Woke up again today to temperatures below zero. It’s been a long, cold winter already in Upstate New York, and we’ve barely put January in the rear view. As someone who loves only heat and sun (I’m looking at you, Summer), it’s a really harrowing season with so many long shadows.
I survive it by maintaining aggressive self-care, keeping my head down (i.e. old-school denial/endurance) and blowing on embers of tenderness and connection in hopes they’ll flare into something that will warm my hands.
I found one of those embers recently in “Meditation at the End of Winter” by Mollie O’Leary (Wildness Journal). It’s a devastating poem about being at the bedside for a loved one’s end-of-life/dying — a place I’ve been, though I continue to run as fast and far away from it as soon as I can.
The poem looks back at the season when the family’s care taking was in full force and then brings us to the speaker’s present moment:
… Today I tread along
February’s blue edge, the trees holding
their winter vigil among last year’s fallen
leaves. The tenderness I witnessed during
those final weeks is the only kind of devotion
that’s ever brought me to my knees.
The word “devotion” in the penultimate line yanked me up by my collar. I was surprised to have failed to consider the word as a description of how myself and my family tended to my mom in her final weeks. I hadn’t even see “devotion” as one of the options.
A decade and a half later, I’m still too knocked down by the gore of it to see anything but horror, but then a poem comes along and grabs me by the scruff of my neck and stands me up to a very different possibility. It takes a while before my knees stop buckling, but once they do, I’m grateful. In love. Connected.
I say it here at the blog a lot, but it’s always true: Poets, the work you so generously share with the world matters. It really does.
This is both an expression of gratitude for other artists/writers and a pep talk for myself — trying to get through winter, keep my creative fires going and sort out what to do about the agents of chaos currently running the country.
This post isn’t about the latter, but I did recently ask ChatGPT how artists could combat the dangers of late stage capitalism. It introduced its suggestions with this statement: “Through their creativity and influence, artists can challenge dominant narratives, raise awareness and inspire social change.” It listed these specific activities:
- Art as protest against “the harmful impacts of the system” and as parody of consumerism and its “absurdities.”
- Art to “expose wealth inequality” to “document struggles and resistance.”
- Art to “promote alternative economic models.”
- Art as a “tool for direct action… to engage with or disrupt capitalist systems.”
- Art at the core of “community and solidarity.”
- Art as a means for “empowering marginalized voices.”
- Art to “reframe success and happiness” and “foster radical imagination.”
In other words, art (including poetry and other genres) packs a punch. It’s a kind of agency, and having it in our toolkit makes us dangerous to the status quo.
What, if anything, do you think anything was missing from ChatGPT’s list?
Here’s what I’d add (and it’s something likely beyond AI’s grasp of the world): Art responds to despair not by numbing us out but by making a safe place for us to feel. The shared experience it creates is a bond that rallies us to care about — and protect — one another. It rallies our interest in our own survival by reminding us what’s worth living and fighting for and why we bother with this poetry thing at all, and it validates the experiences capitalism, patriarchy and the ruling party refuse to acknowledge.
Sara Peterson captures this quality of art/books in the intro to her recent interview with Loving Sylvia Plath author Emily Van Duyne. Peterson writes,
Loving Sylvia Plath [is[ a book for anyone who has ever loved Sylvia Plath. But it’s also a book for anyone who cares about women’s lives, or their ability to share their lives with others. It’s a book for anyone who has been gaslit. It’s a book for anyone who has been forced to shrink themselves in order to survive. And it’s indisputably a #Metoo book.
She and Van Duyne go on to discuss the forces that cast Plath as the villain — or at least an unreliable narrator — of her own story. With Loving Sylvia Plath, Van Duyne fights back against that myth and tells Peterson why counter narrative — and we can speak to all art here — is so necessary:
“If we bait women into believing that Plath was, as I wrote in Loving Sylvia Plath, ‘always already an unstable liar’ then we can bait them into disbelieving their own experiences of violence– or, at the very least, we can bait them into remaining silent about it.”
Art, then, is our refusal to remain silent. And our voices? Embers.
So much of the creative work we do is invisible. I’m not currently pursuing publishing for my poems or displaying my art publicly. It’s easy in that scenario to say I have nothing to show for the effort or that the effort is a tree falling in the forest.
I admit to sharing with my therapist that I don’t feel like I’m doing enough or doing anything at all really, and she’s good about asking me what is and isn’t true about those perceptions. It’s so much easier to spot the fiction when she calls me on it. *Sigh*… We really do hide from ourselves, don’t we? But anyway —
To challenge my negative perceptions about my effort, I’ve been tracking ways I’m practicing my craft and strengthening my chops. I’m in a sowing period, I think, and I’ll end here with some notes about January’s activities. (If this kind of thing doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip it. The post ends with the lists.)
JANUARY 2025 ART-MAKING
- Drew & painted via two live Zooms with the Emma Carlisle Patreon
- Worked on & finished a painting of my happy place in Ogunquit, Maine
- Sketched figures for an upcoming series
- Sketchbook painting/play
- Started & worked on a second landscape
- Brainstormed themes for an upcoming series
- Created two collages
JANUARY 2025 WRITING
- 12 free writes (far more than in recent memory!)
- 1 new microfiction draft
- Biweekly workshop with two fellow poets via Zoom (though we only met 1X in January)
JANUARY 2025 BLOGGING
- Finished & published reading notes on a book about self-care for writers
- Finished & published a list of poems for every month of the year
- Worked on upcoming posts, including a new resource (list of over 40 letter poems) & new writing prompts (my 2025 list of 30 prompts for NaPoWriMo)
JANUARY 2025 INSPIRATION & ADMIN
(I could have placed these under their respective art or writing categories, but I’m trying to be honest about if I’m consuming inspiration more than I’m doing the work.)
- Daily Morning Pages
- January 1 (in-person) / Artist Date with Jill Crammond at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center (photos above)
- January 20 (online) / Sandi Hester YouTube video on color mixing
- January 20 (online) / Micro memoir writing workshop
- January 28 (online) / Notebook Collective conversation between poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee
- January 29 (online) / Initial meeting with art mentor Christine Evans
- January 31 (online) / Orla Stevens sketchbook tour on experiments/play
JANUARY 2025 READING
- Poetry: 15 collections
- Fiction: You Like It Darker (Stories) by Stephen King
JANUARY 2025 PUBLICATIONS
- “I Have As Many Chances As I Give Myself” / Interview for Emily Mohn Slate’s Be Where You Are Substack” (highlights below; click to see larger images)
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