“Relax” With Ellen Bass

So, the writer's job is to find the thing that only you love. And one way is to find beauty — and humor — in the humblest, most unexpected places. And I think, yes, Annie Dillard said, I'm going to not get the exact words here, but she said that everyone loves the same things best. Of its almost translucent eyelids. If you say, my love is like a red, red rose, your brain is, in a microsecond, without you being conscious of it, holding up love and your love, the beloved and the rose, and going quickly back and forth, back and forth, between them to do this authenticate. I don't know how I would live without poetry. Feeling competent doesn't mean that I don't think I have things to learn as a teacher, and need to pay attention, but I do feel capable of doing it. To me the most personal thing, the thing that feels exposing when I share a poem, is not the content, it's actually never the content, but the revelation of my mind of how I see. Most of those poems don't reference Big Sur directly, but the inspiration and nourishment of that environment has been very fertile for me. Ellen bass the thing is poem. And two mice — one white, one black — scurry out. Ellen Bass is a master of the contemporary love poem, and when I say love, I mean not only romantic love, but a love for everything that is in a life, especially where something mystifying lurks around the object of affection. For me, this unpredictability is one of the best things about the process of writing poems. For example, my poem "Because, " about giving birth to my daughter, is a poem I wrote first as a narrative, but I knew it wasn't working very well.

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Ellen Bass The Thing Is Poem

But we left that haven the same night because my husband. I was doing workshops with women and learning, and pretty soon I was getting calls from all around the country, all around the world from survivors of abuse. And I guess my question is, how much of a lens do you think we need to supply as a poet for someone else to be invited into our work? Surely, we're not just merely showing our lives to others. Ellen plays bass youtube. If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips. 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. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase.

Rather than spin out into hysteria, the speaker tempers the moment with tender memories of her breasts' development and the longing for and eventual discovery of all their joys, no match for the joy of being declared healthy. And its sands are fair: Wave of sorrow, Take me there. Rich Territory: An Interview with Ellen Bass. This image, and the words "Rock Me, " seem significant as representations of how we might choose to decorate and individuate our lives. So she didn't get a father who'd sling her. My friend's mother was so traumatized that she couldn't care for her baby.

Ellen Bass The Thing Is Love

When the stars align and my teaching schedule doesn't conflict, I participate in Bass's home workshop, a long-running group that meets in her living room each week for lively craft discussions and careful critiques of poems-in-progress. Ellen: Yeah, they've done… Yeah, around metaphor, which is kind of the thing that I'm maybe the most, the aspect of the craft that I feel closest to. They heard soldiers approach, boots stomping through the snow. Ellen Bass - If You Knew. If you're a classicist… I mean, who's to say? I don't mean to say that… I mean, certainly, right now, Oh, my God, June 2020, we know how essentially crucial it is for us to be looking at race, and as white people, white privilege, and to be amplifying black voices and voices of people of color. My use is less stringent, but it still sets up an expectation. You lead a lot of workshops, and I wonder if that is how it is for you? Once this first woman told me, it was as though a telegram had been sent to the world that I was now the person you could tell. He's going to want to have sex with his wife, who slept in late, and then he'll eat.

The intensity of emotion here is such that the mind wants to race away, perhaps deny. Because the night I gave birth my husband went blind. I mean, my dog had to be alive before he died—that sort of thing. I'd been invited to spend a week in residence at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and I knew I'd have the open space and time to write the poem there. But you have two odes actually in the book that I loved the Ode to a Pork Chop and Ode to Fat. About a Poem: Roger Housden on Ellen Bass’ “If You Knew”. Visit Marion Roach dot com and take a class with me. You haven't jumped off yet. All rights reserved.

Ellen Bass The Thing Is Currently

So, I was really primed with this pork chop to pay attention. It's a wonder to behold. And so, when I was cooking this pork chop, and I found this… I've also written about chickens that we slaughtered. Now love and grief would be greater. I was in a relationship with the man I then married. Ellen bass the thing is love. But when I opened the photograph that I was assigned, I felt an immediate opening. 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. What if you knew you'd be the last. I've lost two loved ones and there have been other, significant losses as well. Have a relaxing weekend! And when I started… Now, we're going back to like 1970. On the way to the hospital, but I pushed anyway. Because when I started to stand.

No, that's part of it, but it's really working harder to find the language that will communicate the feeling. So, how do you make the decision about what goes in? It almost wrote itself. That is the whole idea—to dig in deeply enough to be transformed in the process of writing the poem. Ellen: Which I love to say.

Ellen Plays Bass Youtube

I wanted to hear about women's experience, and in my writing workshops women were writing about things they had never told anyone. I've been teaching there for the last dozen years. Her most recent book, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Note: Boulder Creek is a rural town in the coastal range north of Santa Cruz. ) I also find that teaching is a learning experience for me, especially when I have the opportunity to work with poets I admire a lot. As the wand of the ultrasound glides over my flesh, revealed is a river of light, a bright. Then I waited a few weeks to try to write the poem. The Book for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth – and Their Allies. True enough, Jewish-working-class immigrant had once seemed an identity carved in stone but now, in the 1970s, it clearly was as nothing compared with the unalterable stigma of having been born into the wrong sex. She simply seizes the only moment she has, the present — and it's sweeter beyond belief. But I knew from the way she gave it to me that it was really important.

Do you want to talk about the different ways you work on these? I really had to stay close to my own experience. In 1982 I came out as a lesbian and that ushered in another kind of discrimination, but that's a story for another time! He was too young to walk all the way to the port, so sometimes he walked and sometimes his mother or his brother carried him. You see something, the pork chops in your marvelous poem, Ode to a Pork Chop, which is my new favorite poem. I feel that it's a major step forward for you. When I confront a blank page, I don't know how it will turn out or whether I'm capable of doing it. I mean, we are talking together, so now you care about me a little bit, and I care about you a little. That's to be decided later. Perhaps the final lines reveal the underlying question—why is the speaker lying awake all night following the birth "with the baby whimpering in [her] arms"? And so, that's the material I'm given. I wish only that I might live out my days like this, in wonder.

Ellen Bass The Thing Is The New Black

On his zafu chanting om and then went out. I just took delivery on a whole pig. So I missed it the entire time that I was away from it. And so, set me straight.

Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy? My father was a very small child when he, his older brother, and his mother fled the pogroms in Russia. I read a fair amount of books and essays about poems and I'm always gaining insights and being stimulated and inspired. Among her awards are Fellowships from the NEA, the California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, The Larry Levis Prize, and the New Letters Prize. Dropped dead on the sidewalk.