~ Poetry is the language of our time.  It is a verbal excavation, digging us into and under that which is in inarticulate, that which cannot be said but can be felt, that which cannot be stated but can be conjured.   Poetry is a form of revolution.  It rearranges our thinking, our perception out dialogue. It takes us out of the literal so that we can see what is real.

~ Before written language took words out of our mouths and onto the page, and long before “virtual” communication lifted them off the page and into intangible space, our ancestors knew that a poem, spoken aloud, could change us with its vital, voiced wisdom.

~ A poem is a physical event.  The rhythm may quicken or slow your pulse.  The flow of language may expand your breathing.  The music woven into the words may change the very texture of your voice. A poem even entrains your brainwaves, altering your biochemistry and allowing shifts in consciousness that can bring healing, understanding, and unexpected insight.

~ The truth is, we turn to poetry all the time without knowing it. The lyrics you played over and over after the break up – I will survive! As long as I know how to love I know I will stay alive – is poetry. The psalm you recite when you cannot take another step – Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – is poetry. It is in the prayer you repeat as you pick up your partner’s socks one more time – God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change – and the pulse of the speech you’ll never forget: I have a dream! We are healed by the rhythm, we are harmonized by the sound, we are awakened by the passionate telling of truth.

~ Poetry is the language of this shift. It is a direct route to the riches of the interior life. It is available to everyone at any hour of the day or night, and it doesn’t cost a thing.

~ At this time in history, there is a paradoxical urgency to slowing down, focusing on what matters, looking into each other’s eyes and speaking the truth. Whether you read poetry, avoid it, or have never thought twice about it, find a poem you love today. Let it become your companion. Speak it aloud to yourself and to others. Your whole being will come into alignment. And wholeness is contagious. Others will catch it from you, and they too may taste a moment of peace in the maelstrom of these times.

From Saved by a Poem and Madoff and Miracles: How I Lost My Life’s Savings and a Poem Saved My Life by Kim Rosen Collage by Josh Copus. More of Josh’s collages can be seen HERE.

Note: The above are a small sampling of my Asheville Potter Son Josh Copus’s collage journal pages. You can read more about his 20 custom made  leather bound collage books and view more photos HERE. More playing Wordless Wednesday are HERE

I’ll tell you a story

of things that smell lovely

Jasmine, patchouli

I love you truly

Post note: The poem is from my vault of nursery rhymes written in the 70’s – 80’s that I’ve recently been re-writing.   The photo is from a Woman’s Wellness Week bookmaking workshop sometime in the early 90’s and is a page in my collage journal. That’s my friend Jayn on the left and me on the right.

It all began when Copus was packing to leave his childhood home in Floyd, Virginia, for Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2000.   Finding an old journal in his toy box, written when he was 15 years old, his first impulse was to toss the embarrassing record of childhood ramblings, but “I also knew it was an important part of my history that I couldn’t just throw away,” he remembered.

At that time Copus was regularly carrying around a sketchbook, a journal, and a photo album. The bulky nature of managing so many books gave him the idea to combine his artistic pursuits and record keeping into one book.  With ripped out pages from that childhood journal, he began laying the foundational canvas for what would become an ongoing autobiographical art memoir, one that is currently marking its 10^th year.

The first collage journal was so full it wouldn’t close, so Copus enlisted the help of Asheville bookmaker Annie Fain Liden for future books.   Spaces between signatures, individually bound, made the books Liden created for Copus expandable, giving him the freedom to expand his expression through the use of art mediums.  Today, only hints of Copus’s teenage record remain under layers of new handwriting, paperclips, paint, cardboard, transparencies, recycled scraps of life, and photos of photos that have been altered with scissors and pens.

“The more I can layer the pages, even if you can’t see a lot of it, the more successful they are. The layering is the structure that supports the end piece,” Copus said, adding that “the value is in what lies underneath. It’s the same way I feel about human beings.  It’s what’s inside us that makes us who we are.  If you just look at someone you don’t see everything.”

One page in his most recent journal documents a morning walk from the ClaySpace cooperative gallery and studio he founded in the River Arts district of Asheville to the Klingman Avenue Café for coffee.  Incorporating found objects– a ticket, a piece of styrofoam, and square of pink cardboard– the page compliments an adjacent one that features an image of a ceramic bowl in shadow, pasted on a background image of finger-painted mud.  Another, layered with a restaurant menu peeking through the window of an envelope, is topped off with an audio tape.

