in the first place? The need to say something before getting passionate about how we say it? After all, a tool is only useful and appealing when we can see what it can do for us. Even such a basic thing as handwriting that is explicitly taught in school, is important as a means to express oneself clearly, not as an end to be pursued, in itself.
Just wondering if the institutionalized public school tentacled monstrocity we have created is becoming its own worst enemy? How to re-evaluate? How to stop the grind of such huge bureaucracies that turn blind just from their sheer size. And affect the lives of both teachers and students? Let alone lack of shared vision? Is there only one way to dance?
Children are not bored. We teach them to be.
in earth dreams: animated
Posted by Daniela Elza on Nov 13 2008 | 2 Comments »
Here is a collaboration between me and my awesome computer savy guy.
re me mb er?
Posted by Daniela Elza on Nov 11 2008 | Comment now »
I feel so ambivalent on this day. This strange duality. I completely understand the sentiments expressed on the No Media Kings website. And I like the symbolism of poppies as reminding of flanders fields, as red bullet holes, and poppies as part of the drug wars. I was also taken by the line:
Poppies induce forgetfulness, after all.
At the same time I have deep respect for those who ended up dead or damaged for life from taking part in the wars of our world. Also for their families.
What does a poppie mean to me? Actually, not wearing a poppie makes me think harder about this holiday that wearing one. So I did not wear a poppie today. And I thought hard about why. I just did not want to play this game. It is not about the symbol, or the soldiers, or the wars. It is a certain type of absolving ourselves from the responsibility we have to not being involved in wars. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that we are still fighting wars. And what it seems preventable wars.
We know we were cheated into the wars in Afganistan and Iraq. I suspect a lot of people who were shipped overseas to fight also feel cheated. Or if not at first it slowly dawned on them the lies they were putting their lives on the line for. And the physical and psychological wounds they have contracted.
Why do we have this glorifying notion that a soldier marches happily into war? They get drafted. They get ordered. They sign up to defend their country and end up sent to invade another. And we also know that the rules for disobeying or disagreeing are punishable in many cases by death. What does it take for a soldier who does not want to play this unimaginative game to get out? It must be pretty hard, if they have to seek refuge in another country. A recent case in Canada got turned over back to the US authorities.
Symbols and language are quite an opiate. We can easily be put to sleep, we can easily be talked into forgetfulness. So yes, I am glad the day is over. Here is a poem that I wrote when the war in Afganistan started and I am quite sad to see it is still relevant for me today. Here you can read it on the Poets Against War website.
an ivy for remembrance day in another year of war
and a few more poems from the poets against war department:
dear god
the bomb
events, events, and meeting people
Posted by Daniela Elza on Nov 09 2008 | 2 Comments »
The night before last was the launch of the Rocksalt Anthology at the Vancouver Public Library. I read. There were probably about 70 people who came on such a rainy night.
This is going to be an ongoing project for me: connecting and getting to know the community of poets in the pages of Rocksalt. A kind of celebration, a kind of culmination. Thank you to those poets who made the time to comment on my poem.
I used to think that when you have your poetry published it is like being exposed in public, with out the adequate garments to cover what you normally would.
Now, every time a poem is out into the world it feels more like taking my five year old to his first day in kindergarden. A whole, beautiful, pure being is placed into a public space to be shaped, warped, shared, understood, and misunderstood. It is a being separate from me, even though we are connected by an invisible umbilical chord. And yes, you get those tears in your eyes that you heard people talking about, and thought you will not get (what is the big deal after all). But it is a big deal, you have created this life, this poem, and even if it feels it has come out of nothing, it hasn’t.
I enjoy meeting people face to face. At the Agro Cafe launch I loved Jen Currin’s poem and deliverance, also Betsy Warland, Elena E. Johnson, Maxine Gadd, Kate Braid. I started going around with my book and asking poets to sign it, as a sure way to touch base (or shall I say face) with everyone.
I enjoyed meeting Rob Taylor (co-founder and editor of One Ghana, One Voice ), Anna Wärje, Zachariah Wells and others. Understandably I can only mention a few at a time.
I also had a chance to meet some of the brain and man/woman power behind Rocksalt. Peter Haase (Mona Fertig’s husband) and their two beautiful children. Here I suspect there will be photos from last night and other launches as well.
