Love Parade

As a kid growing up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, I loved going to the Portland Rose Festival Parade in June. My oldest brother was a trumpeter in the high school's band, so besides enjoying the parade floats that glided by, I had the thrill of seeing my sibling marching with the late spring light gleaming on his brass Doc Severinson horn.

Today, my idea of a good parade would be even more joyful. Using the writer Kahlil Gibran's phrase, it would be "a procession of love"  –  a celebration of people and creatures and all the natural world.

Many thanks to the New Verse News for publishing my vision for a parade in their post today. You can find my new poem at https://newversenews.blogspot.com/search/label/Linda%20Ferguson. 

Blue Moon/Blood Moon

It's the last day of January, and I’m a little shaken by two poems I just finished writing.

Can a poem be finished? Probably not. When we look at a line with fresh eyes, we notice the cadence is a little off, the similes are a tad limp, or a certain word’s dull glow wants to be replaced with a shimmering synonym.

At any rate, I was answering a call for submissions that ended today, so I had to put an end to my intense editing.

The theme for the submissions was poems from the news. I thought I would be clever and write something inspired by a New York Times wedding story. Maybe something about how the couple met through their mothers, two old school friends who were reunited when they were both widowed and began attending services at the same synagogue. 

I was sure I would find a story like that to write about. I imagined a bride who rode her bicycle to the ceremony, wearing a fern-colored skirt that had belonged to her grandmother. As for the groom, I pictured him in a shirt of pale blue cotton with a Scottish tie of heathery tweed. He’d had a beard when he'd met his future bride, but he shaved it off when she developed a rash after their first long session of kissing.

I’ve read many such stories on Sunday mornings in the Style section of the Times. No, that’s not quite accurate. I tutor a high school student on Sunday mornings, so I usually don’t get to the weddings until later. On Sunday mornings, my student and I discuss commas and adverbs and thesis statements. This year he's taking AP U.S. History (a.k.a., “A-PUSH”), and so before I meet with him, I review my notes on things like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that lawmakers passed to keep Chinese people from coming to America. According to the A-PUSH textbook, in 2012, Congress apologized, which makes me wonder what formal regrets the U.S. will express in 2148.

I find studying history as fascinating as it is depressing. Instead of flying through the chapters in the class text, I read every line, sometime twice or three times.

In contrast, I find reading today’s headlines is just plain depressing: the flames that trapped the occupants of a Bronx apartment building, a grown daughter missing after a hurricane, a refugee clinging to her toddler as their dinghy was sinking in the Mediterranean Sea.

I wanted to turn this submission call into something unexpected. I wanted to make my manuscript a celebration of love that would never be printed on the front page. Alas, other subjects called my name, and like a low tire that pulls a vehicle to one side, I felt drawn to write about homelessness and mass shootings instead.

My new poems may never be published. If they are, they're unlikely to make even a small change in the world's path. Or I may not like them myself the next time I read them. But I'm not sorry I looked these topics in the face or that my bones have felt the horror of the facts on which they're based. Instead of basking in the glow of vows exchanged on a sunny hill, I've spent the last month inside the dark cave of a serpent’s mouth where its fangs sank into my veins.

Whoa, was that hyperbole? Yes, but I’m still trembling at the idea of sleeping outside night after night after night and at the thought of losing a child in an act of violence and then receiving thoughts and prayers as recompense.

Of course I’m not literally debilitated by simply writing. And last night I looked up at the sky and saw the blue supermoon (before the eclipse, so there was no blood moon yet), and I knew this amazing sight was as true as all of the terrible news we take in every day. Then I stepped back inside my old house and shut the door and was cocooned once again by the warmth and comfort and electric lights.

An Abolitionist Walks into a Bazaar...

Yes, this season can mean gray skies and the glint of the silver chip on a credit card, but this is also true: The holiday shopping season began with a humanist cause. Before the Civil War, anti-slavery societies held annual charity fairs, featuring crafts that were handmade by women. “Buy for the Sake of the Slave,” was the slogan for these bazaars, which were often held before Christmas.

What is it about this story that makes me happy? Is it the idea that we can mold the clay of consumerism to create something beautiful and good? Is it the image of hushed, corseted Victorian-era women finding their public voice? Or the uniting of two causes – feminism and abolitionism – to make a powerful force?

Maybe this anecdote from my country’s history is like the minute flame on top of a birthday candle or a tiny, single bulb in a string of lights. Maybe it’s a suggestion, whispered, in my ear, that there’s no need to sit and wait for a certain star to shine. Maybe the light I crave in December is already flickering in each of us.

The Whole Picture

My mother has taught me to see color. Whenever we go anywhere together she's alive to every pink blossom and russet leaf along the way.

Two of my favorite Portland poets, Claudia F. Savage and Carolyn Martin, are also especially adept at seeing a full range of colors and textures, without looking through rose-colored lenses. Luckily for all of us, both women have new books out, so we can share their visions. 

