Alexa Mergen's Blog

I've moved over to Day Poems and Yoga Stanza for blogging. Please check them out.

Thrilled to have my poem "Distance"selected by clmp for their Taste Test.

The trees in some place carry poems on every leaf so that when the wind blows, even slightly, one can catch the poems in the air-filled cavity of her inner ear and let them sing to her. The garden at Green Gulch Farm is such a place. Walking there in the misty air of the first rains of a California fall last Friday, poems vibrated through my ear's spiral cochlea and inner canals. A corner of newsprint and a pencil stub found in the garden shed allowed me to note the starts so I can nurture them into full-grown poems through the years ahead. I'm grateful for gardeners who cultivate soil for the rest of us.

Left the computer behind in Sacramento and took two days off to visit Oregon. I started poems by hand, looked and listened, spoke with strangers, visited a friend, found a secret swing swaying from a cork tree, watched the September sun rise at dawn, set at dusk.

Walking the Ashland bike path Saturday morning, I saw a man playing a guitar while riding a bicycle. I'm keeping that image forefront in my mind as I get back to the keyboard. Forward momentum happens if I keep pedaling while playing--traveling from here to there with glee.

The journal I read fiction for accepts anonymous submissions; story titles line up in my inbox without credentials.

A successful story grips, entertains, surprises, enlightens, astounds, evokes. An unsuccessful story fails to fledge. Earthbound, it's a reminder that being airborne requires engineering, grace and wind's fortune, no matter the name on the wing.

Every one of the zillions of stories I've read--in print, as a workshop leader, a schoolteacher, and an assistant editor--reminds me that imagination is proximate and elusive, necessary and honorable.

When Ratty packs a satchel to leave his riverfront hole for a fantasized life at sea, Mole intercepts him. Under the spell of promised adventure, leaving home seems to Rat like the "inevitable and only thing." He's lost interest in daily life; all seems dull.

Casually, with seeming indifference, Mole begins to talk of the harvest, "the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves." Describing red apples and brown nuts he becomes lyrical and Rat, by degrees, sits up and loses his listlessness. Mole tactfully slips away and returns with paper and pencil, placing it at his friend's elbow saying, "It's quite a long time since you did any poetry....I've an idea you'll feel a lot better when you've got something jotted down."

Mole leaves the room. Peeping in later, he finds Rat "absorbed" in scribbling and knows "the cure had at least begun."

Yes. This is the poetry cure for malaise be it in Kenneth Grahame's willow world or our 21st-century one. Start scribbling, even "if it's only just the rhymes," as Mole says. Through observation and interpretation of what's nearest to us, we paddle the river of time. The paradox of story-telling--that the universal is found in the particulars--applies to life, too. A friend's face, a neighbor's gift--that which is immediate--reminds us we are part of something, here, to take part.

I first heard the term "bear witness" applied to paying attention to the non-human world years ago from Terry Tempest Williams. I was in my late teens, at that age when everything you read molds you like hands on soft clay. I loved to hike and cross-country ski, to paddle and swim in lakes; Williams showed me how the notes I made in my journals in the waning daylight, before slipping into my sleeping bag for a night in deep quiet outside, mattered. They mattered because I was logging, recording, noticing, caring enough to make a mark in the way only humans can, translating stimulus into ideas that can be communicated across time and space.

Now I read how Melanie Joy is applying the term to what she calls "carnism," eating meat. She writes, When we bear witness, we are not merely acting as observers, we emotionally connect with the experience of those we are witnessing. We empathize.

Joy's cause is farmed animals and the meat processing industry. Williams's is the natural world, particularly the Great Basin. Mine is the intersection between human and non-human, local and global.

In my Day Poems classes, I ask my students to "bear witness" to their immediate environment. I do believe observation leads to an imaginative connection, which is a way of understanding empathy.

We think of empathy as an extension of compassion, a practice of moral obligation, the responsibility of a citizen. But when we witness, and empathize, we are enriched because what we are really doing is loving in that moment. And it really is better to give than to receive.

