News from the Muse

 The Muse of Lament and Dissent  III

Weeping Madonna
(with credit to Sara Spaulding Phillips)

Introduction 

An Agony of Witness and Empathy

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin. But now, I don’t know you
as myself.

—Joy Harjo “I Give You Back”

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

If you are an American who pays attention to the news, July 2025 has brought a chaos of terror and grief, and an agony of witness and empathy. July 4th brought the signing of the Big Bad Bill, which cut Medicaid for poor people in order to lower taxes for the rich. To witness the slashing and burning of institutions that have supported our American way of life for decades, is to grieve for the world as we’ve known it. To witness hardworking immigrants, who pick our fruit and vegetables, build our houses, tend our gardens, serve us in restaurants and hotels, take care of us in old age, live in terror of being snatched out of their lives and families by masked secret police, without IDs or due process, brings tears of empathy and bursts of rage. How did America, the land of the free, morph into such a hell realm?

To witness civil servants, who have worked for the government for many years, on whom we have depended for help with Social Security, Health, Education, Homeland Security, Emergency Assistance, be fired, or live in terror of being fired, arouses our empathy and horror. Who stole our government and its agencies from us—our access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

To witness the humiliation of great universities, attacked for allowing their students to gather and speak freely, takes many of us back to our own student days, when we demonstrated for Free Speech. Many schools have had their scientific research funds withdrawn as punishment-- for whom? That is a blow to the health and wellbeing of every American, who, should they fall ill, will not be able to benefit from the latest medical advances. 

Who will be held responsible for the monstrosity our country has become in just six months of the Berserker’s reign of terror?

Enter the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Is this some sort of Deus Ex Machina? An act of God intent on haunting the Berserker and his minions? The Man of Teflon seems unable to shake the dirty secret of his long association with a pedophile—a trafficker of young girls and women--sexual prey for rich and powerful men. The ghosts of some of those women, who died before their time, are wailing in the Underworld, seeking to rouse those of us who will listen. Their souls require our witness and our empathy.

Commentary on the Poem: Unease Listening to my Guide in Tallinn

The edgy title of Virginia Chen’s wide ranging and penetrating poem sets the reader up for the discomfort of facing difficult truths. Those truths come in two voices, speaking from very different histories and lands. We begin in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, where a tour guide lectures the visitors about a history unknown to most Americans--his country’s struggle with Russian Tsars, and how that tiny country prevailed: One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

The guide scolds the tourists from the West for being afraid to “stand up for freedom” and warns: Do nothing and you will lose everything.

The second voice is that of the poem’s speaker, a “traveler for forty years,” as, back in an America changed drastically by a new administration, she struggles with what has become of her country. Married to the birthright son of parents born in China, she comes home to the shock of seeing immigrants being “arrested by agents wearing masks.” She wonders about her husband’s safety, about her own standing—her grandparents came from Europe. In a powerful leap that takes us beyond “unease,” the speaker’s blood pressure rises, sending her to the emergency room. She sums up her medical crisis deftly: American rage gave me the political bends.

She makes an astute psychological assessment of the land of her birth: We have no ancient enemy outside ourself.

Which means, one gathers, that we are doomed to project our shadow on an enemy within. But, being a traveler, who has learned courage from her Estonian tour guide’s lecture, the speaker ends her poem:

I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

May the wisdom she has brought back from Eastern Europe inspire our American struggle against our own would-be Tsar.

Unease Listening to My Guide in Tallinn

by Virginia Chen

Tallinn

The sun is decorative. It doesn’t warm and the wind is blowing.

Our borders are closed to Russians.
Tsar Putin wants all of Europe.
Just wait. He will take.

Russia on the Globe    vs   Estonia on the Globe

Kyiv was once the Russian capital. Ukraine kicked out the old Tsar.
He moved to a swamp—St. Petersburg.
We’re getting ready for a fight. Northern Europe is building up

its military —NATO will help us.
Not the U.S.
They can’t decide which side they’re on.

The West is afraid to stand up for freedom.
They’re scared of nukes. Retribution.
Do nothing and you will lose everything.

Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia

Naïve leaders think they can make a deal with a Tsar.
For 500 years, Russian Tsars and Soviets tried to annex the Baltics.
Russians took us over. Then the Nazis. Then the Soviets. We fought back.

We’ve held off the Russians since 1990s when we got
independence by singing. That’s right.
One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

Estonian Women Singing Against the Soviets

We were lucky.
Not a drop of blood.

Russians don’t travel. Don’t know how others live. We Americans don’t travel that much either. When I’m asked about traveling, I’m careful

not to say much. People here are easily bored. Some are listening for what tribe I belong
to. I did not buy a “Greenland is not for sale T-shirt” in Nuuk, I bought a deep blue one

that was a map of the Fjords. Think climate. Thawing permafrost.
I’ve been traveling for over forty years. This time I came home to riots in LA.

Masked Ice Agents Arresting Immigrants

Immigrants are being arrested by agents wearing masks. Some detainees are sent to prisons in Central America, Cuba and Africa. Americans voted for this.

My husband’s parents were born in China. They had Boxer Rebellion scholarships to medical school in the U.S. They became naturalized citizens.

Becoming Naturalized Citizens

They hated the communists. Couldn’t go back home. Will Americans whose parents were born in China be targeted next? Like the American Japanese during WW II?

My husband was born in Indiana. I spent my whole life in California. My grandparents were born in Europe. I love the Dutch and Swiss but my home is in the U.S. 

I was home a week when my blood pressure rose. I went to the emergency room feeling like the salmon who couldn’t readjust in the brackish waters of home after living at sea. 

Sockeye Salmon

Tests showed a possible blood clot from the long flight. They let me go after they factored in my
age. American rage gave me the political bends. I don’t feel at home swimming 

in hostile waters. My home has the mightiest military in the world.
But—we have no ancient enemy outside ourselves. We’re only 250 years old.

I sing in praise of travel.
I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

No Kings Demonstrations

Besides travel, Virginia Chen spent most of her life singing in choruses. She loves the idea of people singing together in religious congregations, community choruses, and other gatherings big and small. She cherishes the experience of singing with people from different backgrounds and cultures to make beautiful music—not war. When things are bad or good, we sing.

News from the Muse

News from the Muse

of Revolution 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—

—Emily Dickinson

Sister from Below: Cover
Painting by Bianca Dalder

What’s Happened to the Sister from Below?

If you follow the Sister from Below’s News from the Muse you may wonder what’s become of her. I’ll tell you what: the November 2024 Election, and since the January Inauguration, the onslaught of bedlam and chaos in the crazed fists of a Berserker President. The Sister from Below has been silenced. Struck dumb. The breath of inspiration knocked out of her. She, my connection to Soul, to deep Self, has withdrawn to a dark cave, to keen, to howl, to moan. She’s brought me no wisdom, no glowing intuitions from the depths, only nightmares about stormy weather. 

Kamala & Tim

Gone, gone the joyous dance of Kamala Devi Harris & Tim Walz, in whose vision of America women are free to choose, workers are paid livable wages, Mother Earth is honored and protected. Gone gone the feathered thing called Hope. Now we’re in a story of total devastation. The Robber Baron crew has showed up with their chain saws, to fell every tree our ancestors planted—the habitat for feathered creatures and their songs. 

But then, one night, I had a dream which changed everything. The Sister from Below showed up in the form of Diane di Prima, my late, long ago poetry teacher, demanding I write a revolutionary rant. That dream evoked memories of a difficult mentorship. It woke The Sister from Below to the inspiration of the Muse of Revolution and to the necessity of political rants. She gave me this poem to pass on to you. And she asks, if you are so inclined, that you pass it on to others in need of inspiration.

Diane di Prima

A Revolutionary Letter

to the Spirit of Diane di Prima

Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns. . .  

