First Butterflies, Sunny Days and Speculative Poetry Picks, Broken Teeth and Meditations on Melancholy

First Swallowtail butterfly of the season, on lilacs

First Butterflies and Sunny Days

I saw my first Swallowtail butterfly this week, and that is a sure sign summer in near. Although I mistrust a string of sunny says, we’ve been trying to make the most of them, getting out to see the early summer flowers and enjoying gardening late with the longer light (til 8 PM now!) Sun can slow me down, as heat makes my MS symptoms act up, and I broke a tooth again this week requiring an emergency dentist trip. So that’s the downside of this week for me.

As people get more and more vaccinated in my area, you see happier people, friendlier faces. I stepped into an indoor farm stand (with a mask) for the first time since the pandemic – so much fun to see the produce in person.

I also am so proud of my planter-based culinary herb garden I started last year – with parsley, chives, pineapple sage, chocolate mint, mojito mint, tarragon, and a mini-rose for no reason. The hummingbirds and bumblebees love sage and chive flowers. If you need to garden but have accessibility problems with diggings, bending, and weeding, it’s a perfect container project. Highly recommend! This planter is sectioned so the herbs don’t take each other over, and there are planters (more expensive) that are even self-watering. But I like watering, pinching things back and smelling each herb close up. In my real-life-sized larger garden, roses and peonies are blooming, sugar snap peas are ready for harvest, and strawberries have baby strawberries on them now.

Me with newly extra-pink hair in Kirkland

Speculative Poetry Picks

I also had the honor of helping curate a Speculative Poetry page for our Seattle poetry-only bookstore, Open Books.

Here’s a link if you want some of my favorite books of speculative verse! 

It includes everyone from stellar popular prize-winners like Tracy K. Smith to robot-loving poet/scholars like Margaret Rhee, and I tried to find all kinds of speculative poetry – sci fi, scientific poetry, futurism, pop culture.

Besides the books listed at that link, I highly recommend Sally Rosen Kindred’s upcoming Where the Wolf, from Diode Editions, Celia Lisset Alvarez’s Multiverses, Jason Mott’s Hide Behind Me (hard to find now – he’s just putting out a tremendous new book taking on race, celebrity, and a book tour haunted by ghosts called “A Hell of a Book”) and Jason McCall’s Dear Hero (also out of print, but worth tracking down.)

Glenn and I with Lake Washington and roses

Meditations on Melancholy

So, despite these smiling pictures, I’ve been struggling with melancholy lately. Something like breaking a tooth (the fifth one since the pandemic started) or waking up with MS-related joint pain and fatigue, or another rejection of my manuscript-in-progress, can kick off a cascade of catastrophic thinking. Why do I send out my poetry at all? Why do I work so hard on my health (eating carefully, meditating, physical therapy, etc) only to face setbacks I can’t do anything about fixing? Is aging just one health disaster after another? (The answer, children, is yes! No, no, I’m sorry. I’m sure that’s not true. For some lucky people.)

One way I comforted myself about my broken tooth was to think about Emily Dickinson, who probably had very little help from dental technology when she inevitable broke her teeth, or the way her vision problems caused her headaches (and she had to write longhand via candlelight.) My paternal grandmother had to have all her teeth pulled by the time she was 40. Another friend my age told me she’d had ten – ten, not two – root canals. I may be more unique in that I have autoimmune problems that make dental work complicated, as well as allergies to pretty much all painkillers and Novocain, but lots of people have battles with their teeth, which is somewhat comforting.

As far as my Multiple Sclerosis, I’m lucky it doesn’t give me more trouble than it does, so when I wake up with nausea and vertigo (telltale signs I need to slow down and take care of myself) or I’m so fatigued I can barely walk across the room, I try not to panic, and to be extra careful to stay out of the hottest part of the day and take my vitamins and just generally pay attention to my body’s signals. I’m due for another brain MRI soon. Do I want to do this? It makes me really anxious because I’m claustrophobic, and of course the possibility of the bad news of progression of damage to my brain and spine. I’m also facing the question – now that I’m vaccinated – of starting a new disease-modifying medication. Sigh.

And in my writing life, it’s been a season of rejection, rejection, rejection. Yes, I try to comfort myself that I’ve been lucky enough to have five poetry books published, or that I’ve gotten into some of my dream journals, or that I have wonderful supportive poet friends to help celebrate the wins and mourn the losses. But sometimes I wonder if the rewards are worth the effort. So, if one day I just stopped writing or sending out poetry, it’s not like anyone would demand it or clamor for my next book. To be honest, I also wonder about the effort of keeping this blog up as well – it does take time and energy, and I’m not sure that many people even read it (thanks, those that read and comment though, of course!)

I don’t want you to think it’s all gloom and doom in my head; it’s not. And I certainly recognize that many people, including some of my friends and family, have had it much worse than me lately. Every poet probably struggles with rejection, and we do tend to be prone to melancholy; it’s been a hard year for everyone; I recognize that catastrophic feelings don’t help anything. I think it would be nice if I could feel like I was able to do something useful again in the world, get paid for my work, or at least feel like I was helping others. I’m writing an essay for an anthology on speculative work and I’ll be offering an online class on speculative poetry soon (of course I’ll post details when it’s closer.) So those projects are good. And I really am thinking about moving forward on acquiring a place to use as a writer’s retreat – La Conner, WA or Port Townsend, WA maybe? So I’m trying to see the good things coming. I promise.