I am looking forward to meeting a lot more of the poets in the small moments before and after readings. I also want to thank Berenice, a friend who came to see me.
Looking ahead, this coming Thursday, Nov. the 13th, I will be at the Jewish Community Center as part of a word and art event around the Echoes art exhibit to which a number of us wrote poems last week to the displayed art. We will read in the art gallery at 7:30 pm. Come and join us if you can. Yes, fresh from the over poems. Hope they can stand on their own two feet by then.
time crunch
Posted by Daniela Elza on Nov 06 2008 | Comment now »
Another time crunch. Things have to get done, and things have to get written, and edited, and sent out. Yet, the only time is right now and right here. Where we embrace every moment and then pretty much at the same time have to let it go.
Otherwise, we miss the next, and the next, and the next moment.
Get the laundry done, vote, save the UBC farm, get your book review written, pick up the kids, vacuum, go to class, make sure you pack snacks, vote again, listen to what happened at school today, quiet those thoughts down in your head so you can listen better, make soup, bake a poem, say hi to your friend who is going through a hard patch, book the birthday party, oh, yes, vote, and do not forget to eat.
Can we really be present amidst all this? Can we slip underneath the rushing and find stillness in the midst of all this whirling and spinning and driving? How often do we consciously attend? There is the past to brood over, and there is the gaze into the future to predict, assume, hope, despair. But really, the moment right now is the only thing we have. That gutter, that gap, that connects the two.
It seems to me attending, and being fully present in the moment is more and more a conscious activity. Young children attend to the moment. They are present for that ant, that leaf. It is hard for them to buy into the hurry up we will be late plot that we as adults are written into, and constantly written by.
So these are some of my thoughts today, as I take a break from my letter to UBC regarding the 24 hectares farm that they want to reduce to the size of 8 (in one of their proposed options) or move to another unsuitable site for a farm (in their other two options). None of the proposed options seem to keep the children’s programs, which allow thousands of kids to have hands-on knowledge of sustainable soil practices, food production and the healthy community that develops around these practices. In this, last working farm in Vancouver. My daughter was part of the Landed Learning Project last year where her class visited the farm every other week for most of the school year.
As if we can move a 40 year old farm, like we can move a house, or change a winter coat. Not to mention 80 or so year old adjacent forest that will have to go. The one where my daughter walked me through (a few times) and taught me about the wild edible berries. The one that seems important to the farms ecosystem, and helps with natural pestcontrol, not to mention the wildlife that depends on it. As if place did not matter. The value in a farm is not what is on the surface.
I am trying to sift through looking for the underlying values that are betrayed by such actions. Looking for the eco-systematic approach, the recognition that ecosystems are valuable places that need protection, not transportation.
I guess I can understand this type of thinking more from the point of view that we run our schools like businesses, and all three “solutions” would make perfect business sense, because the bottom line of businesses is the profit. If building condos is more important to UBC than creating and sustaining learning environments, then they are in the wrong business.
As if, if someone else were to start writing this blog tomorrow, it is going to be a solution to my time crunch. As if a person (or a farm) and what has been cultivated for decades does not matter. As if these thoughts can be moved to another brain, and incubated there, the way they incubate in mine.
Well, if it were that easy, I am sure UBC can also move Einstein’s brain to a new site, and hope to reap the benefits of such a brain, right here on UBC land.
Rocksalt Anthology
Posted by Daniela Elza on Oct 24 2008 | Comment now »
Last night, I finally got my hands on the anthology. It is beautiful. It has 108 poems in it from emerging, mid-carrer, and established poets. This makes it quite exciting. It felt to me so much like a family, intergenerational.
It was great to listen to the different voices and what struck me was how many of those voices were real voices. No more of that sing-songy reading of poetry, where every line goes up at the end. It always bugged me, to the point that it creates a barrier to meaning. Last night, poets spoke their poems in such unique ways that you can feel right away being taken, and at the same time given a gift.
I have not had time to read through all of it yet, but the excitement this morning was to read through some of the poetics statements, along with the poems. I find that we move into other dimensions of poetry with this anthology. This weaving through of what poetry means, or does, or where it emerges from, or what it sustains etc. is a great interest of mine. Yes, we have these products. But to actually start messing around with process, right next to the product is . . . is. . . well, what is the right word for it, other than, exhilarating?