Although the journals span a 10 year period and chronicle Copus’s growth from age 20 to 30, the pages encompass more than that.  Childhood themes, family heritage, love affairs, and art influences are all explored with poignancy and with a flair that reflects Copus’s bent towards theater and performance art.

20 journals in 10 years is an average of 2 a year, but Copus said he made 5 journals when he was studying for his fine arts degree at University of North Carolina Asheville and less when he was building woodfiring kilns on his property in the countryside of Madison County.  The process is slow and personal.   “If I take shortcuts the work doesn’t have the same quality,” Copus said, explaining that he frequently goes back and adds to pages, which are not in linear sequence.

Unlike most art, Copus’s journals weren’t created for an audience, so there’s a raw honestly that comes through them. Like dream symbols, his collages have the capacity to bypass the brain’s processing time to convey an emotional message.  Recently he’s begun to explore options for publishing a compilation book of journal pages.  “I like stories and I started to see the books as an interesting story,” he said.

Like any good work of art, Copus’s collage journals have the power to elicit a longer look, a deep breath, a sigh, a smile.  And, like a well written narrative, the visual narrative that each one tells is a real page turner.

Post notes: More of my Asheville potter son’s  collages are posted HERE. See a write-up on Josh’s collage journals at bookmaker A. Fain’s website HERE.

I write poetry by ear like a musician who doesn’t read notes can still play music. ~ Colleen

Some people make quilts, stitch blocks of designed fabric together. Others mix colors and paint. The theme of my creative life has been finding my voice and using it through speech and the written word. Considering that, it was no surprise that my recent series of collages have been about finding voice, with captions over my head or scrabble letters, cookie fortunes, crossword puzzles, and magnetic poetry flying from where the top of my head has been cut with scissors from my face.

I first started using my poetic voice writing poems in my bedroom as a teenager. My awakening to language had less to do with school and more to do with popular music and maybe the discovery of pot. At the close of the 60’s, I experimented with psychedelics. My first (and only) trip revolved around words. Whatever I thought appeared as words to be read over my head.

If a singer overuses her voice without training, her voice can be damaged. I wonder if the same could be said for poets.

I got a late start. For a variety of reasons – as a female, as a sibling of nine from a blue collar family – for too much of my life I didn’t know how to use my own power to make things happen and I wasn’t even aware of the truth of that.

It’s too late for me to start using punctuation in poetry now, I tell my poet friend Mara. When Mara was accepted to go to Hollins University for creative writing, she suggested that I might like to go back to school as well. “What? And spoil my self-taught reputation?” I answered.

My sister Kathy is a master seamstress, something she inherited from our grandmother and I did not. Kathy taught herself rug braiding (and then hooking). After a couple of years of making rugs and because she wanted to solve a rug making problem, she took a class. She learned what she needed to know about braiding but also ended up teaching the teacher and the class some rug-braiding tips and techniques that they didn’t know. She went on to later teach her own class.

Since those days in my bedroom when I would spend hours writing poems and reading them aloud to my sister Sherry, I haven’t been able to NOT write. I keep plugging away at what I do by instinct and with perseverance. I may have had to take the long way around more than once, but eventually I discover what I need to know. Eventually I do arrive.

Post note: Click and scroll HERE for more “Say So” collages.

I’ve been reading a book that was gifted to me, Goddesses in Older Women, written by Jungian analyst Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen. Initially the book’s subtitle “Becoming a Juicy Crone” irritated me. For decades women are expected to be juicy, and we are. Are crones supposed to be juicy too? When will we be let off that hook?

Juicy is not the way that I would typically describe an older woman. Aren’t elder women striving to stay juicy just a reflection of our youth-obsessed culture, which is no better than and an offshoot of patriarchal culture, I wondered? It seems to me that striving to be a juicy crone only feeds into our cultural obsession with plastic surgery, fat collagen lips, and denial of impermanence.

Women are living longer these days and the “Maiden, Mother, Crone (post-menopausal woman)” phases of a woman’s life no longer fit. I and others see this triad more as Maiden, Mother, Matriarch (or mature), and Crone. A lot happens between motherhood and being a crone, and the mature woman today has time to prepare for what Sinoda describes as the “third trimester” of life.