                               we turn. . . 
faces of pain and fear, the dawn
awash among them
—Diane di Prima

You came to my dream last night    Diane
like a Zen slap    your fierce spirit hell bent    on waking
me up    rousing me to write    a roaring rant
for these terrible times    you find me in    You
who were my poetry teacher    decades ago    You
whose lineage    is my lineage    Blake    H.D.
The Black Mountain Poets    Your own wild Loba    You 

usher me up a steep staircase    to your garret    a word 

whose root means watchtower    You who believed
there is gold    deep in the roots of words    You
        whose creed was    a poet must always be    on the watch

White Wolf Fantasy

Remember the first time I came to you?    wearing a flouncy
gypsy skirt    so femme    beside your tattered Beat poet jeans
I was scared    for I had given you the power    to dub me poet
or dud    Back in the day    at a demonstration against The War
I’d heard you read    Revolutionary Letters    I was smitten    you
who mingled the lyrical    & the political    (forbidden to an English
major)    called to me    like a Muse    Turns out my lucky stars
had unexpected plans for me    an esoteric path you walked
me down    to the roots of Poetry’s Tree of Life    in the Spirit
of the Depths    in the Lunar Realms    of Magick    Tarot
                                       Kabbala Alchemy Mythology Dreams

Wm. Turner Angel Standing in the sun

I watched you being brilliant    fierce    tongue-lashing nasty

You scared me    just as my Father had    & yet I stayed
in your circle    in the spell of your Magick    long enough
to become the poet I am    whose Muse insists    on mingling
the esoteric    the lyrical    & the political    Your lineage
is my lineage    At the cusp of the pandemic    I learned 

you’d left your body    & now here you are   in my dream

insisting I remember   who I am   the first-born birth right baby   

of refugee Jews from the Shoah   reliving the very catastrophe   

into which I was born     I used to believe   never again

would such an atrocity   assault us     

The holy wind’s been knocked out   of my Muse  

My Goddess has retreated    to the underworld    

Your spirit demands    that I tell it   as I see it   

                  the whole cruel scourge   of our passion play

He has come    who sees himself as savior    creator

of a Golden Age    whose given name means    

Ruler of the World    Sea Monster from the Depths 

I prefer to call him    Berserker    You say that hardly
does him justice    The truth is that he stinks
He is corrupt    his guts rotting    in Big Mac Sauce
His Doppelganger    who does his dirty work
his little boy    as a shield against assassination    He wields
a jubilant chain saw    to cut & slash    the Civil Service
to rend asunder    the bonds that bind our land    Diane
is that you chanting    the Declaration of Independence?

Lady Liberty Weeping

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of our rights    to Life    Liberty    and the Pursuit
of Happiness    It is the Right of the People    to abolish it

He has ridden roughshod    over the Constitution
He has tossed landmines at clinics that serve    wounded veterans
He has swindled the working classes    to cut taxes for the rich
He has eviscerated truth    violated due process
disobeyed judges    ripped peaceful legal immigrants
out of their lives    O monstrous chaos agents
wreckers of law    & community    You who believe
that empathy is a sin    a feminine weakness
like helping a stranger    like feeding a starving child
like calling out    cruelty & bigotry    Be careful

Our Goddess has arisen    from her underworld meat hook
She who is a love Goddess    a warrior Goddess    a flood
& fire Goddess    for whom earth & sky sing
                is in a holy fury    about this desecration &    She’s Woke!

The Goddess Durga: Photo by Subhrajyoti

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

invites you to a Poetry Reading on Zoom

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky 

will read from her 6th poetry collection

Your Face in the Fire

Blue Light at the Gallery

Friday, Jan. 10, 2025 6pm Pacific Time

7pm Mountain Time 8 pm Central Time 9 pm Eastern Time

                                                                        Though the weather’s becoming
                                        a banshee goddess     Though the “white only” nation
                                        is trolling the web     Though the emperor-elect
                                        is tweeting our downfall     My wish is     Remember
                                        The way of women     is our way     The moon swells
                                        the moon goes dark     pulling the tides     in and out
                                        The way of trees     is our way     So raise up
                                        your branches     sisters     for we are one     gathering
                                        Soon sap     will rise     apple trees flower

                                        We’ll weave us a canopy     all over this land
                                        It will be uprising time     once again
                                                                                    in America

                                                                            from “Wishing in the Woods with Hillary”
                                                                                      in Your Face in the Fire

Two Women Under the Tree in the Garden - Edvard Munch 

Request your Zoom link at bluelightpress@aol.com

For a signed copy of Your Face in the Fire

Send request, name and address to danielsafran@yahoo.com

($25.00 via PayPal--nlowsky@hotmail.com--includes shipping and handling)  