Bruising Continents by Claudia F. Savage
Reading Bruising Continents is like sinking your teeth into a pear still warm from the sun. As earthy and generous as a sumptuous feast set out on a table, the pages of this book pulse with images from the natural world. Cells are “suspended fish,” a man has long limbs like a tree, a woman’s hips are “ripe figs.” Celebrating the physicality of being human, Savage lovingly uses the names of body parts throughout her poems – tibia, medulla, clavicle, rib – while also drawing images of the body of our world as she writes about rain and sky and river and hill. In this lyrical love story, the lines between nature and people are erased. While lovers ache for each other, pine needles also “desire to be splendid.” Savage’s poems make us see – and feel – that, like the naked lovers on the cover of Bruising Continents, the environment and human beings are intertwined.


Thin Places by Carolyn Martin   

It’s no wonder I’ve used Carolyn Martin’s poems so often as prompts in my creative writing classes. In her latest book, Martin takes us on a journey from the Japonica that grows in her yard to a Little League game in Taos, New Mexico and a side street in Puerto Vallarta. As her poems travel from place to place, Martin's work maintains a delightful accessibility. Like the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, her writing style is as conversational (and entertaining) as a chat with a good friend who has a genial sense of humor combined with a keen eye. In the title poem, she cheerfully writes of “squishing Pacific sand” and sitting at a “smudged computer screen,” and we nod in recognition. Also like Collins, though, Martin never fails to take her poems – and us – someplace unexpected. By the end of "Thin Places," she has moved on from more familiar images to the "quiddity of stars" and "frogs that listen with their mouths.” Nudging this idea even further, Martin's unique vision urges us to close our eyes and “let the darkness concentrate,” a profound concept that leads us into the depths of this perceptive collection.

To buy a copy of Bruising Continents, click http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/bruising-continents.html 

To buy a copy of Thin Places, click https://www.amazon.com/Thin-Places-Carolyn-Martin/dp/194746504X/ref=sr_1_29?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511288291&sr=1-29&keywords=%22kelsay+books%22.    

To hear these two stellar poets reading, join them – and me – on December 4 at the Northwest Library.

Free Range Poetry
Monday, December 4
6:00 - 7: 30 pm
Northwest Library, 2300 NW Thurman, Portland, OR
(the event begins with an open mic – sign-up is at 5:45 pm)

News Flash

Many thanks to the editors of little leo journal for including two of my flash fiction pieces ("After Hours" and "Lucky Me") in their first issue!

You can read the stories at https://littleleojournal.com/linda-ferguson/.

"After Hours" started out as a dashed-off freewrite in one of my own recent creative writing classes. In contrast, I wrote "Lucky Me" in 1998 and have been polishing it ever since. Such disparate experiences, and yet both were pure joy.

If you have a quirky poem or short piece you'd like to get published, take a look at the submission guidelines for little leo: https://littleleojournal.com/submissions/.

Dark Materials

Halloween 2003: Hester and Pearl hang out with
their pals Darth and Leia.

A prison door studded with iron spikes swings open, and a young woman with an infant is led onto a scaffold above a sea of stern faces belonging to her neighbors, who've gathered to witness her humiliation. One person in the crowd thinks the prisoner’s forehead should be branded. Another suggests she be executed.

So begins The Scarlet Letter, the 19^th century novel of New England puritanism that high school students often fear more than peer pressure, cafeteria food and SAT scores.

Don't worry, teens—there is hope! Here are a few reasons why The Scarlet Letter is a masterpiece of dark entertainment:

The Bold and the Beautiful. At the heart of the book is Hester Prynne, who gets pregnant while her husband is away—a bold move considering she lives among a group of religious zealots, including “iron-visaged…old dames” and sober men “in sad-colored garments.”* Although the novel begins by describing her punishment on the scaffold, Hester is no quivering victim. Hawthorne describes her as being “tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glassy it threw off the sunshine with a gleam….” In short, she’s a powerhouse; Wonder Woman in a long grey dress.

Portrait of an Artist. Hester, though, is more than strong and stunning: She’s also wildly creative. Sentenced to wear an A (for “adulteress”) on her breast, she pulls out all the stops, crafting her version of the letter “in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread.”

Rebel, Rebel. What’s supposed to be a symbol of shame within a strict society becomes, in Hester’s hands, a celebration of individuality. She has made the A “with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy” that it's “a splendor” and “greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.” Such unique needlework isn’t just a skill; it’s an expression of the deepest self—a forbidden act in this society. Even Hester’s cuckolded husband (Roger Chillingworth), who’s horrified when he shows up and sees his wife standing on the scaffold—with another man’s baby in her arms, no less—is “unable to restrain a thrill of admiration” for this gutsy gal.

