I'll be teaching a four-day poetry workshop at the Catamaran Writing Conference in Santa Cruz, California, July 25-29, 2021. Come and join me for poetry writing, inspiration, and relaxation at the gorgeous seaside: https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/writing-conference-2021

For more information, contact me at: mariebrowne@aol.com

MARIN POETRY CENTER ONLINE WRITING RETREAT

Marin Poetry Center Online Writing Retreat 

June 29 to July 5, 2020

DAY ONE

POEM: 

Almost the Same           by George Bilgere

And then there was the night, not long
After my wife had left me and taken on the world-
Destroying fact of a lover, and the city
Roared in flames with it outside my window,
I brought home a nice woman who had listened
To me chant my epic woe for three
Consecutive nights of epic drinking,
Both of us holding on to the bar’s
Darkly flowing river of swirling grain
As my own misery flowed past and joined
The tributary of hers, our murmured consolations
Entwining in precisely the same
Recitative, the same duet that has beyond
All doubt been sung in dark caves
Of drink since the very beginning
Of despair, the song going on until there was nothing
For it but to drive through an early summer
Thunderstorm in the windy night
To my little East Side apartment and gently
Take off her clothes and lay her down
On my bed by the light
Of a single candle and the lightning
And kiss her for a long time in gratitude
And then desire, and then gently kiss the full
Moons of her breasts, which I discovered
By candlelight were not hers, exactly;
Under each of them was the saddest,
Tenderest little smile of a scar,
Like two sad smiles of apology.
I had them done
So he wouldn’t leave, she said,
But in the end he left anyway, her breasts
Standing like two cold cathedrals
In the light of the flaming city
And I kissed the little wounds
He had left her, as if I could heal them
And kissed the nipples he had left behind
Until they smoldered like the ashes
Of a campfire the posse finds
Days after the fugitive has slept there
And moved on, drawn by the beautiful
And terrible light of the distant city.
CRAFT:

Notice George Bilgere's imagery of stormy weather and the world-destroying, chaotic details--the city roaring in flames, the darkly flowing river, the swirling grain, (and grain can be linked to drinking, too, with the grain of alcohol), dark caves of drink, thunderstorm, windy night, lightning, ashes, campfire, posse. So these two sad lovers have to leave the destroyed city of their past loves who have abandoned/betrayed them, and try to warm themselves on each other during this terrible “storm” of their shattered romantic lives. Bilgere is also using hyperbole in order to create the emotion but also to add humor to the poem: the world-destroying fact of a lover; the city roared in flames; epic woe; epic drinking; my own misery flowed past and joined/The tributary of hers; sung in dark caves/Of drink since the very beginning/Of despair; the full/Moons of her breasts, which I discovered/By candlelight were not hers, exactly; little smile of a scar/Like two sad smiles of apology. 

Bilgere also employs the use of simile for surprise and humor and emotion: her breasts are like two cold cathedrals in the light of the flaming city. Also the use of  hyperbole again, in the flaming city, and the idea of the breasts as almost a religious experience for this woeful, but grateful (to his one night stand lover) speaker.  Then he kisses her nipples until they “smoldered like the ashes of a campfire.”  Then the woeful lover must move on to “the terrible light of the distant city” (hyperbole again), and the “posse” only finds the ashes of this one night stand, the “fugitive” of love having moved on to probably more “terrible” lonely nights in the “distant city.”

WRITING PROMPT:

Using Bilgere’s opening line or a variation of it, write a poem. You might begin:

And then there was the night…

And then there was the moment…

And then there was the day…

And then there was the hour…

And then there was the time…

On form: try using Bilgere’s form: his poem is two long sentences in one continuous stanza.  This gives the poem a head-long rush of emotion, as if the speaker must get this all out, is forced to spill this agony down the page.  You will also notice that he uses a capital letter to start each line.

On craft elements: try hyperbole and simile in your poem, as well as a repeating imagery system of weather or a destroyed city or some sort of repeating imagery pattern to get the emotion and situation across to the reader.  This poem utilizes the journey from the bar to the woman’s apartment during this “storm” and then on into the night, leaving the smoldering ashes of this “campfire,” of this one night stand. You also might want to try enjambment of the lines. Notice how Bilgere spills the line over into the next one, in order to keep the head-long rush of his poem/journey going, this desperate journey of this night. 

