poetry – Page 2 – Pamela Helberg

X is for April Haiku Review

Published on April 28, 2014April 28, 2014 by Pam3 Comments

I cannot believe that April is almost over and I’ve spent another month writing haikus (and daily blogs). Again, so many of these haikus defy explanation—I will try to give some insight into as many as I can. Some, though, just pop into my head fully formed. Others I get pieces of and have to then work out the remaining syllables. Occasionally, I will sit down with a topic in mind—generally these poems turn out to be the ones that sound the most forced, the least authentic.

So, as promised, here’s a haiku that begins with the letter X (which is the letter for today’s blog):

X—a crooked cross,
Sideways marks the spot, and, drawn,
Erases me gone

X can stand for so many things—ex, as in former. A place to stand. A place to dig. A spot. A signature. X’d out, as in erased.

My heart’s flame burns white-
hot blue tongues arise, dancing,
Seek your oxygen

Poetry sparked and
Ignited passionate fire–
Stark truth doused that flame

This one came directly out of Jake Ballard’s mouth on Scandal one night a couple of weeks ago, after Olivia tricked him into sleeping with her so she could get her hands on his phone. I just wrote it so that it lined up 5-7-5:

Tell me you felt it
Too. Tell me I’m not crazy.
Tell me you were there

The Little Woman and I were born under the same sign—we’re both Geminis, so when I read my horoscope in the morning, I’m reading hers as well:

Every day I
Read my horoscope and yours–
Astral projection

This year I seem to have a huge amount of pent up energy that I keep trying to expend through running and writing and now, school. So I wrote these:

I’ll sleep when I die–
Til I’m exhausted, weary.
Sounds good in theory

Wet sneakers pound through
puddles, toes shriveling, cold.
Insidious rain.

I woke up on Easter morning and this came to me, fully formed. It is one of my favorites:

Whatever tomb has
You trapped–Push away that stone,
Step into the light

I woke up another morning just wanting to write a haiku in Latin. I’ve never even studied Latin, but there it was, this desire I think to break out of the limits of the language I know, the desire for more meaning, maybe. I had to resort to Google, and it’s not exactly the right amount of syllables, but good enough:

Verba volant
Cor ad cor loquitur
Clavis aurea

(spoken words fly away
heart speaks to heart
golden key)

I struggle often with what to write, what parts of my story, my life belong to me and what parts of my story belong to others. I’ve written blogs that have upset people in my life—these haiku deal with finding that line, that balance between speaking my truth and revealing someone else’s:

Truths stuck on my tongue
Peeled off, now forced to drain through
The nib of my pen

I beg forgiveness
again for speaking my truth—
Is my story mine?

The scales tip toward
truth, and compassion falters–
Elusive balance

How does the writer
tell her story, pen her truth?
Dull the sharp edges?

Truth wants to vibrate
up and out in minor chords.
A sharp dissonance

Warrior woman
Draws her word sword, aware it’s
Double-edged, dang’rous

More on writing—this first one seems pretty self-explanatory. Here’s a whole series of haiku on writing into silence. Sometimes all I want from my writing is a reaction, feedback, someone on the other end to acknowledge my words. I don’t need cheers and accolades always (though occasionally that sort of feedback is awesome), but it’s difficult to write into silence, day in and day out. I don’t care for it much. My frustration seems pretty clear here:

Some days the words must
be pried piecemeal from dry earth
dusted off, washed clean

Looking for Divine
but finding only silence–
The great unlearning.

I have to escape
great silences, vast chasms
echoing within.

I can’t keep birthing
Words into silence. These are
Boisterous children

I’m pushing my words
Into silence and meeting
Resistance. Friction.

Your silence echoes
Through my canyons of desire–
Freshly gouged and deep

My words like wafers–
communion offered, received,
Ingested. Some Truth.

My sentences, like
Wine. Drink from the blood rivers.
exanguination

These paragraphs, my
soul. Transubstantiation.
Sacrifice. Rebirth.

These poems take a little liberty with the haiku form:

(Sorry–)
I just meant to tug
that one thread, not to make the
whole thing unravel

(Can we–)
Mend this ragged edge
Knitting word bones together–
Follow this thread home?

Please do not invite
me in and then abandon
me at the threshold

What lives behind the
sets we construct, the masks we
wear? Step off the stage.

Mudslide

Nature knows no bounds—
Follows her own path toward
wreckage, renewal

Oso Strong. Forty-
three gongs of the bell between
Amazing Grace and Taps.

This last one also came to me one morning, after I woke up from a vivid dream and starting writing about how someone so far in my past could occupy any space in my head while I was sleeping. It didn’t seem fair. This is the haiku I ended up writing, not quite where I started, but it turned out to be a favorite:

See this hotel in
My heart? Revolving door for
Itinerant guests

On Failing Better

Published on March 21, 2014March 22, 2014 by Pam6 Comments

It’s been a tough week, wrapping up with finals, keeping up with my wifely duties (mostly being door person to the cats), and contemplating a new direction in life in the form of grad school (starting in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Antioch University in April). Yesterday I attended orientation–and I’m excited to get going. That said, I’ve been wrestling with my writing too–what it means, how I do it, what will happen to it once I start school. I’m thinking there will be an intersection for me, a sweet spot between counseling and writing. Not sure yet what it will look like, but I suspect I will find it.