So, for a lack of a better word right now (feel free to put your finger on one), I will settle for that, and keep probing further into why it is that these poetic statements are flowing with such excitement through the four chambers of my heart today, not to mention the numerous chambers of the mind. For me poetry is integrative. Mind, sky, heart, trees, body, soil, spirit, fire, dreams, signs, language, will, curiosity, imagination etc.. And I believe that the beginning of every investigation is poetic (in Nature), and then we move up into our heads, and a bit to the left and we call it science, or philosophy. How we forget to acknowledge those first stirrings, and excitements, and shivers, that got us walking on this journey. Poetry is a way.
Why is it that, all of a sudden, I feel so close to these poets through their theories, beliefs, efforts, delights, world views, language play, needs, joys, commitments, and vocation?
What is this calling? This mystery, that we neatly delegate to a small genre, or field? This is not a job. Well, it could be, but, it is so much bigger than that. And like teaching, it is a vocation first. And when we forget that, somehow the job definition of it is not quite enough to sustain its multidimensionality.
Thank you Harold Rhenisch, and Mona Fertig for this feast.
publishing update
Posted by Daniela Elza on Oct 22 2008 | Comment now »
Today I got in the mail the Vancouver Review and was pleasantly surprised to see my poem Nelson so beautifully displayed on its own page and the image was fitting and inspiring. Thank you Vancouver Review, and thank you poetry editor Caroline Harvey, it was a pleasure working with you. This is the first poem I have seen in print this year. It seems sometimes so long between an acceptance on a rainy January day and the day the journal, or book comes in through the mail slot and thumps affirmingly on the floor. This, however, was not the case here. The Vancouver Review accepted my submission and published my poem within a couple of months.
This week I will also get my copies of Rocksalt. The launch is on Thursday, at the Agro Cafe on Granville Island. One of those, still, free pleasures in life.
Another good news was that my poem drawing me won first place in Pandora’s Collective. Thank you judges Bonnie Nish, and Sita Carboni, and Mary Duffy.
So, it has been a good week so far.
what we owe each other
Posted by Daniela Elza on Oct 19 2008 | Comment now »
I had the privilege for the first time to attend a live Massey Lecture. It was given by Margaret Atwood at the Chan Center for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia. I find Atwood has a comprehensive way of looking and integrating and analyzing that is not just good for reason, but also aesthetically crafted. Yes, integrative. I bought the book, and am looking forward to reading it.
The timely nature of the topic has drawn the attention of a lot more readers from diverse backgrounds. It is encouraging to see a writer’s work given weight so quickly. The circumstances helped, even though they are not happy. Why wait for a crisis to happen so we can start paying attention? So we start to notice the accrued social debt?
“Is brokenness the only place from where we might be lifted?” asks Alison Pick in one of her poems.
“It won’t be until faith and honesty have been restored to the system that things will change,” Atwood says, in the article Margaret Atwood weighs in on the financial crises, in the Vancouver Sun.
The Lecture I listened to was chapter two in the book. Each chapter of the book is one of the five lectures she will be giving live across the country. They will be broadcasted on Ideas on CBC radio between the 10th and the 14th of November.
These old stories carried to us through literature are not so old (and if I am reading Northrop Frye correctly that should include the bible). It feels like we have not learned a thing (which is the sad part). Also sad is that the price to pay for practicing these urges on the large corporate scale of human existence is too big. Same old same old, but the repercussions today are world wide.
I love the way Atwood talked about the banking system as the game we choose to play. It is ficticious, and the only thing that makes it real is our consent to play. Further in the article (linked to above), she says:
“Life is not all about money and in fact money is an imaginary thing we’ve invented, that’s why it’s so volatile,” she said. “What we’re really living off is not money, it’s food and water and air and heat.”
We like to think of economics as a science. But for a while now my husband and I have been regarding the stock market as a branch of psychology. We do not have faith in its erratic volatility. Why add this stress to our lives?
Makes me also think of the elections and how they too are this game we play. A lottery, perhaps? I have friends who did not vote. How come their vote did not count? Can we count those as negative votes? They did not have anyone they wanted to vote for. Can we cast a —1 and a +1? Then do the math. Almost half of the population did not vote, and the reasons could be numerous. Do we not want to find out?