The Sister from Below is Delighted to Invite You

 Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and the Deep River Poets

invite you to a reading of

Soul-Making in the Valley of the Shadow

with 

Kent Butzine, Virginia Chen, Sheila deShields, Dossie Easton, Connie Hills, Raluca Ioanid, Daniela Kantorová, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Clare Marcus, and Anita Sánchez

Sat. Oct. 22, 2022 

3-5PM/PT

On Zoom

Cover Image: Kent Butzine

General Admission: $25

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)–C. G. Jung

How does one live in the soul during dangerous times? The ancient mode of mythopoesis is an imaginal practice which can confront shadow and give voice to soul. Since 2006 the Deep River Poetry Circle has provided a temenos for this process. After the trauma of the 2016 election, followed by the pandemic and the climate catastrophes that have followed, we in Deep River have engaged the Spirit of the Times as well as the Spirit of the Depths. It has become a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts. We gather at the river to follow the flow of our poems; they take us to surprising places, show us the unexpected—the Tree of Life around a bend in the river, its roots deep in the earth.

We gathered to create our anthology, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow, as a gift to the community.  We offer this reading to the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, in memory of our Jungian ancestors, and as an expression of deep gratitude to the Extended Education Committee, who have given us support, visibility, and a way to gather for so many years, through so many changes.  

Please join us. The $25.00 admission fee will get you a copy of Soul Making. All proceeds will go to the Extended Education Program.

- No Continuing Education Credits are available for this event.

The Muse of the Psalms

Mainz Book of Hours 

Save me O God; 
For the waters are come in even unto the soul. 
I am sunk in deep mire, where there is no standing; 
I am come into deep waters, and the flood overwhelmeth me. 
(The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917)

In the Valley of the Shadow

 

you are the last living generation 

of the six that went before you 

passing that invisible medicine basket 

from one generation to the next… 

Anita Cadena Sánchez 

from her poem “Medicine Basket” 

in Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow p. 6 

Medicine Basket

On June 12th of last year, the Sister from Below celebrated the publication of Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow with a blog called: The Muse of Deep River. We of Deep River—the poetry circle I lead at the Jung Institute—had begun to feel the shadow of the pandemic lifting and the political scene brightening as the Biden administration vaccinated the willing and passed the American Rescue Plan which stimulated the economy, sent money to families with children and helped out state and local governments. That upbeat mood did not last long. New variants of Covid 19 attacked us, and the political will continue to support families with children, to protect voting rights, to protect our Mother Earth, seems to have ebbed away.

We’ve recently passed the one-year anniversary of the day Lady Liberty was roughed up so badly at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The question, now hanging in the air is: “Are we losing our democracy?” On the first anniversary of that infamous day, President Biden accused the former president of “holding a dagger to the throat of democracy.” The New York Times Editorial Board warned us that we face “an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.” Republican lawmakers are passing bills that “would make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome.” (The New York Times Sunday Review Jan. 2nd, 2022) At this writing, the news is unbelievable: the Republican National Committee has decided that what happened on January 6th 2021 is “legitimate political discourse!” Excuse me? Have you watched the horrifying videos of that coup attempt on YouTube? Where are we? In Germany, 1933? In Mandelstam’s Soviet Union? In Milosz’ Poland? It’s not just the virus that hangs heavy in the air, but a terror that our elections are about to be undermined, and that the hopes for real change kindled by the victory of Biden and Harris, by the Black Lives Matter Movement, by the Green New Deal, by the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, by the Build Back Better bill, are in deep trouble. “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?” asks Czeslaw Milosz in his famous poem “Dedication.” He answers this impossible question in another poem, “In Warsaw:” 

My pen is lighter 

Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden 

Is too much for it to bear. 

And yet, poems have been written about this unbearable burden since the psalmist took up his lyre and sang: 

Why, O God, has Thou cast us off forever?
Why doth Thine anger smoke against the flock of Thy pasture?
(Psalm 74:1 The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917.) 