Mostly though I’ve been thinking about what it means to write, to be a writer. How I relate to the world via the written word. Starting this blog a day commitment almost three weeks ago has reinforced much of what I already know–that nothing works quite so well as putting my butt in the chair–that usually even if I don’t think I have anything to say, if I just sit down and start writing, something will manifest. Not everything will be deep or terribly meaningful, but every now and then I hit on something I can work with, mold into more meaning. I’m turning out some shitty first and final drafts because oftentimes they are one and the same.

The blog isn’t a great format for me for in-depth explorations as I haven’t been devoting enough time to it. I write a piece and then spend the next few hours or days after posting thinking I should take it down, thinking “oh man, I should have said x and done more research so I could have said y” and generally wishing I was smarter or more thoughtful with more time and a deeper commitment. So many times I find blogs and articles on exactly my point that are far more articulate, funnier, and published in actual publications. And I berate myself further.

I started reading Dani Shapiro’s lovely new book Still Writing today on the plane today. I’ve been toting it around with me for several days now, waiting for the right moment to break into it. Today I needed to read what she had written. She writes about the inner censor, the one that sits on the writer’s left shoulder and says things like “that’s stupid” and “how boring” and “you’re wasting your time.” Anyone who creates anything knows this voice intimately. We know to get any work done we have to ignore her, silence her, wrestle her to the ground and say “look bitch, I’m going to fucking write so just fucking fuck off.” She will sometimes slink away for a bit.

I’ve noticed the Censor doesn’t come around so much when I’m writing haikus. Ironically (is that the right use of this word Kari Neumeyer?), the daily haiku practice, of which I’ve written about twice now (here and here), has actually been good for my writer’s ego. I get more bang for my syllabic buck with the haiku. For one thing, I have a venue in which I post and in that venue, a closed Facebook group, I’ve found a thriving community full of cheerful support and thoughtful feedback.

I’ve shared some of my haikus with other folks as well, people I know in real life, offline as it were (email is so luddite, it practically counts as being offline, don’t you think?). My commitment to writing a haiku a day has inspired others to do the same. Some people have shared theirs with me–a haiku exchange. I’ve found kindred spirits–it’s not everyone who understands what it means to distill an experience or a feeling or a sensation down to 17 intentional syllables. Even fewer people get excited about the process. Here it is less about ego and more about connection. There’s something holy there, sacred. A communion:

I attend haiku church
Words and syllables offered,
Received. Communion.

Words live on my tongue
Like communion, and sweet wine
Come closer, receive

(I love that I can use all of that religious imagery from my childhood to illuminate my love of writing and poetry. Finally.)

I love too that poetry is mystery–the making of it is a strange alchemy, and even when words are so intentionally selected, the meanings from person to person vary wildly. Poetry engages the imagination in a way that prose doesn’t. I know this may not be news to most of you, but I’m late to the poetry lovefest. I didn’t ever think I could enjoy poetry, let alone write it until recently someone put it in front of me and said read, this is great, expansive, mind blowing stuff. It is.

Writing is powerful, transformative medicine–for the reader and for the writer. As Dani Shapiro says

“the page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face to face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego–and also with your singular vision, guts, and attitude . . . life is usually right out there, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up and dust ourselves off, and begin again.”

This place, I think, in the failing, the sitting up, the beginning again, is where my career in counseling will intersect with what I know and love about writing.

My Drug and My Vice

Published on February 19, 2014February 19, 2014 by Pam8 Comments

Feedback hits my veins
Smack for my ego, mainlined
I close my eyes, sigh

I wrote this haiku over the weekend, fueled as I was then by a steady stream of positive feedback for my writing and after a really great response to the Whatcom Writes reading on Sunday. But like any good addict knows, that euphoric feeling fades fast without a continual infusion.

I managed to ride the wave for most of the week, getting by on a steady stream of Facebook likes and occasional comments, but on Friday I hit bottom. Two months ago I sent out some queries to a handful of agents and within days one agent requested I send sample chapters of my memoir. This is it, I thought. I’m golden. I worked feverishly for a week to put some high polish on a few of the better chapters and sent them off into the ether. I tried hard to stay in the moment but really, who among us writers doesn’t live at least part of the time on that fantasy book tour? On the bestseller list in our own heads? I’m a legend, if only in my own little monkey mind.

Things came crashing back to earth for me on Friday when the agent got back to me with a kind and generous email indicating that perhaps my pages aren’t quite ready for primetime. Honestly, I can’t say that I wasn’t expecting this—I know the odds. We all do, when we sit down and dare to think we have a hope of seeing our words in print. The statistics are depressing, but still, we dream.

