My Wobbly Bicycle, 153

1. Well, I just haven’t. I haven’t posted in a long while. There’s been a great deal of caretaking around here, although Jerry does everything he can. Yesterday I saw him dragging the dirty clothes basket along behind his walker, making for the laundry room.

2. Have I lost focus? Once I wrote about cancer, but that subject, thank whatever-gods-may-be, is worn out for the time being. I have thought if I use what precious writing energy I have on a post, I won’t have anything left for the poems and essays.

 Yes, but of course energy begets energy. And when has not having anything to say stopped the words? They come out ahead of consciousness, sometimes. They know what they want even when “I” don’t. Aging. Aging and the writer. That subject should keep me busy for a long while. Today the subject is caretaking. There are probably two dozen good blogs about caretaking out there. And books. You don’t need to bother with this blog. However, I hope you do. Breathes there a caretaker with soul so dead that he or she doesn’t sometimes flare with internal anger, doesn’t watch others head out on mountain biking trips and feel jealous? Who doesn’t fantasize living alone, eating toast over the sink instead of bothering to get out breakfast stuff? Who doesn’t stare long minutes out the window at the turning trees? There’s no point in trying to balance that with heart-warming tales of the blessings of sharing hard times, of having a long-time mate that you love, no matter what. The deepening of tenderness and closeness when it’s down to brass tacks. No sense balancing at all. It’s not one or the other, but both.(Above poem is my 100-year-old father's favorite. Thought you might enjoy it.) Things have turned mysterious. First there was Jerry’s hip replacement, then it failed, then it was replaced again. For a short time there was no pain. In the last couple of weeks there is a lot of pain in the area of the sacrum. He’s had steroid injections. No help from that yet. We don’t know exactly what’s pressing on what, but after two major back surgeries, plus the hip surgeries, is there any wonder something’s pressing on something that it shouldn’t be. Can this be remedied? I don’t even know what we’ll have for lunch, much less what will transpire tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jerry’s just celebrated his 78^th birthday. We’ve had to give up our Alaska cruise, which was to be our present to each other. Note to reader: buy trip insurance (we did). We drove up the peninsula to look at trees and gorgeous water, the way old people do, and stopped for lunch along the way. My sister and brother in law picked up dinner for the four of us and brought it to our place. My children and grandchildren travel all over the place. Kelly’s family was in Croatia this spring. Scott’s in Italy right now. Interestingly, I have always been pretty content with a computer, paper, pen, trees, crickets, and water to swim in. I prefer our lake but I can make do with the Y.  There are all sorts of explorations, both interior and exterior. I lean toward the interior, anyhow. The interior has its own cathedrals and canals. In less than two weeks, I’ll have arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus that has tormented me for almost six months (took a while to diagnose).  I’ll be glad to get it fixed, but there’s Jerry, unable to help while I’m hobbling or whatever I’ll be. I mention this because this is how it is when you get old—people’s ailments don’t conveniently take turns. They sometimes come on simultaneously. Meanwhile, I’ve written a couple of essays I’m happy with this year, and more poems, good and bad, than I usually admit to. I tend to pretend I’m a total wuss as a writer. It seems to be my way of clearing the decks for the next thing. AND, the book I wrote with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, has just come out in paperback from Green Writers Press in Vermont. It has a great cover and a new chapter on politics. It’s gotten great response from people who’ve gotten hold of it. I ought to have a book launch!  This needs to be another blog post—the need to publicize when you get older and basically all you want to do is write. 

My Wobbly Bicycle, 33

This month is my “baby” sister (14 years younger) Michelle’s time at the lake (she owns 1/3 of the cottage, I own 2/3). She said that since she wasn’t able to visit when I was having chemo and radiation, she wanted to give me a lake-spa weekend.  She’s new to yoga this year, passionate about it, learning moves and practicing the techniques of “healing yoga” for herself. I had a session every day on the upstairs screened-in porch, waves lapping below, incense burning, woo-woo music on Pandora, and a little sister who loves me. If anything can cure a body, that ought to. Touch makes a huge difference, I think, not just when we’re sick. A masseuse is good, but someone who loves you is even better.

AND, I finally got in the lake!  I swam my usual swim to the boathouse three cottages down and back. We’ve always claimed the waters of our lake are the North American Lourdes, so I guess I’m doubly “cured.” But I have to say, my poor muscles are weak. It was a simple swim, breast stroke, not far, but it registered all over my body. Still does.  