Black and White and Red.  Of course any good story isn’t that simplistic, and standing apart from society is never a barrel of laughs. Hester’s individuality gives her the gumption to survive the pitiless scrutiny of her soul on the scaffold, but it also sentences her to a life of slow torture. In the community’s eyes, which are fixed to her breast every time she walks by, she’s no longer a human being, but a “general symbol at which the preacher and the moralist might point.” The scarlet letter is both torment and triumph for Hester.

The book's ending is similarly complex. Hester and her daughter manage to get away from this awful place and its iron rules. Then, for some reason, Hester voluntarily returns to her old cottage and resumes wearing her old gray garb with the symbol of her sin attached to it. Why in the world would she do that? Has she internalized the harsh lessons of her community and truly believes she deserves to be punished? Or is the scarlet letter her only living connection to her now-dead lover? Symbols mean different things to different people. What Hester—and we—read into the A appears to go beyond the original intent of the Puritans.

Funny Ha-Ha. For a book that’s about sin and punishment and suffering souls, The Scarlet Letter is surprisingly full of humor. The name of Chillingworth is one obvious example, considering the character’s heart is about as warm as the steel blade of a scalpel. Hawthorne, who finely shades so many of his sentences with a sly irony (like when he refers to the prison as the “black flower of civilized society”), is happy to make sure we get this particular joke.

The name of Hester’s unfortunate lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, is a similar gag. Even if you didn’t know that the man has a pale face and trembling hands, you could tell by his name alone that Dimmesdale doesn’t have half the spark of his paramour.

In a sneakier way, it’s funny, too, that Dimmesdale is the pride and joy of the community. At the beginning of the book, he publicly tells Hester to name the father of her babe in hopes of saving the sinner (a.k.a. himself). What the townspeople don’t know is that he’s simply not up to confessing his own guilt. Later, he does tell his congregation he’s a sinner (without saying specifically what he’s done), but they just think he’s being modest and love him even more. The same stern-faced folk who’d like to chase the "evil" Hester out of town don’t guess that their angelic reverend is her partner in crime.

This joke is at the heart of the novel…and it’s a dig both at the hypocritical community that has condemned Hester Prynne and at anyone who’s ever had a sense of their own superiority…meaning, maybe, most of us.

On the outside, The Scarlet Letter may look like a musty bore, but inside is a sumptuous story with a labyrinth of relevant ideas for modern readers to explore.

---

*Quotes are from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1850 by Ticknor and Fields.

It's a Sign

Of all the crazy things, there's an intersection in Beaverton, Oregon (the town where I grew up) where the names of the crossing streets happen to match my husband's name and mine.

O.K., this is probably a coincidence and not proof that we were destined to get together, but it's still uncanny. Especially since you don't hear my husband's name (Murray) all that often in the United States, unless you're into binge watching Mary Tyler Moore episodes.

Even if you don't believe in using signs on streets and buildings to predict the future, they can make great writing prompts. What could you do with "Pirate's Cove," "Help Wanted," or "Rough Road"? Look around and see where random signs can take your writing.

As for me, I'm glad Murray's path crossed mine. Here's a poem for our 33rd anniversary.

The Surprise Inside the Cake*

by Linda Ferguson

We were still a couple of kids,

all dressed up like adults –
his charcoal suit with tails,
my white dress with a lace-edged train –
we had Pachelbel playing on the church piano,
boutonnieres pinned to our brothers’ lapels,
and bridesmaids holding bouquets
the same shade as their chiffon gowns.
The reception, though, was a different story –
a party in my parents’ backyard,
with my high white heels a little stained
from sinking into the soft grass.
We had a keg of beer and some
food set out on a picnic table,
plus a wedding cake with a surprise
inside that first slice. Instead of
the vanilla layers with the skim
of raspberry filling we’d ordered,
here was a silly, garish thing,
as if we’d pulled back a curtain and revealed
an out-of-town aunt with spangled fingers and a brash,
knowing laugh as big as her hat. Instead of a pale,
well-behaved pastry, this cake was flaming pink –
like the thick flamingo lipstick on a drag queen
about to step on stage or the mini-dress Barbie wore
the night she tore off for Malibu in her plastic car.
How to describe what we fed each other
with our fingers that day –
was it simply sugar and shortening or the gaudy
flavor of caramel corn and carnival rides
that its glaring hue implied? Or maybe our tongues
were touched with something else –
a hint of salt, and the essence of
a small borrowed boat setting out to sea;
maybe we opened our mouths and tasted
not the cake, but the white peaks of promise
folded into some weighty substance
we could not yet name.

*Published in The Poeming Pigeon: Poems About Food  (The Poetry Box, 2015). To order your copy of this delicious journal, which includes work by Carolyn Martin, Claudia F. Savage, Dan Raphael, Elizabeth Moscoso, Shawn Aveningo Sanders, Tricia Knoll and many others, you can click

http://www.thepoetrybox.com/_DetailPagesBookstore/TPP-FoodOrderPage.html