This crash, this bursting of my ego and the view from down here at the bottom set me to thinking about how fortunate we are now, though, as writers. We have an audience if we want one. We don’t have to toil in obscurity—relative obscurity, maybe, but not completely. We have communities that welcome our imperfect work, places where we can get our hits and fixes, venues even if they are of our own making.

I started wondering, though. What was it like as a writer to wait months and months for feedback on a piece of writing? Or to not get any at all? Imagine—writing something, spending a few hours, or weeks, months, years, on a piece and then just . . . doing what with it, exactly? Sending it to an agent or publisher and then waiting for a single letter to come by post. No instant gratification. No thumbs up or down within minutes. I suppose after a week or so trips to the mailbox might become something like obsessively checking Facebook within a few minutes of posting a particularly witty comment or status update. The worn path to the mailbox might have been a little like the iPhone-shaped silhouette on my back pocket—there because I want easy access to my inbox, the ability to quickly check my blog stats. My self-esteem rises and falls with the number of hits I get.

All of which leads me to ponder just how healthy it is, this continual trickle of sporadic feedback and my incessant need to check in on it. On the one hand, when the stream dries up a bit, we can just post something new. On the other hand, why? What’s my motivation? To continue the high or to hone my craft? I’ve been reading about B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, operant conditioning—the key to operant conditioning is the immediate reinforcement of a response. Suffice it to say, I’ve been thoroughly conditioned by variable reinforcement. I feel a bit like a used lab rat, and the unpredictable rewards are messing with my monkey mind. One day there might be these beautiful little gifts waiting when I press that lever, other days there’s nothing. Does the nothing keep me from pressing the lever? No it does not. The nothing makes me press the lever even more—there must be some mistake! Where’s my feedback? My next hit? I need my fix!

So. I enroll in a mindfulness class. I employ hypnotherapy and guided imagery. I run. I run and run and run. They say the endorphins produce a natural high. It doesn’t really compare, but there are 30, 40, 50 minutes a day where I’m away from the lever at least. And I’m getting healthier as a side benefit. I’m not sure I want to give up the drug, the high, the next hit long term, but I’m trying to get better at living in the moment and focusing on writing just because.

Oh hell. No I’m not. If I were, I’d not be posting this damn blog. Hit me baby. Just one more time.

When Words Fail Me: My Writing, My Wedding

Published on December 18, 2013January 21, 2014 by Pam2 Comments

Sometimes the pressure to write builds up inside of me and it is so huge that I feel like I am going to explode. Someday The Little Woman may come home to find bits of me all over the house, word bits, words that built up and couldn’t find their way out of me. There will be a preponderance of prepositions and a truckload of nouns, verb carnage all over the kitchen, and gerunds on the ground (hey, that rhymed!). Adverbs and those nasty words that end in –ly will litter the walls, pronouns and random punctuation marks will be sprayed around.

Too often, these words don’t find an outlet. Instead I spin and dither. I find other ways to expend the energy inside, activities that seem less arduous than sitting down and grinding out sentences. This week, for example, I’ve set up the art table and started making things: prayer flags with my own twist and boxes to put the prayer flags in. I love making these boxes—I’ve been making books (books is a broad term, in book making, just about any form of art with words) for a number of years, and now for every book I make, I create a box in which to stow it. The timing is good, for making things. I can justify my projects as Christmas presents. These projects are my safety valve, the overflow, where the dangerous steam can spill without harming anything. Still, it is not writing.

And it’s not like I don’t have things to write about. I got married this weekend. I feel like I should be writing something about that. We had a small and lovely ceremony with our daughters and good friends in attendance. My longtime friend Laura officiated, my friend and writing buddy Jolene took pictures (she’s good, check out her page). Our vows reflected the tenure of our relationship, sturdy vows, hard won truths reflecting our accrued wisdom. Mature vows from which the dewy innocence has been shaken, vows with wonder and tenderness and love.

TLW (aka SugarMama) and I have been together for more than thirteen years. We had a silly ceremony ten years ago, and became registered domestic partners about five years ago. None of that was enough in the end however, for me to retain my health insurance benefits with her company. I proposed to her last Christmas not long after Washington State enacted its same sex marriage law. And yes, we gays fought to get married so we could have benefits, but I felt a little irritated rushing our ceremony in to beat a deadline. We were caught between her company’s end of the year deadline and the one that comes in June of next year that says the state will roll our domestic partnership into a marriage if we don’t act first.

(Yes, we had a year to make plans and do the deed. We need not have rushed, but all excuses and reasons aside, that is what happened, so don’t judge me, Dear Reader, just read on, quietly and without comment).

Family: Anna, Nancy, Pam, Taylor

I’ve run out of words. So here are some photos instead and a copy of the poem I wrote for my wife (wow, my WIFE! There’s something I didn’t think I’d ever be saying in this lifetime, forever ending the dilemma of what to call her: significant other, TLW (always), partner, girl friend, spouse, better half, my uhm friend special friend, the boss, etc).