Karen Elias

Karen Elias on “Flight”

A couple of years ago, when “Flight” was created, I'd been listening to Leonard Cohen.  The song that captivated me was “Anthem.” It sounded, as it came to me over my car's audio, like the hard-won result of a long interior process, and indeed the song took Cohen ten years to write.  He was to say of it later: “I think it is one of the best songs I have written, maybe the best.  I know that song was everything that my whole work and life had somehow gathered around.  It is absolutely true to me.”

Years later, in the midst of a calamitous time, “Anthem” seems to speak even more clearly to our need. It takes a clear-eyed look at our broken world and refuses to be defeated by it, rising in triumph to that provocative dare that stirs us to shine – not in spite of the world's imperfections, but because of them. 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

What would it be like, I wondered back then, to walk around in my version of Leonard Cohen's world, camera in hand, and try to find equivalencies?  It would mean taking the song apart before putting it back together.  It would mean creating portraits of sorry objects that have still somehow kept their sheen.  It would mean breaking things apart to find my own song.

Some of these equivalencies were easy to capture: abandoned car with a shattered windshield, wooden bowl cupped in supplicant hands, string of bells tilted in several directions, teasing me with their promise of sound.

But I returned again and again, with some frustration, to these lines:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again

The holy dove, she will be caught again

Bought and sold, and bought again

The dove is never free

As you may well imagine, I did not happen to have a dove lying around.  Holy or otherwise.  If there was a place where I might get stuck, this was it.  Then suddenly there was a milkweed cutting in front of me.  I honestly don't remember how it got there.  I turned it around in my hands to catch the light.  I set it on a dark background and snapped its portrait. Turned it to the right, to the left, upside down and sideways.  And finally, there it was in black and white – a mere husk, yes, something left over, a remnant, but at the same time a form that flight itself had sculpted.  In the words of Marjorie Maddox's beautiful poem:  

brown husk of a wing

tipped up, speckled

            bird reminder

of chirp, of everything

still willing

            to soar.

It was my imperfect offering.

Marjorie Maddox

From Still Life to Flight and Back Again

by Marjorie Maddox

Flight came first, the stunning photograph by my collaborator Karen Elias, that is. It swooped into my in-box with Karen’s brief explanation that she’d seen a call for “things with wings.” Did I want to use the photograph as a prompt? As with all of Karen’s work, I was tempted immediately. The bold black-and-white image captured the present, gave evidence of the past, and lifted the viewer into the future. There was a life cycle here—and not just one.

Interestingly enough, the month before I had submitted several milkweed-related poems to Tupelo Press’ anthology project. My son calls this “the theory.” Once your attention is drawn to a word or object, it suddenly seems to appear everywhere. (Apparently, this is a well-documented phenomenon known as The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.)

Milkweeds were in the air and in the brain—and suddenly here was another. The anthology deadline had passed, a poem had been accepted, but the milkweed was not done with me. Not only did their wisps keep collecting at the edges of my brain, but now so did the images of wings, emergence, and flight that arrived with Karen’s image.

And since art—including photograph and poem—often begins as still life and transforms to action, this is where “Still Life with Milkweed or Bird” originated. Because the photographer had connected plant and fowl, I, too, needed to ask the questions: “Where is the bird in this image? And where is the milkweed? In what ways are they part of each other? In what ways are they part of me? Part of us?”

To approach these questions, of course, I needed to enter not only the photograph but also what appeared to me as the life cycles of the milkweed and the bird. And so I began:

Flight by Karen Elias

Still Life of Milkweed or Bird

             - after the photograph Flight by Karen Elias

Inside, once

you were a wisp

            of flight,

seeds weathered

to air, a delicately

            tied fly flung

across currents

of stream

            far above

the rippling

dreams of trout.

Flight, to me, is dream-like, so I wanted to capture this surrealistic quality in image, sound, and transformative possibilities. But dreams also switch “mid-stream,” suddenly incorporating optional realities: “Or maybe . . . ,” the driving catalyst of so many poems, the cousin of “What if . . . ?” There is a soaring quality to these options (as emphasized by the line and stanza breaks). Is this a milkweed readying itself for the next flight of its journey? What connections can be made to our own bird-like choices to escape, or take risk, or merely revel in the beauty and joy of wings, air, and rebirth? And so the poem moves between escape, sacrifice, surprise, risk, willingness, and a type of resurrection—“everything/still willing/to soar.”  

Isn’t this also the life cycle of art, delighting us with the unexpected? If we are willing to climb aboard, art carries us beyond the rooted to some higher place. From this different height or angle or perspective, we can look and say, “Ah! Yes! Now I see where you’ve flown and why?”