I put on my swim cap ordered from one of the cancer sites. It’s white and ruffled and comes down over even my ears. It’s dopy. I look like Esther Williams. Michelle said something like, “Oh for Pete’s sake, take it off.” So I did. Here’s a photo, from a safe distance, but I put the cap back on when there were boaters or neighbors. And the photo Michelle took of the two of us, up close, my head shining in the sun? I can’t quite show you that one. I’m shy, obviously, about my head.   

I know, I know, a lot of young (particularly) people parade their bald heads around, an act of defiance of the disease, a statement that they feel okay no matter what they look like. I’m okay being bald, but I don’t like to be stared at, or have eyes drop when they see my head. I’m private. I’m okay with that.

I have days when I can walk over a mile, other days, like today, when I feel that chemo-y sick feeling and every movement is an effort. There seems to be no clear cause of either. My body just oscillates between okay and not-okay.

I feel somehow deficient that I haven’t been turning out poems about the cancer.  Other people have written really good poems about it. Though I’m reminded of what I said in my essay, “Mildred,” in Sydney Lea’s and my book (Growing Old in Poetry, on Kindle  from Autumn House. Ahem. Also a short version on Brevity’s website): you have to see things slant, you have to wait until they insinuate themselves in when the eyes are turned elsewhere.  I’d tried to write a poem about my adventure with Mildred the raccoon, but it was a failure. I’ve tried to write poems “about” this cancer experience. I only like one or two of them, if that.

“Emotion recollected in tranquility,” says Wordsworth. I say, if it’s tranquil, it’s lost its punch and you might as well not write it at all. However, if you let it sit, it will attach itself to the shirttail of some new  urgency and both will be charged by it.  Why did WW say “recollected”? Anything written about is recollected. “Tranquility” because almost certainly there’s much more to the poem/essay/story than the present scene yet knows. There’s a breadth and depth to be brought to bear upon it. There’s an assimilation that, if it happens, opens the door of the experience to let in the whole of our lives.

This relates to privacy, too, I think.  If we scatter ourselves all over Facebook, if we don’t allow enough pulling-back time, if we release every experience immediately into the general churning vat of conversation, OR (Ahem again) onto our blogs, how can we absorb, assimilate, and “see” what’s there? I’m not talking about making meaning of it, which is more akin to preaching than to writing. I’m talking about seeing by staying with it, by continuing to watch what emerges instead of quickly ossifying it into language, photos, and emoticons.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 16

Sick of pictures of snow? It's the first day of Spring no less. The theme of today is unpredictability. I’ve been weak, needing long naps, and was about to write about weakness, when I find out my white and red blood counts are climbing back up. Woe is me, how can I get a trajectory going here? Once again I watch my body do things I have apparently little control over. I rewrite this post.Control. I’ve had good reason to keep chaos at bay in my original family and then in my own previous marriages. Kelly used to call me “the rock,” which isn’t altogether the best of epithets, for a mom. Steady and reliable, yes, but wouldn’t one want to see the vulnerability, the uncertainty, to see how it might be managed?Most of my life my nerves have been, as the poet Anne Carson puts it, “open to the air like something skinned.” As is true of many writers, I’ve been pretty smart in figuring out how to buffer, how to let the words hold me—or hold the words, my sheaf of arrows. It’s harder to buffer—for any of us---when things change so obviously quickly. I’m not complaining. I’m just looking at this. I’m looking at this through the lens of the visits of my daughter Kelly, Jerry’s daughter Pam, and my son Scott. Jerry’s daughter Amy will be along next week. A change: they’re all here mid-winter (not usual) because they love us and they want to help take care of us. I found Scott some plastic bags to put on his tennis shoes, and he and Jerry got the snow dug out and blown. Scott stayed almost a week: snow delayed his flight. But he works with Big Data stuff for IBM and can click from the wilds of northern Michigan to California and India. But I’m aware especially of just being taken care of.  Looking at my big son and knowing he’s brought not only several seasons of BBC Sherlock, but his own precious self. Seeing all of us-- in my present particularly fleshly awarenesss--as flesh, all breaking down at its various rates, all joyously hung in this void or un-void where we just go on, watching out for each other.I remember my Nana Simpich, who, it seemed to me then, wanted everything perfect—house, garden, flowers in vases, dinner table, yard. She used to pinch my cheeks because she said they didn’t have enough color. She was dismayed about my tomboyish clothes. Then she had a stroke. Then a woman was brought in to help out. She directed this woman with the best authority she could, but it was a trial to her. How would I be, how will I be, if my life comes to that?I have been one to plan, arrange, amass credentials. But now I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Murial Barbery. (I recommend it!)  The main character, Renee Michel, a French concierge, intelligent and educated far beyond her station, has been flipping through her sister’s pretentious dissertation on William of Ockham. Renee says “The quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon at the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject [my ital.], this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us  from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlty of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal.”I do know that the greatest joy is when we are able to see through (not obliterate, as if we could) that need for intellectual control, to be amused at it, to see our lives develop and disappear moment by moment.  I know this as surely as I know anything after over a lifetime of practicing Christianity and then Buddhist meditation. What I learned from Christianity has often been over-simplified to “Let go and let God.”Then it appeared to me that the wildly ambiguous word God is like a door-stop in front of the openness.  Just see. Just see what’s there, what’s beyond the fussing and the organizing and the desperate desire to hang on, to avoid change. Something is changing all the time. And Something is the wide sky of our own mind and is made of change-and-not-change. This is how it seems to me.Not to get all apocalyptic. But when one’s “ordered” life is disrupted, one ponders. Oddly, as I feel less “substantial,” there is a great joy underlying, or should I say pervading, or should I say behind? I don’t HAVE to be substantial. Or in charge.

