“Do” Roberts, Editor of Bloodroot Literary Magazine died suddenly and unexpectedly on Sunday, February 23, 2014.  An accomplished poet in her own right, in seven short years, “Do” with the aid of her Associate Editor Delores Netzband, developed this fledgling local literary journal into a superb magazine that now receives  submissions from all over the United States and outside its confines.

“Do” developed an annual poetry contest judged by prominent poets with the winners highlighted in the  annual edition of the magazine, and she organized annual series of readings in local libraries and bookstores, often with an open mic to encourage more poets to participate in the readings.  “Do” was a warm and generous woman, one who reached out to and supported poets and fiction writers of all ages.

Below is a poem about losing that appeared in Bloodroot Literary Magazine 2010.  It was the first of my poems to be accepted in Bloodroot. I offer it here for “Do.”

                  Losing

        The yellow eye of a bright blue
        forget-me-not in my garden
        looked up at me today,
        reproaching me for absent-mindedness.
        I planted it last year and I’d forgotten
        where it lay. That look is haunting me.
        Yesterday I lost my ipod. The day
        before, some pills I thought
        were safely stored,
        and last week a book
        I knew I’d bought and put
        upon a shelf vanished.
        Words too are so much harder
        to retrieve. I know I had them,
        but they no longer
        come on cue, waiting till I think
        they’re really gone and then
        emerging. And yet, forgetfulness
        is just a symptom. A while ago,
        I lost another dog
        to old age and disease,
        a timid Springer Spaniel,
        who barked at bikes and boxes
        but no one ever feared.
        That isn’t all. I’ve lost a younger brother
        and a much beloved friend.
        That losing comes with loving
        is, I know, a given.
        Still loving is a habit
        that I can not break—a bird
        whose nest is plundered
        and every year,
        I build my nest again
        in the same fragile place.

        ©Phyllis B. Katz

Bloodroot Literary Magazine, January 2010; All Roads Go Where They Will, Antrim House Books, 2010.

Creative Imitation.

Alan Shapiro offers this workshop annually at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  Here’s how he describes his work shop on the FAWC website:

“Poets learn by imitating other poets. On day one, we will read four poets (yet to be determined), and then each day after students will bring to class a poem imitating one of the poets we study on the first day.”

This is a very short and succinct description of one of the most stimulating and generative poetry workshops I have ever attended.  In last year’s workshop, the four poets were: Adrienne Rich, C.K. Williams, Rita Dove, and Robert Pinsky.  We arrived with a packet of their poems in hand, and spent the first class discussing the style, form, content, music, imagery of their poems. Key to our discussion was our investigation of what made the poems successful; how and why did they work?

In subsequent classes each of the ten participants brought in a poem inspired by one or more of the works of the four poets.  Sometimes the imitation was immediately obvious, sometimes it was difficult to find the model. In each case, the new poem grew out of and beyond imitation.  Each participant’s poem was read twice; then comments by the class completed the discussion.  Integral to this discussion was Alan Shapiro’s keen memory of poems he had read  (there seem to be an unlimited list in his head), that models that were extremely useful examples of material engendered by a participant’s poem.

This was a wonderful workshop!  We do indeed learn by drinking deeply of the work of other poets.  None of us writes in a vacuum; we are all indebted to the writing of others.  Imitation is never exact copying, nor is it “the sincerest form of flattery.” We study and absorb the work of other poets to expand our understanding of how poems work, to learn how to experiment in our own poems, to grow as poets.

In 2012 I attended a provocative and very useful workshop  in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center with Nick Flynn.  Nick’s course is entitled “Poetry as Bewilderment” and he describes his approach as follows: "Frost would sometimes say at his readings that "poems are about what you don't mean as well as what you do mean." In our week together I would like to examine this idea by thinking about the concept of "bewilderment" and how it gets acted out in our poems—either through syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. Or, as Aristotle puts it, "The mind in the act of making a mistake. . ."

“We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our poems, or in the poems themselves, for these are the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little deeper into this shadow world. “

You can find a compelling description of the role of the “duende” at http://duendedrama.org/. In this website the article ends with this statement: Duende is there to challenge us to keep our ears open to the ‘dark sounds,’ to keep our touch with the earth and with the ghosts of those who have come before, to never refuse the struggle which is needed to keep the spirits working on the side of truth.”

Indeed, Nick encourages the pupils in his workshop to think about the world with new eyes and with new ears. For example, his first assignment asked us to write a poem inspired by a recent science article.  This was a challenging topic for me; it required me to look in new directiosnMy poem, “ The Universe without the Higgs Boson,” grew out of this assignment and is posted in the poems section of this website.

Other assignments from Nick included using “found” material, lines of poems, news articles, our own work as part of a new composition.  He also had a wonderful collection of black and white postcards to use as inspiration for poems.  Two of the poems in Migrations were born from these postcards and will be posted later on this site.

You can read more about Nick and his own work at: http://www.nickflynn.org/

I was interviewed by Valley News Staff Writer Nicola Smith on Friday, January 24, 2014. A skilled writer and interviewer, Nicola spent almost two hours with me, asking probing questions about my development as a poet.  In addition, she called several days later with further queries.  The article she produced is a sensitive and perceptive reflection on my poems.  She had read my new book MIgrations quite thoroughly and thought deeply about the poems.  Her article is posted below in full.  Nicola quotes two of my poems,
"An Irruption of Pine Siskins" and "Changes" in her article. I have posted these poems on my website: wwwphyllisbeckkatz.com .