Monica Joy Fara

Monica Joy Fara on “With the Chilean Climber in Puerto Tranquilo, Patagonia”

For as long as I can remember, I have always been drawn to the edge. Novelty, thrill, adventure—these were the themes of all my childhood fascinations. As I’ve continued to pursue these fascinations into adulthood, I’ve come to believe strongly in the value of intentionally pushing one’s own limits to expand those limits. This is one of the many reasons I adore living in my second language.

Spanish immersion pushes me to the outer boundaries of my comprehension and expression every single day. It casts an aura of adventure over all my interactions and friendships. In Spanish, even the most mundane, everyday experiences glow with the possibility of discovery. It’s a thrill I feel very intensely, but its abstract nature makes it difficult to write about in an engaging way. This is why, when writing about my life as a second language learner, I turn to other forms of adventure to help convey my experiences.

Given my disposition for thrill seeking, I also found myself drawn to the sport of rock climbing from a young age. The thought of dancing with the edge in such a tangible, literal way sent tingles of exhilaration down my spine. In college, I finally had the chance to pursue my curiosity, and I worked at a climbing gym for several years. However, even when I was in my best climbing shape, I always struggled with bouldering. Bouldering refers to low-level rock climbing using a crash pad instead of ropes and harnesses. It’s extremely technical—useful for drilling challenging movements to improve one’s overall climbing technique. It takes stubbornness, persistence, and lots of minute adjustments. It teaches you to get comfortable with failing over and over. In this way, solving a boulder problem bears a lot of resemblance to the often-frustrating processes of both language learning and poetry writing.

When I left for South America, I took my climbing shoes with me, but I was so busy hiking and exploring new cities that I rarely found opportunities to climb. I soon fell out of practice. However, deep in the heart of Chilean Patagonia, I met a climber at the local campground who told me about a nearby crag where he and the other climbers had been projecting new routes. I gratefully took him up on the offer to check it out.

 “With the Chilean Climber from Puerto Tranquilo, Patagonia” documents the very first time I went climbing in Spanish. During my travels through Patagonia, I hiked and hitched countless kilometers through stunning glacial landscapes, but there was something about this relaxed climbing session at a backwater crag that inspired me in a way even the most sparkling vistas did not. That afternoon, I felt as though I existed at the brilliant convergence of so many edges. Something in me came together. I felt the force of all the choices and curiosities that had influenced me towards that moment, and my love for language, climbing, and limit pushing renewed itself all at once. I was compelled to write.

I had tried many times before to write about rock climbing, but all of my poems dead ended. I just couldn’t seem to make it mean anything on the page. This poem, however, was one of those rare ones that came into existence almost effortlessly. I found that Spanish was my key to writing about climbing in the same way that climbing was my key to writing about Spanish.

I am continually grateful for the privilege of being able to explore language immersion voluntarily and on my own terms, and since that afternoon five years ago, I have continued to do so. Despite my vast improvements, the process is never ending. There is always more to be discovered, always a new edge to be pushed. Sometimes, I still stumble over the simplest sentences. But by now, I’m well-accustomed to the discomfort and frustration that are an inevitable part of the limit-pushing process. Writing “With the Chilean Climber in Puerto Tranquilo, Patagonia” was an important step in helping me understand and embrace this discomfort.

Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale on “Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell”

“Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” are pandemic poems. That fact is probably either obvious or opaque, depending on who, where, and when the reader is. There is nothing in either poem about disease. But I think they have something to say about isolation, especially when taken together. My son’s collection of interesting rocks, lovingly amassed over a series of walks up the hill behind our house during the spring and summer of 2020, persistently brought the outside (with its dirt, clinging grubs, irregular shapes, and irreducible solidity) into the hard shell of our home. These are pandemic poems in the sense that they are about the attraction and the danger of leaving apparent safety inside for the unpredictable beauties and perils out of doors.

They are also pandemic poems because during that long first year, my family—husband, five-year-old son, two-year-old daughter, and I—spent more time, and more sustained observation, in the natural world than we had ever managed before. The complex relationships between the human and the nonhuman (humans and viruses; humans and mountains; humans and the alarmingly unstable seasons; and on the smaller scale, our family and our backyard garden) shifted from background consciousness to our primary shared interest and preoccupation.

Humans’ interdependence with the natural world became a daily source of fear and joy for us, in a way that felt new to me even after decades spent reciting Shelley and Frost on long hikes. As I wrote these two poems, I wanted to catch complementary aspects of the increasing continuity I felt between my family and the landscape we live in, recognizing the hard shells we have built around our bodies and the ways those shells are, and ought to be, permeable and temporary.