In troubled times many of us turn to the Psalms, as we did in Deep River when, after the 2016 election and the assaults of climate change and the pandemic, we found ourselves writing poems about a world turned upside down and inside out. Like the psalmist, Deep River poet Daniela Kantorová pleads for help from the divine in her poem “The Ship:” 

Dear God, please turn the ship
that floats in the rain above Foothill Blvd.
It lands in an apple orchard
The back merges with the land
(p. 65)

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow became the name we gave our process of reading and writing. Eventually, it became the name of the book of poems we gathered as a bulwark against the looming catastrophes of our times. The origin of the name is in these famous lines from Psalm 23: 

He restoreth my soul; 

He guideth me in straight paths for his name’s sake. 

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death 

I will fear no evil, 

For thou art with me 

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. 

(Psalm 23: 3-6 The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917) 

In his book, Keeping Faith with the Psalms, Daniel F. Polish refers to the profound idea that the “I” in this psalm is the soul on its life journey (p.171). In this way, making a poem is “making soul.” As I wrote in the Introduction to Soul Making: “The Muse is the voice of the soul, speaking in language that blends reason and mystery, She makes meaning of the incomprehensible.” (p. vii) 

Many of the poems in our collection are about this process. Kent Ward Butzine opens his poem “Pandémie Hypnagogique” with a description of soul loss: 

Everything is receding    darkening 

there is sadness    as the trees go 

the river    birds and birdsong    the sky 

all beloved 

Psalms are both poems and prayers. Many poems meander into prayer. They mix the stuff of everyday life with invocations to the divine. In Sheila de Shields’ poem “Flight of the Mind,” she prays for herself in old age: 

in my last days 

may I sit by the black basalt fountain  wild blue 

      irises 

and hooded orioles among my redwood trees 

let me recall the names of my children… 

In my poem “Birth Day Poem 2017” I pray: 

Carry me back   through the laboring dark 

into first light   first cry   first touch 

of mother’s hands 

Later in the poem I refer to political events as “those evil spirits” and as “the furies” who “rave/ and mutter,” who “spooked// my cradle” as my parents began to learn of “the trains the chimneys” in the Europe they had recently fled. What spooked me all over again was the anti-Semitic chants we heard from the right wing in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017, when a "Unite the Right" rally turned deadly and the hate was palpable. 

There are those who argue that it’s not kosher to mix poetry with the political—they are different spheres—just as the Jews separate the everyday from the Sabbath, just as Jung made a distinction between the Spirit of the Depths and the Spirit of the Times. But in Deep River we found we needed to mix the political with the profound themes that are poetry’s usual domain for the sake of our very souls. Poetry was our way of walking through the Valley of the Shadow. Despite the title of our book, it hadn’t fully come to me how much our path is influenced by the Psalms. As Robert Alter points out in The Art of Biblical Poetry: 

The God of biblical faith…is not a God of the cosmos alone, but also a God of history. A good many psalms…are responses to the most urgent pressures of the historical moment.
(p. 121)

It is moving to realize that this poetic tradition—which speaks to the Divine from the overwhelm and panic we feel when in the grip of history’s violent fist—is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible. There is a lovely Jewish myth about King David, the Psalmist, which tells us that he wrote the psalms with “The Holy Breath” (Tree of Souls p. 279). In Judaism, Ruah, meaning breath or spirit, is one of the levels of the soul. Similarly, the word inspiration, which comes from the Latin word inspirare — meaning to breathe—came to mean divine guidance in Middle English. Thus our very language speaks to the spiritual nature of making poetry. 

David and his Lyre

The Sister from Below is Delighted to Announce the Publication of “Songs from the Deep River: Selected Poems from Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow” in the Jung Journal 

The sibyl breathes deeply 

The vapors from the fire below 

She is no longer herself 

She from a respectable family 

She who is reliably self–possessed 

Is unhinged by the smell of death 

      Virginia Lee Chen from “Sibyl” p. 27 

Deep River is honored that a selection of poems from Soul Making has been published in the latest issue of The Jung Journal (Volume 15, Number 4). Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, the editor of The Jung Journal, doesn’t seem to worry about mixing the Spirit of the Times with the Spirit of the Depths. He writes eloquently of our crazed times in his introductory essay to this issue: “To the Reader:” 

These days the dizzying pace and sheer ferocity of changes in our world leave us little to no time to recover from one catastrophe before the next hits. A pernicious pandemic and intensifying climate change events surge like tsunamis over the globe, leaving us roiling in existential crisis and economic, political and social instability… 

How much can we take? 

