August 7, 2009

A touch of brightest red

Why Twisting Pipe Cleaners? It’s a reference to the first poem I ever really wrote. It happened during the culminating exercise of a professional retreat for teachers in Friends Schools. We were meant to reflect on our learning and growth, and our charge was to create an artifact that we could bring back to school as a marker and reminder of our time together at Pendle Hill.

As usual, I clammed up at the prospect of making something. I brought pipe cleaners back to my seat and I began -- by default -- twisting them into a rinky-dink pair of eye glasses. Conscious that I was far from the spirit of the exercise, I started to bend them into different shapes. As my fingers formed a red bird, I thought of my sister’s recent admission to me that she was seeing cardinals everywhere and had the sense that they were an embodiment of our father who had been dead for just two years.

There’s precedent in our family for this kind of lunacy – our grandmother always said that our grandfather had been reincarnated as a hummingbird and she kept her spaces full of hummingbird images.

As I sat there, making of all things a red bird, I wondered if my sister wasn’t onto something. Before I knew it, I felt like I was sitting in the central metaphor of a poem. I got up, grabbed pen and paper, and happily bent the rules of the exercise and wrote for the remaining half-hour. When we were done, I did not want to stop. My heart was racing and I felt like I had found my way into something extraordinary – the process was remarkable and enough to make me want to write more poems.

So my writing here takes its name from that. It’s a place to put ideas together and see what unfolds. It’s a vehicle to make more space for the poems I own as a reader and want to share.

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