News Flash! Next week, look for the link to Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, Sydney Lea’s and my ebook from Autumn House Books. Our thoughtful/crazy essays about how things used to be, how we see our lives in poetry, how our children, sports, food, music, and more have shaped our work and our lives.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 15

This week has been, well, not so easy. I had a vitrectomy (My spell-check wanted to call it a vasectomy, but no.). My eye has been a bit sore, fuzzy, and I’ll have a large gas bubble in front of my vision for the next few weeks. But it’s done! And it needed to get done now rather than later.Imagine me typing this in 18-point just so I can see it. And my face two inches from the keys.Then, radiation of my upper pelvic region, which includes my stomach, has made me nauseous and gastrically disturbed. My radiation doctor gave me Friday off because I looked so peaked, and I missed most of a long-awaited meditation retreat lying in bed instead. There was talk of lowering the area of radiation to miss my stomach, but that would be risky. But I’m happy to report that it appears we (I’m now a “we”) have come up with a cocktail of drugs that keep me feeling pretty decent.  The addition of a small amount of steroid to the mix seems to settle my stomach. I don’t question why or whether this will last; I’m just grateful. This morning, to celebrate, I came down to breakfast wearing my funny hat, made by my friend Devon.Speaking of hats, I have a bunch, plus the wig. I wear the wig out, but at home the hats are more comfortable. I think a lot these days about apparel, about hair as apparel, which it clearly is for women and also for many men. We have a way we wish the world would see us. Or, rather, the way we wish to see ourselves.I am such a poor shopper! A couple of years ago, I asked a young writer friend, Holly Wren Spalding, to shop with me. She brought a folder of magazine photos of things she said would look good on me, and she was right. She picked out what I wore to the gallery opening of Bill Allen’s and my exhibit at the Dennos Museum. I have never looked better. Well, at my age.I have an essay called "Unruffled"  about my history with clothes that just appeared in a wonderful on-line journal called Numero Cinq.This essay will appear in Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives that poet Sydney Lea, the poet laureate of Vermont, and I co-wrote. It will be out April 1 from Autumn House Books exclusively as an e-book.Here’s the editor’s lovely introduction to my essay, You can read the whole  (fairly short) piece on their site,  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/11/unruffled-essay-fleda-brown/#.UT3qoHqMKas.gmail  ************* Fleda Brown herewith offers a wonderfully smart, touching essay about girlhood, clothes and, amazingly enough, poetry! How does she rope all this together? And touching? Yes! The sweet free tomboyish little girl (of a certain era), a professor’s daughter, running free the summer long half-naked and innocent, suddenly a young lady, going to school, in dresses and appliqued sweaters, proper girl’s clothes, an awkward and constricting mask that delivers her to the agony of fashion and fitting in and the awful kindness of friends who feel sorry for her. Fleda delivers the goods, the terrible moments of humiliation, guilt and misunderstanding we all go through as children, often centered around money, precious money and small dreams that go awry, often small events in retrospect yet still capable of making you wince and yet which do not defeat you — as evidence by the delightful pun in the title.This beautiful, human, raw essay is the last installment here at Numéro Cinq of a series of essays by Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, two old friends, also two poet laureates, who have been writing a book together, a call-and-response essay book as Syd likes to call it, one essay calling forth another on a similar topic. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”In fact Autumn House Books is publishing the book next month, April, as an e-book called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Other essays from the book published here at NC include Fleda Brown’s “Books Made of Paper” and three essays by Sydney Lea “Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh,” “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know.”*************I'll give you the link when it's available. We had such a grand time writing this book. I think you'll like it.   