What do we do? Where do we go to find refuge, solace, healing, a way forward? 

Doesn’t this sound like the psalmist’s cry? “My soul is sore afflicted;/And Thou, O Lord, how long?” (Psalm 6:4) Or like Dossie Easton’s lament in her poem “With my Pink Pussy Hat On”? 

How will we open our hearts 

                                      to each other 

in a country where half the voters are in love 

with their hating  

of people like me: like for instance: 

            women they can’t own, or men who can  

love other men, 

                       or those who belong to other cultures 

                               part of Humanity’s far flung treasure… (p. 17) 

Benevedes continues: 

Depth psychologists, spiritual leaders and healers of all kinds strive to help heal the World Soul, one psyche at a time. 

And artists make art. Out of the spirit of the depths, they engage with the spirit of the times in a way that anchors us, expressing our suffering and our light. (p. 1) 

I agree with Benevedes that it is the very mingling of the Spirit of the Depths with the Spirit of the Times which helps us locate ourselves and cast light on our emotions. It describes a number of poems in the Soul Making collection, among them Raluca Ioanid’s “Bucharest Sestina” about her “vanished grandparents”: 

In our pact never to forget 

the momentum of loss 

is greater. Have our night–vanishing grandparents 

opened the door for dreams 

and days and meals and adventures sweetened by our 

kinship to this family of ghosts? (p. 47) 

or Clare Cooper Marcus’ poem “Ann Frank’s Tree” 

In spring, chestnut flowers 

like ghostly candelabra 

lit her days, as they did mine 

not much distance west, across 

the channel… 

For her, the tree beyond her grasp 

stood achingly alive, dear daily reminder 

of leaf–birth,  

                   leaf fall… (p. 52) 

Flowering Chestnut tree

or Connie Hills’ poem “Time to Come” 

If you visit Van Gogh’s grave 

go after the gust of summer… 

The quaintness of the place 

so placid you can imagine 

standing at Vincent’s burial 

that July midi 

surrounded by lemon sunflowers 

battered dahlias 

Hallelujahs oozing 

from their thousands of 

amber throats… 

                   (pp. 41-2) 

Benevedes goes on to write of Deep River and quotes the beautiful telling of our story by Poetry Editor Frances Hatfield: 

For the past fifteen years, here at the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, something extraordinary has been quietly unfolding. Poetry editor Frances Hatfield provides the origin story of the poems you will read: “At the instigation of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s “Sister from Below,” poets, nascent poets, and poetry lovers have gathered in the library of the Gough Street building…each month, immersed in the ghosts and spirits and deep soul of that holy place, and cooking together in the power of mythopoesis to express grief, beauty and love. Out of that profound communitas, a group of poets emerged who call themselves, aptly, the ‘Deep River Poets.’ This issue’s poetry section features a selection from a new book they have published as an offering to the institute and to the Extended Education program under which they have met. One can sense how these nine poets nourished each other as their voices of witness, grief, praise, awe and exuberance emerged in the presence of great poets, considered in the light of our extraordinary times. (p.3) 

We are deeply grateful to Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes and Frances Hatfield for their generous response to Soul Making and to Managing Editor LeeAnn Pickrell for the beautiful layout of the poems. 

 Slave Ship: Wood Engraving by Smyth

“A Light So Terrible” 

In the Psalms, as in many of the poems we turn to in terrible times, we seek access to a higher power, a deeper wisdom, a more expansive way of understanding, when the world as we know it cracks open, spilling out our firm beliefs and our grasp of what we think of as truth. When things we never thought could happen in America, or things we ignore or deny, are flung at us in a light as terrible as nightmare, what is our responsibility as poets? When we learn that the former president had draft executive orders drawn up involving the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense—in a plot to seize voting machines after the 2020 election—what can we do or say? (My father, a refugee from the Nazis and a passionate believer in American democracy, is turning in his grave.) What scares me more than anything is how little outrage and furor I hear in the collective. Psalm 94: 3-6 comes to mind: 

Lord, how long shall the wicked, 

How long shall the wicked exult? 

