Sonoma County Literary Update

November 1, 2023

Dear Literary Folk,

Today and tonight mark the Day of the Dead/el Día de los Muertos, a holiday traditionally celebrated on November 1 and 2. Although related to the simultaneous Christian remembrances for All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, it has a much less solemn tone and is portrayed as a holiday of joyful celebration rather than mourning.

My altar (ofrenda) at home has photos of my mom and dad, my husband’s parents, and the beloved friends and family who have gone before us. Each year there are more to remember, and I’m reminded of my mom’s prayer book with her list of those she prayed for each day. One column listed the living, the other the dead. The first column grew steadily shorter till, by the time of her own death, there were very few left.

Among those I’m remembering today are my departed classmates and teachers who weren’t able to join the 50th high school reunion gathering last month. I promised to give an account of how that reunion went, and here it is in brief. The gathering itself was incredibly moving—50+ classmates returning to the school where our identities as young women were nurtured and forged. Most of us had not seen each other in 30 years or more, but after a brief moment of uncertainty, we were able to recognize our old friends by their smiles, their eyes, their mannerisms. The profound joy of being together again was palpable in the room. We organizers thought we might need an ice-breaker to spark conversations, but quite the opposite. For me the most moving moments were when our former teachers got up and spoke about the work they’ve been doing since our classroom days in the early 70s, It’s fascinating and humbling to realize how little we actually knew about our teachers, how smart, multi-talented, and influential they were, not just in our lives, but in communities far beyond the classroom.

The teacher who name came up the most, Marianne Rackham, taught us English. More than that, she taught us how to write, how to think, how to see connections between literature, art, history, philosophy. She had nicknames for each of us, all literary references. Mine was Hester (as in The Scarlet Letter), a consequence of my tendency to work on embroidery projects during class. Another friend was Portia (as in Merchant of Venice), regarding her argumentative turn of mind, especially ambiguous test questions. My favorite of these was a student whom Mrs. Rackham called “Helen.” This stemmed from a lecture on the Medieval world view in our Senior Humanities class when Agnes raised her hand and asked who Helen Brimstone was. One student remembered an important piece of advice Marianne Rackham offered: “Live in the world of the author.”

Remembering Louise Glück
I am also remembering today the poet Louise Glück, who passed away on October 13. In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” (poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-gluck)

Because Glück writes so effectively about disappointment, rejection, loss, and isolation, readers often characterize her poetry as bleak or dark. I am also reminded that her father was credited with inventing the X-acto knife; her poetry had a similar precision, cutting deeply into the pain and disillusionment of our lives. But her poetry is also full of music, passion, and the longing to break through the darkness into light.

I first heard Glück’s poetry at the Napa Valley Poetry Conference back in the mid-80s, and I remember my admiration of her treatment of mythological themes, and my envy of her lyrical talents. I was very new to poetry writing myself, just recently out of grad school and a decade away from my own first publication. She had a piece of interesting advice for writers about putting together their manuscripts. She said she always looked for certain patterns, repeated tropes, phrases of words, and then from these she determined what she needed to avoid and what she needed to discover in her next poems. In her just-published collection The Triumph of Achilles, for example, she noticed she didn’t use contractions and that her voice had a kind of Delphic resonance. She decided she needed to try a more conversational voice, one more open to uncertainty and questions. I went home from this conference with Glück’s book, and set to work dismantling her poems and reassembling the language into my own poems. I wanted to use the amazing energy of her work, which so impressed me, to push myself into new territory. I still follow that advice when assembling a manuscript or helping others put theirs together. Years later, I selected Glück as one of the contemporary American women writers for the Sitting Room workshops I was then leading. I still found her poems difficult to embrace and penetrate emotionally, but well worth the work.

I’ve included “The Wild Iris” for the November poem. Scroll down to read this. If you are new to Gluck’s poetry, you might find this PBS article by Amy Canon a helpful introduction: pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-louise-glucks-quietly-devastating-poetic-voice-speaks-to-us-from-beyond-the-grave.

This quote from Canon’s article reflects my own reasons for selecting Glück as November’s poet: “Her lyric voice still reverberates after her death, in part because of how consistently she turned her attention to questions of mortality.”

Congratulations to Sonoma County Award Winners
The County News page of the Literary Update lists several Sonoma County writers who have recently received awards. Among these are Chrissi Langwell, who was awarded the Jack London Award for 2023; Donna Emerson, whose poem “Sarah Mae” won the Editors’ Choice Award from Paterson Literary Review; and Jennifer March, founder of Petaluma Readers Theater, whose podcase “Not Your Mother’s Storytime” is a finalist for the 2023 Signal Awards for Scripted Fiction.

Being Brave Workshop with Poet Laureate Elizabeth Herron
As part of her Being Brave Poetry Project, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Elizabeth Carothers Herron will lead a workshop on Sunday November 19, 1:00-3:30 p.m. at the Occidental Center for the Arts For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.

Crosswinds Poetry Journal Is Now Accepting Submissions
I encourage you to consider entering your work in Crosswinds Poetry Journal’s ninth annual international poetry contest. They will be awarding over $2,000 in prizes this year and supporting literacy and food security as well. Judging will be April Ossmann.

Editor David Dragone says, “As always, I’m looking forward to joining the Crosswinds’ editorial team and getting myself ready for some enjoyable reading. Please submit some work for our contest this year.”

Crosswinds Poetry Journal – Poetry Contests – Poetry Contest Submissions     

Annual Call for Submissions for Book-Length Poetry Manuscripts
Sixteen Rivers Press invites Northern California authors to submit book-length poetry manuscripts between November 1, 2023 and February 1, 2024. All manuscripts will be read blind, and typically one or two manuscripts are selected for publication. The winner/s will be announced on the press’s website during Summer 2024. Selected manuscripts will be scheduled for publication in Spring 2026.

Sixteen Rivers values diversity. We encourage poets of color, young poets, and LGBTQ poets to submit.

Online Submissions: Send an e-mail to sixteenriverssubmissions@gmail.com with your name, address, phone number, and the name of your manuscript. Attach a PDF of your manuscript to the e-mail (name the PDF with the title of your manuscript). In the body of the e-mail, please include a personal statement (350 to 500 words) about why you want to work in a publishing collective, including any special experience or skills you might contribute, and tell us where you heard about our press and our call for submissions. The manuscript must be e-mailed no later than February 1, 2024. For full submission guidelines, use this link: https://sixteenrivers.org/submit-work.

________

Poem for November



The Wild Iris 
by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Source: Poems 1962-2012, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012. Originally published in The Wild Iris, 1992.
________

Terry Ehret
Co-editor, Sonoma County Literary Update