My Wobbly Bicycle, 5

I’m leaning my bike against a tree for now, since I won’t see the doctor until tomorrow. I’ll report next week on what we learn, how chemo will go, and so on. In the meantime—you’ll see this is relevant—I want to tell you about a book I’ve co-written with Sydney Lea, called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. It’ll be out from Autumn House Press in April exclusively (O brave new world!) as an e-book. I have had the BEST time writing this book over the last couple of years with my dear friend Syd.Syd and I share being poet laureate of our respective states. I’m former poet laureate of Delaware; Syd is the current poet laureate of Vermont. You should know his work, if you don’t. His eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, will be out soon from Four Way Books. The University of Michigan Press recently issued A Hundred Himalayas, a sampling from his critical work over four decades. A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife (Skyhorse Publishing), a third volume of outdoor essays, will be published in early this year.We had an idea that a book of essays from two people who’ve given their lives to poetry would be good reading. We then had the idea that if we picked topics and each headed out as we wished with that topic, we could cover a lot of territory, both artistic and memoirish.  We picked our topics as we went along: some, such as “Wild Animals” are downright silly; some are, shall I say interesting, such as “Sex, “Music,” and “Food”; some are mundane but ultimately pretty revealing, such as “Clothes,” “Sports,” and “Houses.” The last one is called “Becoming a Poet,” but really, the whole collection is about us as people-poets. Poet-people. Poetry never completely goes off-stage.Here’s the beginning of one of my essays that’s less directly concerned with writing than some of the others. How ironic it is to me, now. I wrote this no more than six months ago. Our topic was illness.  It begins this way:

I loved being sick. If my body couldn’t work up the germs, my mind could. Through grade school, all the way through high school, I was deft at turning a slightly scratchy throat into a wicked possible strep condition that would keep me home from school. To cinch the matter, I would vigorously rub the thermometer, or hold it under warm water at the bathroom sink when no one was looking, I don’t know if my mother bought any of this, or if she was just too harried and/or depressed to fight me on it. The half-year my aunt Cleone and her three wildly healthy boys lived with us in Columbia, I would be “sick” and my Aunt Cleone would position herself at my bedroom door, frowning.  “Fleda, are you really sick enough to stay home?” she’d ask. She was onto me, which almost spoiled my day, but not quite. Our house, in truth, was a house of illness. My brother was severely mentally retarded and had grand mal seizures so awful that each one would take your breath away. There was a heap of bottles, all full of potent drugs, on the kitchen counter, along with an apothecary’s mortar and pestle to grind up the ones too difficult for him to swallow. My mother had severe arthritis—no wonder. My father had only allergies, but he was able to make a great deal out of lying on his back on the bed with his head over the side, dripping Neo-Synephrine into a stuffed-up nose. Don’t get me wrong—we were also very physical. My mother loved to walk, arthritis or no. She could move really fast, her scarf tied under her chin like a Russian peasant; my father rode his bike several miles to school when almost no one did such a thing; my sister and I rode bikes, swam, played rudimentary tennis, and walked. But it appears to me now that the one way I could be assured that my parents’ attention would be directed at me was to be sick. And also, I was shy —I guess you could call it that. In any case, I found being at home, being taken care of, very comforting. My mother would have liked to be a nurse and seemed to enjoy having me home, bringing me poached egg on toast, straightening my covers, finding the paper-doll pages in McCall’s magazine for me, bringing me scissors and Scotch tape. The kid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane” was me: When I was sick and lay a-bed,I had two pillows at my head,And all my toys beside me lay,To keep me happy all the day. In fact, I remember lying there reading A Child’s Garden of Verses. They were too young for me, but I loved them anyway. School was always pressure—get the math problems right, do well on the test, and carefully manage to fit into certain groups of friends.  I think I was a bit afraid of people. Being alone felt safer, easier. . . . in the mornings when my father was at school, teaching, and my mother was putting around, taking care of Mark and washing clothes, the house was quiet, peaceful—her little radio in the kitchen tuned to the Arthur Godfrey show or whatever followed that. 