I am ashamed when I look at south of the boarder and see how far one can go to play such games. How the public entrusts the candidates, yet they toy with this trust, and end up betraying it. Trust they are borrowing from the pawnshop of the soul? If they do not intend to repay the trust invested in them, then they are trading in what? Debt? Sin? Those empty envelopes in the subprime mortgage disaster?
The title of the lecture came from the tracing back of the roots of the word debt to where it was equated with sin.
When people do not vote, they have lost the trust in this game. It is a sad state of affairs when we consider that people lost their lives fighting to win us the right to vote, so we can have this luxury today.
But how to play this sometimes crazy no rules game. For instance, I do not know how McCain and Palin cannot be disqualified under some hate crime act. I do not know how they cannot be shut down on the basis that they are simply lying. What honest man (or woman) of integrity will not feel sickened by this display of ignorance and treachery? I am not even going to mention the fact that there should be some kind of responsibility taken for the lies that brought the bombs on Iraq. Many people want out of that game. many people feel lied to and betrayed.
What happened to vision, to honesty, and integrity as crucial parts of a ruling person’s character? Yes, at the risk of being naive. It is a game. And we are the ones playing. And if we do not play by rules we make, someone else will be always there willing to do it for us. Not necessarily to our benefit.
So there, I have been thinking about this lie, and cheat, and bully your way out attitude. We have a zero bullying policy in schools. Should we tolerate this bullying on TV? In politics? Really, what are our kids going to think? I am sure, these patterns repeat themselves in all spheres of human existence. Unless honesty and faith are restored as desirable virtues (no, wait, as necessary virtues), as requirements of any instiution or individual, I cannot imagine how we will ever teach a new generation such values.
between a rock and a hard place there is still light
Posted by Daniela Elza on Oct 01 2008 | 2 Comments »
A meditation on Negotiating with the Dead, by Margaret Atwood
The writing occupation (or shall I say pre-occupation) is multifaceted. On the one hand we emerge through it: a flower working its way to bloom and seed. On the other hand we are socialized into it: stand at the mercy of inherited beliefs, understandings, stereotypes, prejudices, and opinions, which form the environment that affects the growth of this flower. We cannot remain oblivious: it is revealed and imposed through others’ treatment of the writer/creator. Yet, if we end up paying too much attention to this environment we may end up crippled, hurt, stunted. We may form impressions, models, habits that are destructive to the writing task ahead of us.
Atwood gracefully delves into the nature of this preoccupation with writing, where it takes place, and its inheritance. I was stalked by the growing concern that something is out of whack. I appreciated Atwood’s sophisticated humour, honesty, and light touch. But there was also a resentment welling up in me. Is this a disease? For sure dis-ease gets me writing, but that is not the whole story. What about wonder? We need to talk of the joy, the sheer delight that comes with writing; with this kind of attention, seeing, playing, and dwelling with words. Enough with the dim and dismal pictures of the troubled writer; the poet as potential suicide. Even worse: “the mere act of writing splits the self in two?”(p.32) Can we really distinguish between who does the living and who does the writing? I refuse to inherit such dicotomies. They are detritus left in the wake of what we have come to conceptualize as writing. Is this the writer’s fault? Could this be more a criticism of society: how it chews up its creative people and spits them out on the refuse heap? Then has the audacity to print their work for posterity: well, if they are lucky. This is hypocrisy. Maybe that is when they die a second time.
Atwood addresses awkward, uneasy spaces: the writer writing for money or writing for art, the role of the reader, the writer’s moral and social responsibility, the relevance to humanity, the writer between the inherited past and the difficulty of the present. Hence the title and the name of the last chapter: Negotiating with the Dead.
The conflicts and paradoxes are numerous, but I am also left with hope. That somewhere there is a way, one can negotiate a path where one can have the best of both worlds. Where one can remain whole. Maybe this difficulty in defining writing and writer should be seen as a blessing. A puzzlement that contains its own salvation.
Read the book. I recommend the negotiations start right away. Discard what is toxic: what does not serve you well in your pursuit. Embrace that which delights: brings joy and contentment to both you and your writing process. After all, that is what it is: a process of discovery, and an exhilarating one, at that. As Atwood aptly puts it: “Every life lived, is also an inner life, a life created.”
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.