JOURNAL: 

https://www.ohio.edu/nor/  

Wonderful journal with a friendly and encouraging editor: David Wanczyk  

I've been proud to have poems in the magazine a few times. 

RECIPE: 

Tofu tacos are one of our go-to dinners. Remember to make enough for lunch the next day.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/tofu-tacos-recipe-1973261

I'll be teaching a four-day poetry workshop at the Catamaran Writing Conference in Pebble Beach, California, July 25-29, 2021. Come and join me for poetry writing, inspiration, and relaxation at the gorgeous seaside: https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/writing-conference-2021

For more information, contact me at: mariebrowne@aol.com

My third collection of poetry, Just Living, is here! It is also available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Living-Susan-Browne/dp/0578573806/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1HG9I98VM8BG0&keywords=just+living+susan+browne&qid=1582823680&sprefix=Just+Living+%2Caps%2C208&sr=8-1

Big News So Happy: My third collection of poetry, Just Living, won the Catamaran Poetry Prize!

https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/catamaran-poetry-prize-2019

It will be published in the fall, and the book launch is set for November 2, 2019 in San Francisco. More details soon!

Here's a link to my Guest Blog on Superstition Review

http://live-sr-blog.ws.asu.edu/2018/11/29/guest-blog-post-susan-browne-thanks-to-a-cockroach-and-cat/

My Brand New Blog or On These Small Hands of Mine

Hello there! This is my Brand New Blog. What will it be about? The writing life, and the life of writing, and just plain ordinary extraordinary life. If not now, when? So I will begin with:

Words. Books. When did I fall in love with them? I don’t exactly remember, but I have vivid memories of reading experiences.

When I was a kid, ten or eleven, I read The Yearling. I finished the book and lay on my bed in the afternoon light and wept. That world, those people, were so close to me. My heart split open. It was great.

   

I read Camus’ The Stranger in one sitting. I was sitting in a lawn chair by a creek, twenty years old, my mouth hanging open as I put the book down on the grass. Huh? Wow. It was the truth no one ever talked about, in every sentence of that book.

William Wordsworth’s poems, but especially, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”  I was eighteen, my first year in college, reading the Romantic Poets in my dorm room. I made Much Marginalia and many underlinings and exclamation points. I underlined this entire passage:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

 *

Emily Dickinson. Many question marks in the marginalia. And stars. Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited Emily. She said this to him:

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it…I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough…There are many people in the world, you must have noticed them in the street. How do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?

Books have helped me live. Where were you when you read a book that changed your life? The Magus by John Fowles. I was twenty-six. That was not a good year; I was thinking, should I stay here? Can I stay here?  Reading The Magus expanded my perception of being. I recognized my dilemma in the consciousness of the main character. It was a mirror, and I wanted to break it, break out of my limited vision. Reading was a way of shattering many illusions, about self and the world. Sure, I've enjoyed reading as an escape, but for the most part I read in order to live.

Evening by Susan Minot. I've read this book five times. Read passages from it countless times, loving the form and style, studying it, the dialogue, the shifting but seamless movement from past to present to past to present, the beauty and sorrow and truth of the plot: that one weekend, one experience, can be at the center of an existence. Thousands of things transpire, but that one weekend was it. The last time I read this book, a few years ago, I was camping. I was inside the tent, (it was foggy by the beach), and I read by flashlight. I stayed up most of the night reading a book I had read many times before. By flashlight in a tent on the cold coast.

Books. Words. I’m so in love with them. A friend asked lately if I like to write so much because it’s like having a conversation. She is feeling a lot of loneliness right now, wondering if writing is a kind of cure. I thought, yes, writing is like having a conversation. It doesn’t, however, supplant the need for flesh and blood human contact. Still, my friend is right. Writing is a talking, an exchange, intimacy, connection. 

Here I go, back to the blank page. Who knows what will happen? This is writing, too: pure discovery. As the poem or paragraph unfurls onto the page, what will it say? E.M. Forster wrote: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

And this:

Thou has made me endless, such is thy

pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again

and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life…

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these

very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still

thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

 –Rabindranath Tagore