 My essay has a postscript: “If I follow the lines of this essay, would I have to say that I brought this cancer on?  Not on your life. I have a good life, and work that I’m eager to continue. I’m happy. I don’t want to stay home from school anymore.”Syd has posted his essay on “Music” on his website, http://sydneylea.blogspot.com/ . I think you’d enjoy reading it. I’ll post part of mine on music later. I must, however, get back to this illness thing. Such a nuisance.    

Putting Together a Book

A collection of poems, stories, or essays has to be arranged, of course.  There’s always the default:  chronological, either by content or by date written. There’s something to that, since that gives a history of your mind on its travels. But perchance--likely, in fact--there’s a different kind of history—more of a dance—only discernible when the whole is in front of you.I don’t know any other way to do this arranging, myself, but to print out the whole manuscript and lay pages out on the floor—I’m talking about poems, now. With essays, it’s easier to keep the larger blocks in mind.I had my new book, No Need of Sympathy, ready, naturally, a year or so ago when I signed the contract with BOA. It was the best book I could put together at the time. But the book won’t come out until next October, so, anticipating that they’ll ask me for a final version just after the first of the year, I went back to work on it last week. I’ve revised a little bit. And I have a few new poems I think will work better, and a few that I’m glad to have the chance to pull out. And I’m asking myself if I still agree with myself about what goes in each section.At nearly the same time, I’m reading my friend Sydney Lea’s new collection he’s putting together.  Both his and mine are made up of individual poems, written at separate times without reference to anything ongoing, other than being part of the world we live in and reflective of the coherence of our own minds. The course of his book seems to be an emotional movement—elegaic, dark, then lyric.So many books of poems—as well as short stories—by young writers have a deliberate and prominent narrative arc. The better, I think, to rope in people who need to be pulled along to get them to read the book, which may be the state of things.One With Others, C.D. Wright.’s new book. (Well, she’s not young.) Are they poems? Are they prose? Not at all sure. There’s clearly a narrative, sustained characters, the evolution of the civil rights movement. Yet the long lines, sentences, have the feel of an epic poem.I digress. But not really. Shall I depend on the reader to be content with poem after poem, each with its own private narrative arc? (Even the lyric has a narrative undercurrent.) Or, shall I aim for a book-sized narrative, like Wright’s, or at least set the book up so that one poem hints what a later one completes?Other issues: I tend to like books with sections. I like to be stopped by a section-marker, asked to consider what these poems have in common. I like (sparely used and unpretentious) epigraphs as an added dimension, another way to relate to the poems. In other words, I like all the help I can get. All the dynamics of this writer’s world I can get.Some thoughts:1. I had a group of flower poems in Reunion. I had placed them together. My friend Dabney Stuart said to separate them, to spread their energy throughout instead of lumping it up. He was right and that’s a useful way to think about “groups” of poems. But I have a series of 10 “Grandmother Sonnets” in this new book. It makes no sense to separate them. They depend upon each other in some way. There’s kind of a movement.2. Sometimes I don’t know what a section is for, or why it’s there, but it feels right. The poems in any section could go in some other, by just thinking of them a bit differently. But generally the reader is willing to play along with the way the writer’s thinking.3. Almost any way the poems/stories/essays get arranged will have some sense to it. The writer’s mind is the container, and so everything fits, in some quirky or mundane sense.4. Arranging poems/essays/stories is really writing another poem/essay/story (Frost said this, not me). The whole needs to feel like a whole. Not anything like the sharp click of a box lid. More like a sense of having been visited by an alien being: there’s an entrance, an amazement, an exploration, and then a leaving, with the wafting of that other world still hanging in the air, doing its work.  