January 31, 2014

A Poet’s View: “Closely Observed, Deeply Felt” By Nicola Smith

Valley News Staff Writer

Friday, January 31, 2014

If, in Wallace Stevens’ adage, the “poet is the priest of the invisible,” then Phyllis Beck Katz has spent her life paying attention to the ephemera many of us miss or choose to ignore. In Migrations, her second book of poems, which was published in the fall, Katz writes of “a trembling of tiny finches,” the sight of birds’ “winged shadows across the moon’s bright lantern” and of the coming of spring in “the woods, so quiet under winter’s rule, now open to the music of desire.”

Her first book All Roads Go Where They Will, published in 2010, was a book of poems collected around such themes as family, friends and nature. And although Migrations, also published by Antrim House, also has poems about family, friends and nature, as well as ekphrastic poems (poems that comment on other works of art) certain themes emerge clearly throughout: mortality, aging, death, struggle and uncertainty as well as the stirring beauty and also the violence found in nature.

“The second book has a lot more unity to it, which tends to be typical of second books,” Katz said in an interview in her home in Norwich.

The original title of Migrations was Holding Fast, Katz said. But she changed the title as she “began to think more and more it was about the changes in my life.” Although the poems allude to her experiences, which are either described directly or refracted through the lens of nature, she doesn’t see the act of writing as some kind of personal catharsis.

“I don’t view them as confessional at all,” she said, looking slightly perturbed at the thought. “I view them as experiences that other people have access to.”

In 2002 her husband Arnold Katz suffered a grave illness. He eventually recovered, but that was, Katz said, “the event that really made me think about mortality and family and it entered into my writing certainly.”

Katz has had a long, distinguished career as an academic, teaching English and the Classics at schools and colleges throughout the country, including, most recently, at Dartmouth College, where she taught in the Classics, English and Women’s Studies departments from 1993 until her retirement in 2012.

She grew up in Hamden, Conn., the daughter of a Yale professor, Fred Beck, who could be, she said, a difficult father and husband, and a mother who had married young and regretted giving up her dreams of being a dancer and artist. Some poems in Migrations describe the walls her father erected between himself and his family, and her mother’s disillusion. “I was very conscious of my mother’s unhappiness,” Katz said.

When she went away to college at Wellesley, where she studied English, it came as a relief. “I wanted to get away from home,” she said.

After college, she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1959 to work for National Geographic, and it was in the city that she met her future husband, then working at the National Health Service. They were married in 1959, and their first child, Paul, was born two years later while they were living in California, where Katz got her M.A. from U.C.L.A. She went on to earn a doctorate in Classics from Columbia University. The Katzes have four children.

As Katz was in the later stages of her career she began to focus more on writing poetry, a pursuit that she’d embraced in high school but then put aside as she moved into adulthood, teaching, writing scholarly books and articles and raising her children. While at Dartmouth she met and took a course on poetry from the late Donald Sheehan, a professor in the English and Latin departments, as well as a teacher in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, who was also the first director of the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H. It was Sheehan who helped to turn her in the direction of poetry. Her poems have been published in Bloodroot Literary Magazine and Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont. A recent poem, Falling Time, appears this month in The Avocet: Journal of Nature Poetry.

The poems in Migrations look to a wellspring of sources, from childhood to the passage into adulthood to marriage and children to the lessons of nature. The poet Alan Shapiro, a winner of the prestigious annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book Night of the Republic, praised Migrations for its “closely observed and deeply felt” poems that “console and disquiet in equal measure.”

Katz spends as much time outdoors as she can, and it’s from nature that she draws much of her poetry. An avid birder, Katz said she is “interested in their behavior and what they like to eat and what they sing.” She also makes excursions into the Vermont woods with the Norwich chapter of Keeping Track, a Vermont nonprofit founded by noted animal tracker Susan Morse that trains amateur naturalists to monitor natural habitats so that data is available on the flora and fauna in any given environment.

Although Katz doesn’t want to belabor the analogy, she sees some similarity between poetry and bird song, with its musicality and coloration, and complex form and structure. And being outside frees her mind, lets it wander and reflect and create. “I sometimes write a poem when I’m walking,” she said. “I put it all together in my head.”

When she is in the woods, she listens, she said for “bird song, I listen for the rustlings of the leaves and that’s wonderful. I’ve learned there’s so much to see at every level.”

On a trip to the Galapagos with her youngest daughter, an evolutionary biologist, Katz realized that, from the largest organism to the microbes invisible to the eye, there are worlds within worlds within worlds. “You can keep looking in, and in, and in, and find more,” she said, just as looking through a telescope like the Hubble takes you “farther and farther out.”

Poetry has that capacity, to burrow in and then pull out, all the way to infinity, and the music of it has always run through Katz’s head. “I never thought of writing a novel or a short story. I get a lot of pleasure out of writing a good poem, and feeling it’s been birthed the way it needed to be,” she said.

Katz will read from “Migrations” on March 18 at Left Bank Books in Hanover. The event begins at 7 p.m.

For further information on Katz, go to phyllisbeckkatz.com.

Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com

http://www.vnews.com/home/10454441-95/a-poets-viewclosely-observed-deeply-felt

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