Saturday morning, I met with my Day Poems class to prepare for our week-long commitment. We set parameters, four or five variables to record as part of the practice of noticing. Each day poem chronicles a few minutes in the stream of time using observation, serendipity, and juxtaposition.

Some opt to record temperature, cycles of the moon, time of day. Some listen to music, watch passersby, gaze through a window. Titles may be plucked from newspaper headlines, classified ads, menus and signs.

By Saturday afternoon, I'd changed my parameters. I thought I'd sit and write; I walked. I thought I'd log a bird species; I included the bird's name in the poem. My initial plan didn't work.

I remembered learning to "monitor and adjust" when I trained as a teacher. Psychologist and educator Madeline Hunter's edict acknowledged the thousands of decisions a teacher makes after planning a lesson. She freed me to fine-tune, in midair, as I led students.

An artist must also free herself to "monitor and adjust." She attempts, observes and modifies as she flies, engaged, through the world, paying attention and recording.


Three Weeks Before Summer

"A hobby is something that gives but doesn't take." -Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist.

Lose yourself in a hobby. If it's not diverting--whether gardening, knitting, running, baking, watching birds--it's not a hobby. A hobby, like a hobby horse, won't take you out the door; it brings you home to yourself.

When I glue bits of paper snipped from junk mail and magazines into journal covers and postcards, I'm so absorbed that I don't think to stop until a twinge in my shoulder plunks me back to my stiffened body. I slip the collages between layers of waxed paper to dry.

When I uncover them a day or two later, I am surprised at what I find, experiencing the same jolt of pleasure as I do when coming across a possible line for a poem in an old journal. But writing is what I do for others; collaging is what I do for me. When I send out a collage postcard, I don't worry about it getting chewed up in the postal service's sorting machine. The ephemeral aspect of the craft frees me from expectation. I can attend to the process of making without becoming attached to the end result and its reception.

A woman from Palm Springs pronounced years ago that writing poems was a hobby for me. I was young and full of self-doubt and her statement made me waver. It took me more than a decade, and the notions of readers, to decide that she was wrong.

Writing poems is enjoyable, surely, but not care-free. Both writing and collaging remove me from the measurements of clock time. But there's an urgency to the writing that the collaging lacks. Each activity requires full attention: the vocation of writing (poems, essays, stories) moves me toward a place that becomes clearer; the hobby of collaging allows me to loiter.

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

When Nathan Field, of Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, finds himself in London in 1599, and realizes he is no longer in the 20th century, he is "baffled, and frightened."

He is vulnerable, impressionable and receptive, and paying close attention.

Nat's an actor who intuits that poetry is a way of understanding the world. As his aunt says, "Poets find truth by writing about what they love." With Shakespeare's sonnet 116, Nat learns that emotional ties, connections among the living, endure beyond a sole death.

For a moment, when the essentialness of his presence dawns on Nat, he experiences insight, "Looking at all the centuries, all the things that happen and are so hard to explain and understand."

Stories about time travel hold surprise, suspense, detail, mystery, fathoming. As do all stories.

In Old English, a "reader" was an interpreter of dreams. The word "dream" itself is linked to the Old English for "music" and "joy."

Be joyful, reader. Enjoy, traveler.

"You notice things and you don't only notice but you ask why," John tells 47 in Walter Mosley's novel.

Before you can create, make something, effect change, you have to notice what is, and patterns. Sometimes, though, it is enough to notice without asking why. When it comes to accepting a fixed situation, with factors beyond your control, why questions can lead to frustration. (Think: difficult bosses, estranged family members, addicts in denial.)

But when looking to adapt, amend, modify, revise, asking why is necessary. Yet, why is overused; it's a weary word. Substitute wherefore and breathe life into the action of wondering for what reason? for what purpose? Wherefore connotes movement in space--where--and time--fore.

Notice. Ask wherefore. Querying places the seeker in time and space, paradoxically anchoring and stirring. Isn't this why we are here, now?

"Time, like all other things, moves in a circle."