The Case of the "Dead" Brother, Part 2

Here is the Chinese symbol for truth. Here’s more about “truth” in nonfiction and poetry: as I think about it now, it’s really poetry I’m concerned with. When nonfiction posits an “I,” we read with a measure of suspended disbelief. We believe the writer’s trying for the truth of the situation, but that there may be some invented dialogue, some stretched and conflated scenes.In memoir—in my own memoir—I’ve done that: combined elements to make a single moment that was probably several different ones. Who knows for sure? My memory isn’t that accurate. If I ask my sisters, they each have a slightly different angle and sometimes even a different story. We do the best we can. And what the reader’s reading for, what I’m reading for, is a sense that the speaker is honestly searching out the emotional truth and adhering to facts pretty much. If the memoirist were to go too far astray and I find out about it, I’d be disappointed.But in poetry, it seems to me something of a moral failure to lie. Is this silly? I guess so. In “The Prelude,” When Wordsworth is out there rowing and sees the huge peak towering between him and the stars that seems like a living thing, and rows like hell to get away, I believe this happened to him. I take it in, digest it, and it feels like a more direct infusion, let’s call it a transmission, than if it had been set within a fictional frame.Here are some of the comments I’ve gotten about this, followed by my thoughts:Anne-Marie Oomen writes: I do agree with the need for truth, especially in this culture, and for deep consideration of how truth is presented, despite its mystery. But I am wondering, you know, just curious, as to why a poem is so-often assumed “true” any more than, for instance, a short story? I’m probably shy on my literary history here (or misunderstanding the argument–more likely), but has poetry always been a “truth-telling” genre? How did it come down on the “nonfiction” side of things? Or is it simply assumed that the speaker of the poem is the poet speaking of her own experience? Or did the confessional poets lead us to this? Of course, truth be told, my questions spring in part from my self-consciousness about own collection, “Un-coded Woman.” I recently discovered some people have read it as a completely autobiographical poem series. Yikes! The speaker shares a few experiences and memories with me, but she’s not me. (I even gave her a different name.) I hope the book tells a truth, but it is not mine. So. I lied? But. But.My comment: I’m thinking of dear old anonymous’s poem, “Western Wind”. . . “Christ, that my love were in my arms / and I in my bed again.” I suspect that poetry that is spoken by “I” is likely to be taken as really an “I,” the poet, presumably. In Anne-Marie’s book, she created a fictional, narrative structure for the poems, just as I did in my book, The Devil’s Child. When the speaker in the poems is clearly not the—or a—poet, if we have half a brain, we can see that the poems are fictionalized, attempting a truth of the human heart, and maybe even a truth of how it might have been, but still, we see the scrim of the poet’s mind as it plays upon the material.Molly Spencer writes: I’m right there with Anne-Marie wondering about truth in poetry, the speaker vs. the poet. I’ve been working on a series of poems through the persona of the Mail Order Bride. I have to keep telling people they’re not about me or my life…. not quite (definitely not the mail order part!!)… but yes, they speak to experiences I have had (more through serious illness than in marriage) of utter dependence, bewildering new landscapes, and starting over. So, no, I’m not that Bride, but I’m IN that bride. No, the poems aren’t the historical truth, but they are a truth of my life. The same is true for others of my poems — I’m not the speaker exactly, but the speaker’s truth gets to a truth of my life, or to something I feel needs examining from my life.My comment: Again, this is how I related to Barbara, the woman in The Devil’s Child, who had horrible experiences I could never expect to enter into or to see firsthand. But I know something of fear, of terror, of feeling abused, of sexual threat, etc. I knew her from the inside, only thank God, less so. Again, this is a self-conscious narrative frame we’ve established, not a lyrical “I.”Sydney Lea writes:  Point 6 is the one that is absolutely on the money for me. Of course all experience, even “true” experience, is edited by the experiencer. Facts are not. Play fast and loose with the facts as a means to personal aggrandizement and you insult all those who have lived the awful factuality of something like a family death. If “I was the man, I suffered, I was there,” then by God I had BETTER have been there!My comment: This is what I mean. If the lyrical “I” is experiencing something, that “I” had by God better have been there. And by removing the narrative frame around the “I,” the poem purports to deliver me into a situation unmediated by anything but the sometimes faulty mind of the writer/speaker. I am that I unless I give plenty of clues that I’m not. That’s just me, now, saying this. Understand that this is what I, Fleda Brown, FEEL about this issue. This is how I react, without a lot of thinking about it. Which is fine with me.Ann Hursey writes: Let’s just say I agree with the responsibility of how writers navigate their words on the page: is it fiction or non-fiction?. . .how deceiving the reader violates “the basic human contract.” And as for “this particular political season. . .”My comment: I am interested in the word “responsibility.” I have a hunch I have some responsibility as I write, to the whole human endeavor. I am not sure what it is, what that would look like, exactly. I certainly don’t want to start making “rules.” All I know to do is to rely on the rudder of my deepest human compassion. I don’t know what that means, either, but I seem to know how it feels when I'm doing it.