In the active years after fifty, you may become more visible in the world than ever before, or you may develop your inner life and pursue creative interests, or you may be the centering influence in a family constellation. Far from being a non-entity, it is in the third trimester that it is possible to be more defined and substantial a person than ever. In the Native American tradition, a woman becomes fully grown at the age of fifty-two.

I like to let my life be informed by the natural world, and recently I began to think of the stages of life like fruit. As women, don’t we bud, bloom, ripen, and eventually dry up. Isn’t that the nature of life? I wondered and then realized, No! A fruit only dries up if it hangs uneaten on the vine. Life, like fruit, should be used, which I think is what’s meant by “giving back.” I think staying juicy means to let ourselves be consumed by what we were made to do. When we do that our efforts will eventually come to fruition. Our ripening can be enjoyed by all around us and, hopefully the sweetness of that will be long remembered. That’s a juicy idea that appeals to me as I head down the far side of fifty.

But it would also be a story about the perils of solitude because solitude is a double edged sword. A few slips, sharp wrong turns, and sweet solitude transforms into isolation. The heroine forgets her verbal language, how to speak, how to be with other people. Her hair grows longer. She is older. There is never enough solitude. The more she gets the more she wants. Day and night come and go and she forgets there is a difference between them.

Her prince hero returns. She remembers him but has forgotten how to talk. They gaze at each other. He knows the well she lives in. She breathes deeply, comes up for air. She blinks in the sunlight, feels a nearly forgotten sensation in her body. Moved by the power of being seen by another, her eyes fill with tears. And then she finds her voice and speaks.

“If I were writing a fairytale of my life it would be one about a heroine princess who goes off to be alone …”

My mother and I have an ongoing conversation through the clipped newspaper articles we send each other. It’s the only comfortable way we can “talk” about politics because our views are so vastly different. She also sends me clippings about writers like me who have written family stories. Last week she sent one from the Patriot Ledger on Isabelle Allende’s latest book, The Sum of Our Days.

Did you know that Allende starts all her books on January 8, the date she wrote her first book, House of Spirits? For me, that small fact was the most intriguing part of the full page newspaper interview. Do writers have certain rituals like sports players before a big game? Do they wear lucky socks at the typewriter or say a favorite prayer or mantra before starting a novel? My curiosity sent me to the computer to hunt down some answers.

Isabelle Allende is a fine writer, but it was Diane Ackerman’s name I wrote down on piece of paper for my next trip to the library or bookstore. Described by the New York Times as an “intellectual sensualist,” she has written a poetic exploration of the mind, a natural history of the garden, poetry, children’s literature, and more. My google search for “habits of writers” hit the jackpot when I came across her essay for the New York Times, “O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult!” It was adapted from her book A Natural History of the Senses and the entire eight page print out dealt with quirky habits of writers and the things they do to coax the muse.

Certain music, certain food; it’s all true. Some writers like to write in the nude, while walking or while smoking a cigar. One writer cited liked to climb out on the limb of a tree. Others, like me, don’t need much of a push; on most days I just fall out of bed and start writing. For political commentaries, I use my mother as an imaginary silent audience, knowing that an opposing view is an opportunity to better clarify my own.

According to Ackerman, the nineteenth century French writer Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on his book, The Charter House of Parma – in order to set the right tone. Willa Cather liked to read the Bible to stimulate writing. Ben Franklin wrote in the bath. Alexandre Dumas wrote his non-fiction on rose-colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow.

My favorite example of a writing habit, described by Ackerman, was one of 16th century German poet Friedrich Schiller. He kept rotten apples in his desk and inhaled their pungent aroma when searching for just the right word. As someone who is in the habit of cocking my head slightly back and squinting my eyes when looking for the right word while writing, Schiller’s habit doesn’t seem at all odd to me, especially considering that researchers have discovered that the smell of spiced apples “has a powerful effect on people and can even stave of a panic attack,” Ackerman reports.

Writers tend to be an eccentric lot. Anyone who spends hours at a time fiddling with a line or sentence with no promise or fame or gain could also be someone who lies in a coffin before beginning a day’s writing, as Edith Sitwell was reported to do.

Ackerman ended her article with a lovely description of her own muse. “My muse is male, has the radiant silver complexion of the moon and never speaks to me directly,” she wrote.