They gush out, they speak arrogancy; 

All the workers of iniquity bear themselves loftily. 

They crush Thy people, O Lord, 

And afflict Thy heritage. 

They slay the widow and the stranger, 

And murder the fatherless… 

We who have put our faith in the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, feel fatherless. We who have fought for Women’s Liberation, Racial Justice, Equality and the well-being of our Mother Earth find ourselves still in the thrall of the Patriarchy—bereft of Mother Power. Orphaned. Terribly afraid. 

Amanda Gorman at Inauguration

But there is help and wisdom among the young and among poets. Amanda Gorman, who gave us her beautiful Inaugural Poem, “The Hill We Climb,” continues to inspire us. In an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, (January 20, 2022)—“If You’re Alive, You’re Afraid”—she reframes the meaning of fear. She had almost decided against being the Inaugural poet because of her fear—amplified by friends and family— that she might lose her life on that very visible platform. She suffered with insomnia and nightmares as she wrestled with her decision. “Was this poem worth it?” She writes: 

And then it struck me: Maybe being brave enough doesn’t mean lessening my fear but listening to it. I closed my eyes in bed and let myself utter all the leviathans that scared me, both monstrous and miniscule. What stood out most of all was the worry that I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what this poem might have achieved. There was only one way to find out. 

If Gorman was praying to a higher power in her dark night of the soul, it strikes me she includes the power to strike fear as an aspect of the deity. This resonates with the Jewish view of the Divine who is not only about goodness and kindness, but about wrath and trouble. Her breakthrough came when she could listen to what her fear taught her. 

In the year since the Inauguration, Gorman has written a new book of poems, Call Us What We Carry. I want to quote from sections of the opening poem in that collection—“Ship’s Manifest”—in which she speaks to the role of the poet in our awful times. Like the Psalmist who urges his people to “Depart from evil and do good” (Psalm 34:15), Gorman clearly sees the poet’s function as ethical as well as spiritual. It is worth noting that a ship’s manifest lists the cargo, passengers and crew of a ship. It is an accounting of what the ship carries. Ship’s manifests for slave ships are one of the few places historians of slavery can find the names and some details about the people who were stolen from Africa and brought to the New World against their will. The poem never mentions the Middle Passage, but its dark waters, its ghosts and demons flow deep below the surface. Notice she holds poets accountable, as though our work requires the tools of an accountant making lists. In fact, much of her poem is a list. Her passion is contagious. Her word play is brilliant—for example, “An ark articulated?” or “Our greatest test will be/Our testimony.” Her use of the word “testimony”—which in Black Churches means telling how the Divine has interceded in our lives—brings us deep into the realm of the psalms, as does the line “A light so terrible” which makes clear how difficult, soul wrenching and essential is the work of the poet. 

Here is a section of Gorman’s poem: 

The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived 

Has already warped itself into a fever dream, 

The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind. 

To be accountable we must render an account: 

Not what was said, but what was meant. 

Not the fact, but what was felt. 

What was known, even while unnamed. 

Our greatest test will be 

Our testimony. 

This book is a message in a bottle. 

This book is a letter. 

This book does not let up. 

This book is awake. 

This book is a wake. 

For what is a record but a reckoning? 

The capsule captured? 

A repository. 

An ark articulated? 

& the poet, the preserver 

Of ghosts & gains, 

Our demons & dreams, 

Our haunts & hopes. 

Here’s to the preservation 

Of a light so terrible. 

                 from Call Us What We Carry, “Ship’s Manifest.”

Miniature from Hafiz-i Abru’s Majma al-tawarikh

The Muse of Duende

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of 

Death and His Lorca 

The Muse of Duende 

I’m wandering in a shadowy part of town. It is dusk in my dream. I am lost. Can’t find my purse. I think I’m headed for a staircase when I hit a wall. I am told I’m in the Duende—which is the name of a trickster spirit or elf in the mythos of Southern Spain. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca insisted that duende was essential for the arts. For Lorca duende includes “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical” writes Christopher Maurer in the Preface to a lovely little book called In Search of Duende.