Up until reading Ackerman’s description of her muse I hadn’t thought much about what my muse might look like, but I’m sure I’ll be paying more attention now. This is what I know so far: My muse likes the moon, to be steeped in its indirect light. She speaks to me directly in an authoritative voice.

But sometimes my muse can be as fickle as a well fed cat. When too quiet for too long, I write a formal complaint, usually in the form of a poem, such as this one, titled “Lost: the Muse.”

Loyal but shy
Last seen on Friday
Her middle name is moon
but she answers to music
She sounds like the ocean
with a shell to your ear
and can sometimes be viewed
at the Rocky Knob look-out
She’s never been married
She talks in her sleep
Call 745-2554
if you know where she is

Then I cock my head, squint my eyes, and wait for the call.
How about you?

In all native cultures there are stories and creation myths to illustrate truths that can’t easily be grasped directly. Jesus used parables to teach. Professor of Mythology, Joseph Campbell said, “A myth is a lie that tells the truth.”

Growing up in a working class family, the literature available to me was How Now Brown Cow and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson. All summer long I tested the meter of language with jump rope and bouncing ball songs. My mostly Irish father spouted nursery rhymes, both traditional and made up. Ours was an oral tradition of reading, reciting, and singing out loud.

As a girl I always held out hope that I would hear the nightingale’s song in the woods. I guarded myself against adults who could have been the Snow Queen in disguise. Whenever I went out walking, I had the urge to drop bread crumbs to mark the way. Rhymes like Hey Diddle Diddle the cat and the Fiddle fostered an early love of sound and world play.

Fairytales and nursery rhymes also gave me access into an inner life. They provided a context of meaning for the unexplained mysteries. Themes played out in fairytales – fate, survival, temptation, loss, courage, fear, and perseverance – are all the ingredients that make for good storytelling. Stories mirror life and give insight into the underpinnings of it.

6. Josh is a hard worker and an inspired artist. I think he has over a dozen collage journals. He usually weaves the creative work of making them into all parts of his life. But lately building the Community Temple wood-fired kiln, making pots, and having two firings back-to-back has been his full time art. You can see that art HERE..  

More collage posts  HERE.

“Everything in it was silly. I hated it,” he said, in answer to the question I posed ‘when did you start journal collaging and why?’

“I wondered who was writing all this ridiculous stuff,” he continued, “but I also knew it was an important part of my history that I couldn’t just throw away.”

That first journal became Josh’s prototype to so many others. He explained how he covered up its contents with collage, in an attempt to disguise what was embarrassing, leaving only little snippets of the original text as hints into that time.
“At that point, I had a sketchpad, was keeping a photo album, and a journal. I combined them all into only one book to carry around,” he explained.
“What a relief to put everything in one place!” I responded.

Josh went on to describe other details that fostered his interest in collage journal art. One particularly striking experience was when he discovered Dan Eldon’s published collage journal (Dan was a young photo-journalist who was killed tragically in Africa). Josh was at a friend’s college graduation party when he spotted the book and immediately became was transfixed.

“I sat down with it. People wandered over to see what I was doing, looked at it some, and then went back to the party. I never got up. I looked at it for hours,” Josh said.

“But you know, mom,” he added, “the books that you made helped …”
“What books? The homemade ones we used to make?” I interrupted. I had forgotten for a moment that I kept scrapbooks and baby books that both my boys grew up looking at.

“I was fascinated looking at the baby books you made for me and Dylan. A lot of those pages were done in collage. You were definitely outside the box. And you told us more than once about the importance of keeping a journal.” Josh reminded me.

As he spoke, I began to remember. Indeed, when Josh was 11, he and a friend traveled around the country with alternative education pioneer Jerry Mintz, and the only academic practice I demanded of him was that he keep a journal of his experiences.

“Even a shopping list is interesting to me once it’s a year or two old.” Who said that? You did, mom! And now I’m always picking stuff up to use in my journals, scraps of garbage that other people don’t even notice,” Josh said.
Like mother like son? It’s true, except for the fact that when it comes to making art, Josh surpasses me by miles.

Post Notes: Collaging runs in our family here. View pages from my collage journal here. That’s Josh’s brother Dylan in the forefront with him looking at Josh’s art scrapbook sometime in the mid 80s. Some pages from Josh’s collage journals were recently featured in an art show in Winston Salem, NC.