Flamenco Dancer

Lorca has been with me since college, when I was awe–struck by his Poet in New York. I was strangely at home in his nightmarish visions of that city ninety years ago—during the Great Depression. I shared his outrage about American materialism and industrialization and was spellbound by the prophetic tone of his poems, their musicality, and long Whitmanesque lines. As the firstborn in America child of a family that fled the Shoah I never felt at home in the death–denying, “positive–thinking” America of the fifties and early sixties. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Lorca’s duende opened my path into poetry. I recognized this spirit in myself—in my own intense relationship with the dead, and my tender feelings of kinship with Lorca, who died tragically in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He was assassinated by Franco’s goons because of his leftist politics and because he was gay. He was 38. 

Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca is a poetic ancestor, a Virgil who guides me in and out of underworlds, a major influence whose work derives from music—the Deep Song of the Gypsy siguiriya. In Search of Duende includes Lorca’s essay, Deep Song, in which he writes that the siguiriya “begins with a terrible scream…It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.” These gypsy songs have duende, Lorca writes—[they] “are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” Jung would recognize that mire as the prima materia of the alchemists. But for Lorca it is more embodied. He quotes “an old maestro of the guitar” who said: “The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of your feet.”

Alhambra Dome

Twelve years ago, when Dan suggested we travel to Southern Spain, I felt the duende climb up inside me, from the soles of my feet, insisting that we visit Granada—Lorca’s home. Granada is also the home of Manuel de Falla—one of Dan’s favorite Spanish composers. Dan and I had always wanted to see the fabled Alhambra— situated in Granada. The Alhambra, Lorca’s home, de Falla’s home, flamenco music and dance are etched in my memory and in a series of poems which poured through me during that pilgrimage. They are saturated in Lorca’s duende and later, as we travelled to Córdoba with its tragic history of the Jews, by the duende of our ancestors. 

Lorca makes a distinction between the Muse and duende. I don’t. My Muse comes to life when the duende appears, when the flamenco dancer raises her skirts and stamps her feet, when the gypsy singer screams, when death makes an unexpected appearance. She and the duende dance, sing, and poetry begins. As fate would have it, when we returned from that trip, the duende came home with us. We suffered a series of significant deaths among friends and family. And both Dan and I had serious health issues. The duende had escaped from its Spanish container and leaked into our whole lives and into my fifth collection of poems. 

According to Lorca, “the true fight is with the duende.” The duende, unlike the Muse, is a combatant, who “does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house.” Why is this so important? Because, Lorca explains: “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it, for with duende it is easier to love and understand.” It is the duende who insists I face my own mortality, that I let in the dead who knock on the windows of my heart, wanting to be remembered. it is duende which became the magnet for the poems in Death and His Lorca —a collection in which death takes many forms and the dead show up as spirit guides and companions. 

These poems were written before Trump was elected, before the pandemic hit, before mass death invaded our safe American world. I hope Death and His Lorca will bring you who read it to the confluence of the “dark waters” of duende—where life and death flow together—aspects of the same mystery. Here is the opening poem: 

Flamenco Dancer 

When her arms rise up like Gaudi’s spires 

and her hands unfurl like forest violets 

When the lamentation of the Moors    the Gypsies    the Jews 

makes an agony about her eyes   and her spine 

is a wild and supple snake   When she hitches up her skirts

and the stamping begins   in red shoes   She is riding 

the exiled horse of her hips   over the yellow land 

over dust that remembers   ashes of the burnt 

bones of the broken   The soles of her feet 

beat a drum   arousing the spirits   of her great 

great   great   great   grand   parents 

                                                    She rides and she rides 

                                                                    that exiled horse 

                                                                            over Lorca’s unmarked grave 

* * * * * *

August 24th Event Invitation:

Please join me on Zoom on August 24th from 7-8. I’ll be reading from Death and His Lorca as the featured reader in the Poetic License Fourth Tuesday Series. Check out the website at www.poeticlicensesonoma.com for more information.

Order Death and His Lorca from Amazon here.

To order from your favorite bookstore: ISBN: 9781421837024 (Distributed by Ingram)

To order a signed copy from me, send an email and I’ll send you the information.